Web Development Utilities

DerekWare -- This is the perfect HTML editor for anyone who doesn't have a lot of hard drive space available. The unzipped file is only 191k in size. It's not a bad tool if you do have a lot of free disk space either. It's size makes it fast loading, and it still manages to have plenty of features. There's an excellent review of this software, written by guest editor, Doug McHone of Coffee Swirls, on the download page.

WebSupervisor -- Continually checks the health of your web pages; it runs silently in the background checking your web pages, at the first sign of trouble it springs to action letting you know exactly what is not working, it can even send emails to different people depending on the problem it detects. You can customize the type of response for each kind of alarm, unlike other web site supervisors that simply ping the server, it actually verifies that the web pages can be viewed as you intended. It's easy to setup and run, just drag or type the url of the page that you wish to monitor, select the actions to take in the event of an error, and hit run. A fully integrated web browser makes it easy to navigate your site to select documents or to check it when errors occur. Free (ad supported, checks up to 6 web pages).

Submitta -- Powerful site submission software, free. Spend less time promoting your web site and more time devloping it. Draw traffic to your web site by submitting it to dozens of search engines and directories at once. It can be configured to every detail, submitting the sites at the right times in the right amounts to the right places. (The free version is, technically, crippleware)

Atomz.com Search -- Add powerful and free "search" to your web site. This revolutionary site search that allows your visitors to search your site, with no hardware or software to install. Just sign up, add a few lines of HTML to your site, and you have a search engine. Completely customizable too. (No annoying ad banners are shown with your search results, just a small "Powered By Atomz.com" graphic).

WindowHTML -- "This is a utility to help you create Windows-like HTML pages (in two easy steps). The only thing you have to do is write the content; you don't have to clip each graphic and create maps manually. Take a look at the author's pages and you'll figure it out quickly. This is perfect for those wanting windows-like navigation on their site.

Abstractamation Mcatis -- An award winning, fully featured meta tag generator for Windows 9x/NT. It creates meta tags that can be inserted into web pages.

CoolSlides™ -- An innovative web tool to create animated slide shows of images, each with a description and a URL, such as online catalogs and photo albums. It's copywrited and patent-pending features include: fully adjustable display size and description window. Display up to 1000 slides in an infinite loop. Each slide can be linked to a different URL. Any jpg or gif image can be used as a slide. Text size is automatically adjusted to fit the display window. Each line of text can have a different size and color. Everything is setup and controlled in a web page. Surfers can control the display content, speed, and direction. It's free with no registration requirement or any obligations. {Editor's Note: The original vender site is gone, but the download is still available from Winsite.com and the link for this software has been changed to their page. If this link goes dead, you can still find this software by going to the search page at http://www.winsite.com and typing "CoolSlides" into the search window.]

Site Confidence offers several online tools that can help you fine tune some aspects of your website design and performance.


StatCounter -- A free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats. Insert a simple piece of their code on your web page and you will be able to analyse and monitor all the visitors to your website in real-time.

1st Page 2000 -- A full-featured, completely free, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML Editor/Script Editor. The application now includes 450 javascripts ASP, SSI And DHTML effects.

IMS Web Dwarf -- A drag and drop WYSIWYG HTML editor with pixel precision positioning and scaling. Features include a TEXT, HTML and Rich Text Editor that also supports conversion between these formats and the ability to import-export thes formats from/to other popular text editors including MS Word. HTML can be modified by the program. The program also includes a publisher with a gather option to export the finished HTML files to a local disk or to FTP them directly to the internet server.

htmlArea -- A WYSIWYG editor replacement for any <textarea> field.

Mozile -- Stands for "Mozilla Inline Editor" and is an in-browser, context-sensitive, XHTML editor that allows a user to edit all or just specific editable sections of any XHTML page from the comfort of his own browser. It can act as the client-side of a content-editing system or as a self-contained "web word processor". (still under development as this is written)

The WebWizard -- A powerful and fully featured HTML editor that's an ideal tool for today's web designer, at whatever level, be it total beginner, or seasoned professional. Note: The free version requires registration and is crippleware.

Ekit -- A free open source Java HTML editor applet and application. The Ekit standalone also allows for HTML to be loaded and saved, as well as serialized and saved as an RTF. It is approaching its first production release version as of this update.

HTML Builder -- Is a Microsoft Windows based HTML editor. With HTML Builder there is no need to learn complicated HTML. Just select text and click on toolbars or choose menu items. Common tasks are combined into a single task to simplify maintenance. A complete help file is included.

bpEditor -- A WYSIWYG HTML editor that you can embed into a web page. Internet Explorer 4.5+ dependant.

HostedScripts.com -- Have you ever wanted to set up a CGI script on your site, but you don't have CGI access on your server? they offer loads of free CGI scripts and they'll host them for you, for free. Scripts here include a message board, a "free-for-all" page, a mailing list, random link, a form mailer, a jump box, a chat board and more.

CGISpy -- Another source for remotely hosted (ad supported) CGI scripts.

BigMailBox.com -- Free email address for your site visitors to build loyalty and keep them coming back. Supported via advertising on portion of each email message.

Color Laboratory -- One of the best 216-Color Palette tools available online with loads of automatic features. There are also some other nice tools on the home page of this site: Visibone

ZSPC Super Color Chart -- This online tool allows you to view different color combinations of text and backgrounds.

Framemarket -- Download dozens of designer frames, animated gif files and tables for your web pages.

Gizmoz -- The best way to make your site stand out! Spice up your site! Interactive IDz, 3D Buttonz, Photo Albumz, Greeting Cardz and more. To create these gizmoz all you need is a web browser! Display them on their web site or put them on yourz! Pretty innovative and very fun! Go create! (Editor's note: In updating this site, I found that's it's become a lot more commercial, but still interesting, and perhaps worth a look see)

Browsing Statistics Counter -- This free web page counter will tell you a lot of interesting information about your visitors, such as their browser type, operating system, screen resolution and so on. Easy, just copy the HTML code to your web pages. The displayed image is 88 X 31.

BK ReplaceEm -- Your premiere-quality, freeware string-replacing utility. It is essentially a text search-and-replace program. However, it is designed to operate on multiple text files at once. And you need not only perform one search-replace operation per file -- you can setup a list of operations to perform. If differnet groups of files need to have different operations performed on them, this is no problem either. You can also specify a backup file for each file processed just incase the replace operation didn't do exactly what you wanted.

EasyMonitor -- Watches your web site and alerts you when it's down. Get uptime and performance reports delivered to your inbox every week! It's Free.

Instant Facelift -- Generate your site's design on-the-fly! Choose your GUI (graphical user interface), and use the Generator to enter the links you want on your navigational bar. Download the generated graphics instantly, ready to be implemented online. Free and pretty 'slick' too!

RankPilot -- Every serious web master needs to know if their web site is listed in the search engines, and now there's a Free serviceto help you find out. Check if your site is listed in Alta Vista, AOL Search, DirectHit, EntireWeb, Excite, FAST, Google, Goto, InfoTiger, Looksmart, Lycos, Magellan, MSN, Netscape, NorthernLight, Snap, Sprinks, Thunderstone, WebCrawler and Yahoo. There are similar services on the Net, but they charge you money if you want to use them regularly but this one is Free!

Free Web Building Tutorials -- W3Schools - A collection of free HTML, CSS, JavaScript, DHTML, XML, XHTML, WAP, ASP, SQL tutorials with lots of working examples and source code. This is the One! Everything you want, or need, to learn about designing your own web pages, and implementing whatever level of sophistication you desire, can be found here, in easy to understand tutorials, and all Free! [Editors Note: Editing the pages of this wonderful site would be a great deal more difficult for me if I didn't have the w3 school available to me, online. Every time I get stumped I spend a couple of hours studying on the w3 site, and quickly learn how to solve the dilemma. This is the most awesome resource on the web as far as I'm concerned!]

LinkPopularity.com -- See who links to your web site. This service provides an easy one-click method of checking link popularity on three of the major search engines. They also provide a free monthly customized link popularity report via e-mail.

AgentWebRanking -- This freeware program will submit your site to 650 directories, search engines and FFA pages. It also helps you monitor your rankings in 13 search engines and improve them. This cool, free tool does even more.

GlobalGuest Poll Service -- Create a free poll for your webpage and let your visitors vote. Easily retrofits with your webpage and can be fully customized with options such as single, multiple and drop down menu answer selections, background, foreground images and color changes and IP blockers to prevent double voting.

FreeFind -- Add a search engine to your website today, for free, in less than 10 minutes. No CGI or server configuration. Simply add the HTML code and your visitors can search your site. Customize with your logo and background, more! It's the one we use!

HTML Tidy -- When editing HTML it's easy to make mistakes. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a simple way to fix these mistakes automatically and tidy up sloppy editing into nicely layed out markup? Well now there is. Dave Raggett's HTML tidy is a free utility for doing just that.

Site Tracker -- No other service offers you this much info for free. Visiting hosts, visiting countries, visiting IP addresses, screen resolutions, screen colors, hourly traffic graph stats based on your timezone, search engine breakdown, javascript compatibility breakdown,tracks most popular hour/day of referring web pages/ URLs and much, much more!

Your Very Own Free Classifieds Site -- As a special gift to our site visitors we are proud to present you with a free classified ad site! No server, special hardware or software needed. You have access to edit your ad site and your ad always appears at the top of all the categories! You are also notified of all postings! Look on the left side for button "Apply For Classifieds."

Xenu's Link Sleuth -- A spidering software that checks your website for broken links. It displays a continuously updated list of URL's, sortable by criteria. generates a report on demand.

ZDnet Devloper -- Tons of web development tools and tips from ZDnet's DevHeads.

NetMechanic -- Online link testing and HTML validation - results by email.

Doctor HTML -- This is a fee based HTML check for your site but checking a single page can be done online at no cost.

Bobby -- This is a web-based HTML checker for browser compatability. Check for multiple browser types on the advanced mode. Free!

Responders.Com -- Add request forms to your site without programming! This is more than your average form mail. A great service.

Response-O-Matic -- Add forms to your site with no programming! Use their form wizard to design your forms anyway you want. "Free and easy!"

EzBoard(tm) -- The first of its kind to offer a "completely" configurable and fully functional message base for your site. In a matter of seconds, you will have a seamless addition to your site that facilitates feedback and promotes a sense of community. The forums are so configurable, your users won't even know they left your site. It's also completely free! Note- no scripts needed.

Free Tools -- Message boards, polls, guestbooks, site search, and plenty of other goodies. See for yourself.

Free Forums By Delphi -- Create a free messageboard/chat room and grow your online community. Easy, fast set-up after free registration!

TableMaker -- Make tables for your web pages! Just fill in your preferences, get a table.

DHTML Dynomat -- New drive-thru script builder! Dynomat makes the process of generating the more complex DHTML scripts automatic. Just copy and paste your customized code.

Media Builder -- Web Tools

Jpeg Wizard -- Free JPEG Compression Service!

mailto Encoder -- The encoder will format your e-mail address in a way that is not readable by any email extractor or search engine. Just enter your email and click the encode button. Your spam proof address will arrive in your inbox in a few minutes. Just insert to your webpage. It is a service of siteup networks.

Gif Optimizer -- This is a free online tool that reduces the file size of any gif image up to 75%! Even animated gifs. "This is one cool tool!" There are other web site development and marketing tools here too: Siteowners.com

GifCruncher -- Shrink your static and antimated gifs from your hard drive or the web with this technology...Free from HVS.

Note Tab Light -- An award winning text editor. An amazingly powerful editor which can open several documents at once, and allows you to use the search & replace feature on all documents with a single click, and that's just one of many, many features. If that isn't awesome enough for you, then how about the price? It's free! [Editor's note: I do all my website editing and write our ezine with NoteTab. It's the most often used program on my computer.]


Access Adobe -- Helping people with visual disabilities.

Cast's Bobby -- Web Accessibility Bobby is a web-based tool that analyzes web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities.

Microsoft Accessibility -- The Microsoft Accessibility site provides information about accessible technology to help improve the lives of people with disabilities.

Safe Colors -- Home Tools for using colour in a way which does not disadvantage colourblind users.

Viewable With Any Browser -- "Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
(Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996)
The concept behind this site seems to be a good one and it's worth a visit to learn more about.

Accessify -- This site contains a host of modern resources, available at no cost, which can help you improve your site's design as well as it's accessibility.