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Search Engine Optimization is a rather complex and never ending process. You have to analyze a lot of things including what keywords people are searching for, the density of those keywords in your sites, how many sites link back to you, how popular your links are and so on. Doing all this manually can be a huge pain.

With that in mind, regardless of whether you're an SEO guru or a beginner, these twenty tools are guaranteed to make your life easier.

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Are you a web designer who wishes you could do more in one handy spot instead of having multiple programs open? Well, thanks to the enormous Firefox add-on development community, your web browser can do almost everything for you.
These 19 add-ons will allow you to choose colors, measure dimensions, save screenshots and a whole lot more. Be warned that you should be selective in what add-ons you add to your browser due to the fact that the more you add, the slower it goes, but can you really resist very many of these?

Color Tools

ColorSuckr: ColorSuckr will pick the 12 most common colors out of an image and allow you to build a palette out of them.

ColorZilla: ColorZilla allows you to get a color reading from any point in your browser (not just the page), and you can adjust the color and paste it into other programs. Besides identifying colors, this add-on will also allow you to measure the distance between any two points, choose colors from pre-defined sets, get information on DOM elements and more.

FirePalette: FirePalette adds a color selection tool to Firebug’s CSS panel so you can easily pick CSS-compatible colors.

Palette Grabber: Palette Grabber allows you to make a color palette from any page you visit and then export it to Photoshop, Flash, PaintShop Pro, GIMP, Adobe Fireworks and Mac OS X Color Picker palette formats.

Measurement Tools

GridFox: You can draw a grid on top of any page and measure the column widths and other items.

MeasureIt: A quick and easy way to draw a ruler around a page element to see how big it is in pixels.

Pixel Perfect: Pixel Perfect allows designers to overlay their composition on top of the developer’s progress to see how far off elements are and what adjustments need to be made.

Miscellaneous Tools

Firebug: Firebug is generally associated with developers, but the layout and CSS inspectors can be quite handy.

Font Finder: This add-on will allow you to highlight any element in a page and see the CSS information for it. It’s especially handy if you want to identify a font.

View Dependencies: View Dependencies adds a tab to the “page info” so you can see a break down of all of the files associated with the page you just loaded along with their sizes. This can be a handy tool for determining what may be slowing down the load time.

Web Developer: Despite the name, Web Developer has many useful features for designers such as inspect, edit and disable CSS, as well as graphics. You can also use it to measure elements, re-size the browser, display CSS by media type and more.

Window Resizer: Allows you to quickly view a page at different screen resolutions. With just a click you can switch between 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024 and 1600×1200.

Screenshot Tools

Abduction!: Abduction! allows you to save a portion of a page or save the entire page so you can show potential bugs to other people. You can also print or copy any images you saved.

FireShot: FireShot gives you numerous options for how to shoot your desired images of a partial or full page, which you can then email, save or upload to a free host.

Image Zoom: Choose the size you want to re-size an image to or reset auto scroll so you can use the scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom in and out on an image to check quality.

Picnik: This add-on will allow you to save an image of the page you are on and send it directly to the online image editor, Picnik.

Pixlr: You can edit and open images or screengrabs you’ve taken directly in the Pixlr online image editor.

Screengrab: You can grab the entire scrollable document, just the visible bit, or a draggable selection. Screengrab will even save just the contents of an individual frame as well as taking images of Flash and JavaScript elements.

Talon: Talon is an add-on by the popular Aviary.com that allows you to take screenshots that can be saved to your system, opened directly in the online Phoenix image editor, hosted on their site or copied it to the clipboard.

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Here's the best web design software available in the market today. We highly recommend using these web design tools to develop professional and attractive websites.

Through experience we find that the best web design tools are all Adobe products, and we highly recommend everyone interested in web site development to use these tools. Here's a small introduction to these cool Adobe products.

Adobe Dreamweaver CS4

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Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 is the best web site development software/tool available today. If you are a professional web designer looking for a rapid application tool to design web sites, this is your best bet. We've been using Adobe for a long time and highly recommend it to everyone who is interested in learning web site development. This tool generates HTML code for you, (so you don't have to be an expert HTML programmer to develop a web site!). Cool stuff possible using Dreamweaver includes rollowers, css styles, server side includes, templates and much more.

You can download the 30 day free trial version from the Adobe site and try out the software.

Dreamweaver Creative Suite 4. Design, develop, and maintain standard-based websites. Order Now!

Adobe Photoshop CS4

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We highly recommend using Adobe Photoshop CS4 to design web sites. We use this tool to design web site layouts. Photoshop is also great for optimizing images and exporting them in the gif or jpeg format. Great features in Photoshop include cool effects, great textures, text effects and other cool stuff.

Here's how we use Photoshop:

We design our sites in Photoshop to get an idea of what the finished site will look like. We then send these layouts to our clients in the form of gif and jpeg images. Once the client approves a particular layout we use Dreamweaver to convert these layouts to HTML.

You can download the 30 day free trial version from the Adobe site and try out the software.

Photoshop Creative Suite 4. Create powerful images with the professional standards. Order Now!

Adobe Flash CS4

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Adobe Flash is the best software to use for web site animation. It has gained a lot of popularity and there seems to be a huge demand for Flash web sites. The reason Flash is so popular is because you can do fantastic animations while still keeping the file size low and so that sites can load fast. If you are interested in developing web animations Flash is without a doubt the best. There is also a huge online community of Flash developers so if you have questions or need resources like articles, tutorials, sound loops, flash files - it is all readily available on the Internet.

You can download the 30 day free trial version from the Adobe site and try out the software.

Flash Creative Suite 4. Create and deliver rich, internet content. Order Now!

Adobe Creative Suite 4

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Adobe Creative Suite 4 is the best software bundle for graphic and web design. It includes all the software needed for web design and development. The softwares included are :

Adobe Dreamweaver CS4
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended
Adobe Flash CS4 Professional
Adobe Illustrator CS4
Adobe InDesign CS4
Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional

You can download the 30 day free trial version from the Adobe site and try out the software.

Creative Suite 4 Design Premium. Deliver innovative ideas in print, web, and mobile design! Order Now!

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Tips and tricks on effective web design

The Number 1 rule that every web designer should follow is to create a fast loading web site. You might have a great design but very few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load. While designing a web site always think about how long it will take to load. Try out our tips to build a great looking web site that also loads fast.


1. Minimize the use of images - The key to a fast loading web site is to minimize the use of images. Images do enhance a page but don't make 80% of your web site only images. Instead break it down as much as possible to simple HTML. Notice the popular sites like Yahoo, Google, Ebay, Amazon etc., they have very few images because the load time is more important. Very often simple designs are the best.

2. Optimize images for the web - Once you have decided on the images that you need on your site, make sure that it is optimized for the web. They should be in the gif or jpeg format. You can also minimize the size of the image by choosing the number of colors you need, from the color palette. The less the colors you choose, the less the size of the image. You can also use online tools like Gif Wizard to optimize your images or to get a recommendation on how to cut down the size of an image.

3. Use Tables creatively - You can get some great looking designs by using tables creatively . Tables load very fast because it is just HTML code. Tables can be used in the homepage, menus or anywhere you like. Check out our homepage and our menus to see how we have used tables in our site.
Read more on Using HTML Tables Creatively

4. Cut down the use of animated gifs - Don't use animated gifs unless it is necessary. Animated gifs take a long time to load and can also be very irritating. But since they catch your attention you could use small animated gifs to draw a visitor's attention to a particular section of your site.

5. Design simple icons - Instead of using big, bulky images use simple and small icons that add a little color and draw the attention of a visitor. We have used small icons in our homepage to highlight the main sections of our site.

6. Use background images instead of big images whenever possible - Use background images whenever possible. This is usually a very useful tip for headers and footers. Instead of using an image of width 580 which is a uniform design you can use just a part of that as a background fill. This reduces the size of the web page as the image is small. The code will look like this :

7. Try out CSS Styles - Have fun with CSS styles to get some cool text effects. Again, a CSS Style is simple HTML code so it loads very fast. You can create cool rollovers using CSS Styles.
Rollover the text on the right menu to see how we have used CSS Styles to get a simple but nice text effect.
Check out our CSS Styles tutorial for more cool tips on CSS Styles

8. Use Flash sparingly - There seems to be a lot of hype about Flash but I recommend that you minimize the use of Flash on a site. Don't make entire sites using Flash. It may look great but it takes hours to load and can really put off visitors. If you do want to use Flash use it within an HTML site and make sure it loads fast.

9. Design most of your site in HTML - As much as possible try to design your site using HTML. You can create great designs by just using HTML code. Use tables, CSS Styles and simple fonts to design your site. Minimize the use of animated gifs, Flash, bulky images etc.

10. Keep checking your load time - Last but not least, before you decide on the final design of your web site, check its load time on NetMechanic. This site gives you a free analysis of your web site which is extremely useful. We kept using it to improve our site till we got a report that said good loading time!

We learnt these tips while building our web site. We've enjoyed sharing them with you and hope that you found them useful.

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