Useful Web Design Resources

I have used the services and products below and highly recommend them.

Autoresponder/Newsletter Service

Aweber provides list management and autoresponders. Aweber's email marketing tools make it easy for you to create professional signup forms for your website, build your email list and send out newsletters.

Shopping Cart

1ShoppingCart is great for selling products, maintaining an email list and autoresponders.

Marketing

Robert Middleton of Action Plan Marketing has a free Marketing Plan Start-Up Kit you may want to get.

The InfoGuru Marketing Manual and Website Toolkit are highly recommended, especially if you have a website or are planning to have one.

Blogging

There are many different options available for blogs. WordPress is the most popular one. It is supported by a great
online community.

Website Tools

These are my favourite website design tools to improve the speed at which your website pages load, test how your site will look on various browsers, improve the quality of your website content, increase your website's aesthetic appeal, or even check the validity of all links on your site. These tools wil help you save time and work needed to take your site to the next level. These top website tools are used by website owners who won't settle for anything short of the best when it comes to improving the quality of service their sites provide to their visitors.

1. GTmetrix

If you own a website, you definitely want to win the love of all your visitors. So, do you feel like you have tried everything there is to this complex art but still wish you could do more? Then you should try out gtmetrix.com. This great website tool will make access to your site blazing fast by allowing you to monitor, graph, and block the content that is slowing down the loading of your web pages. If your visitors have to wait for several seconds before your page loads, then you need this tool ASAP – studies show that most website visitors will leave your site and move on if it doesn't load in less than 5 seconds.

2. BrowserStack

You might possibly be wondering: what makes BrowserStack unique as a web-based browser testing tool? You could say it is because of its enormous list of satisfied clientèle, which currently stands at over a quarter of a million. More accurately, browserstack.com offers a high quality cross-platform browser testing service. Through this tool, you can have access to browsers on your iPhone, Android phone, Windows phone, and all kinds of desktop. No other browser testers can top this. You should also know that BrowserStack comes with inbuilt developer tools so that you can test and remove kinks on the browsers you are working with.

3. Grammarly

Do you worry about the quality of text content you post online, even after using a decent word processor to get rid of common mistakes? Of course you do, and rightly so. When putting content online, you have to worry not just about its grammatical quality, but also its originality. Usually, you have to use two tools to achieve this – a word processor, and and plagiarism checker. But with Grammarly alone, you will do better at both of these tasks.

At grammarly.com, you can check over 200 more mistakes beyond what a typical word processor can identify. More importantly, you will get top-of-the-range plagiarism detection. Quite frankly, Grammarly is the best, not just because there is none better, but because it offers more than you could look for when making grammatical corrections, detecting text originality, and enhancing vocabulary.

4. COLOURLovers

The title sort of gives it away, doesn't it? You should not be mistaken though, Colourlovers.com is more than a site that allows colour lovers to indulge their obsessions through forum comments and sharing of ideas. At COLOURLovers, you can learn more about colours and how you can use them to make mundane things in your life explode with colourful splendor. On this handy site, you can learn how to kick your party up a notch through lighting and colour, how to decorate your house better, how to create more interesting fashion items, splendid weddings, ways of making your websites cool and more interesting using colours, and so forth.

5. W3C Markup Validation Service

Do you want your website to be up to standard? Do you know an easy way to go about it? If the answer to this last question is no, then you know nothing about W3C Markup Validation Service (website validator.w3.org) or what it can do. To put it simply, this handy website tool will check the validity of your web documents - HTML, CSS, name them. This tool will also check for broken links and give you all the information you need to run a site that not only meets high standards but also offers visitors to your site a web experience that they can certainly appreciate.