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20 Useful Tools To Evaluate Your Web Design

Rebecca — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 03:22:22 +0000

Crafting the perfect website is a time-consuming process which depends on a number of different factors. There’s usability, or User Experience, to take into account. There’s also layout and color schemes to think about. Branding issues come into play, as you want your site to stand out from the crowd and be instantly recognizable to new and returning visitors. Finding a decent web hosting provider is yet another concern when it comes to building a successful website. As uptime and reliability matter most to users, you’ll need a solid web host as the foundation on which to build your website. Moreover, there are plenty of reliable hosting plans out there to choose from.

Taking into account all these various factors, it can be tough to find out how well your site will resonate with potential visitors once you’re up and running. But you can hedge some of that risk by testing out your concept beforehand. Thankfully, there are many great tools available online that will assist you in creating a useful and powerful site that’s captivating and effective in assisting your users with their problems. Most are free and easy to use, and cover everything from back-end performance to web analytics and accessibility. A great website is constantly tweaked and nurtured throughout its lifespan to maximize its potential.

The most effective route to take is to test out the site extensively as you go before you launch your project. The following is a comprehensive listing of 20 of the best website evaluation utilities available. They’ll help you figure out what you’re doing right and how well your site clicks with users. More importantly, they’ll let you know where you went wrong and which aspects of your site aren’t performing at their full potential. Evaluating the direction in which your site is going early and often is the best way to make sure you’re successful in the long run.

Performance Tools For Developers

Yslow

The color scheme and layout of your design is just one part of what makes a good site. How fast it loads and how quickly it responds is another. YSlow is a Firefox browser addon from Yahoo which integrates with the popular Firebug plugin to analyze page performance and maximize speed.

Pingdom

You’ll want to make sure that your site as a whole is as quick and responsive as possible. Pingdom features a comprehensive Full Page Test that evaluates the average load times for Javascript, CSS, and Flash files as well as images. This gives designers the ability to trim the fat and create lightweight sites that aren’t sluggish, cutting down on bounce rates.

iWebTool

The speed test utility from iWebTool offers tips and advice on how to optimize your pages for speed and responsiveness. It gives a thorough analysis of what’s going on when it comes to how fast your files are loading, and helps you eliminate bloat.

Web Page Test

Yet another helpful utility for analyzing page load times, the Web Page Test will give you a quick rundown of how well your site is performing judged on a number of different criteria. You can never have enough performance testing tools, and Web Page Test is one more that you can add to your arsenal.

Analytics

Piwik

Getting back reliable hard numbers about your visitors is important when it comes to the effectiveness of your website. There’s always the free Google Analytics, but Piwik is an even more versatile and flexible way to tailer traffic monitoring techniques. You can easily determine bounce rates and all that.

FireStats

Like Piwik, FireStats features an astounding number of helpful tools to analyze your traffic. Highly configurable and customizable to suit your specific needs, FireStats is one of the best analytics programs around.

Yahoo! Web Analytics

Though Google usually gets all the attention when it comes to developer tools, Yahoo! Web Analytics may just be the best analytics program of them all. Still favored by many web designers and developers, it’s a trusted resource for site optimization.

Validation And Compatibility

Cross Browser Testing

Ensuring that your concept renders properly between all the major browsers with graceful degradation for newer features is essential. CrossBrowserTesting.com gives you the ability to test out your design from your own browser and through secure VPN connections without having to install them on your own PC.

HTML Validator

The HTML Validator lets you check your site for valid markup and mistakes early, making cross-browser design that much easier. You can ensure that your source code is standardized to that it will render correctly for all users regardless of what browser they use.

CSS Validator

The CSS Validator from W3.org checks your CSS files and ensures that they’re all compliant with generally accepted standards. Making sure that your CSS is valid and well formed makes it easier to go back later and play around with your layout and design if you decide to make any major redesigns.

User Feedback

Five Second Test

Sometimes, you have to go straight to the source. That means testing your design out on a potential customer or visitor. Five Second Test shows testers your site for five seconds, then asks them to remember specific details about the positioning and design of your layout.

Usabilla

Yet another helpful feedback application, Usabilla allows designers to create their own feedback surveys. Designers can customize usability tests to get specific information on how useful visitors find their layouts. Usabilla lets webmasters fine tune their designs based on relevant and immediate responses from testers.

Feedback Army

It’s not free, but Feedback Army provides webmasters with knowledgeable and expert advice from testers who go through their layouts with a fine-toothed comb to find aspects of your website that could use a little work or are difficult to use.

Layout And Design

Click Heat

An important consideration when it comes to effective web design is knowing where your visitors spend most of their time on your site. Click Heat creates “heat maps” which show you which specific page elements get the most traffic, and allows you to eliminate features which aren’t popular and improve those that are.

Check My Colors

Color plays a big role in how we view and regard a site. The first impression that a good color scheme can make can’t be denied. Check My Colors analyzes the color patterns and combinations of your page and gives you feedback on the amount of contrast provided, in addition to other helpful information.

Crazy Egg

Truly the ultimate in site analysis, Crazy Egg features a slew of tools to assess exactly how visitors interact with your design. It generates heat maps much like Click Heat, but collects more raw data for you to analyze. It even provides hourly reports to constantly monitor traffic and usage.

Google Website Optimizer

This handy application from Google allows you to maximize your return on advertisements, specifically those from the popular AdSense program. Google Website Optimizer gives you the ability to play around with formats to find the optimal layout for advertising placement.

User Experience Tools

Firefox Accessibility Extension

This nifty addon assists developers in making their site accessible to those with disabilities. The Firefox Accessibility Extension allows you to make sure that the site can be experienced by the visually impaired.

Clixpy

This program is another great way to see how your site is going over with visitors. Clixpy keeps tabs on almost everything about each visit to your site. It records which elements are clicked, which videos and images are viewed and for how long, and where users are focusing the most.

Loop 11

When it comes to User Experience testing tools, Loop 11, is the easily the best on the market. It lets webmasters quickly create user tests of their sites, invite participants to join and try it out, and gives you tons of data and analytics to comb through later.

Based on the foregoing, is your web design both creative and functional?

20 Useful Tools To Evaluate Your Web Design is a post from: denbagus blog

8 Very Useful JavaScript Testing and Validation Tools

denbagus — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 07:46:30 +0000

JavaScript is a powerful client-side scripting language used in modern web sites and web applications. In the hands of a skilled Web developers, JavaScript can enhance the user experience and web site provide interactive and feature-rich components.

But although syntactically simple JavaScript is often difficult for writers because it runs in the environment: a Web browser.

Below you’ll find tools for unit testing and validation tools to test your scripts in Various situations

JSLint

JSLint is a Web-based tool for verifying your JavaScript code for errors. It has a ton of features and settings that you can use to customize verification algorithms to suit your needs.

JsUnit

JsUnit is a Unit Testing framework for client-side (in-browser) JavaScript. It is essentially a port of JUnit to JavaScript. Also included is a platform for automating the execution of tests on multiple browsers and mutiple machines running different OSs. Its development began in January 2001.

J3Unit

J3Unit is an object-oriented unit testing framework for JavaScript. J3Unit runs JavaScript tests directly in the web browser and can be automated using JUnit and Jetty. J3Unit builds on previous work by JSUnit and Script.aculo.us to provide a better way to automate JavaScript unit tests. Object-oriented JavaScript unit tests are written using the Script.aculo.us Test.Unit.Runner object, which is in turn built upon the prototype JavaScript library.

Crosscheck

Crosscheck is an open source testing framework for verifying your in-browser javascript. It helps you ensure that your code will run in many different browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox, but without needing installations of those browsers. The only thing you need is a Java Virtual Machine.

YUI Test

YUI Test is a testing framework for browser-based JavaScript solutions. Using YUI Test, you can easily add unit testing to your JavaScript solutions. While not a direct port from any specific xUnit framework, YUI Test does derive some characteristics from nUnit and JUnit.

Regular Expression Tool

The Regular Expression Tool is an online utility that allows you to test your RegEx code against a sample test. It’s a handy tool to have around when you want to quickly test the efficacy of your regular expressions in a variety of example texts.

JSLitmus

JSLitmus is a lightweight tool for creating JavaScript benchmarks and performance tests, using an intuitive API.

JavaScript Regular Expression Tester

This handy utility program tests JavaScript Regular Expressions in a browser using JavaScript. Its interface is similar to other regular expression test tools, but unlike those tools, it tests JavaScript’s implementation of Regular Expression in JavaScript.

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8 Very Useful JavaScript Testing and Validation Tools is a post from: denbagus blog

5 Fresh tools for MySQL You Should Know

denbagus — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 05:20:28 +0000

MySQL is one of the popular databases in use of the web developers to develop web applications.

MySQL became popular course for free, easy to use and highly effective in serving its purpose. Both are developing desktop software or web-based application, you will always use the database.

need tools to make the web developer to manage the database. Here I’ve collected a tool to help simplify web developer jobs

AeroSQL

AeroSQL is an open source (GPLv3) web based tool for managing MySql servers written in PHP. The key feature of the product is an intuitive management of the database content.

Sypex Dumper

Sypex Dumper is an open source web application for creating instant or automated backups of MySQL databases.
It is built with PHP, has an Ajaxed interface & can restore databases as well. The application can work with gb-level huge databases as it easily bypasses the timeout limits of PHP by pausing/starting backup jobs.

Sequel Pro

Sequel Pro is a free MySQL management tool for Mac OS X. It offers full table management (including indexes), supports MySQL views, imports/exports from SQL/CSV files & compatible with MySQL 3/4/5 databases.

Ajaxed MySQL Table Editor

Mysql Ajax Table Editor is an open source web application for easily editing MySQL tables & creating admin pages almost instantly. Besides the standard “add, edit, copy, delete, view” functionality, records can be paged, searched & exported to CSV.

SQLyog

SQLyog MySQL GUI is the most powerful MySQL manager and admin tool, combining the features of MySQL Query Browser, Administrator, phpMyAdmin and other MySQL Front Ends and MySQL GUI tools in a single intuitive interface.

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5 Fresh tools for MySQL You Should Know is a post from: denbagus blog

5 Image Editor Portable Apps for Web Designers and Developers Must Know

denbagus — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 00:57:55 +0000

Few days before I have to share information 6 Utilities Portable Apps for Web Designers and Developers Must Have. Now I will share 5 Image Editor Portable Apps for Web Designers and Developers Must Know. So you can manage the image you want to be easily at any PC. Enjoy

GIMP Portable

Perhaps all designers know this application. GIMP is the best alternative to Adobe Photoshop. With this edition of the notebook, you can edit your images easily, no matter where you are (assuming you can access the PC).

Inkscape Portable

Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor, who is also an alternative to commercial products such as Adobe Illustrator. It should be in your collection of portable applications, where Web / Graphic Designer.

Fotografix

Fotografix has a small footprint – only 760KB after extraction. Supports layers, scripts, filters and functions like a magic wand, drip, cloning, etc. This application can open another alternative for you if you just want simple editing to do and do not want large applications such as GIMP.

Artweaver

Brush another alternative to Photoshop. This is more than Fotografix and users can download the plug-in package, which culminated in the filter Super Nova, remove red-eye filter, etc.

FastStone Image Viewer Portable

FastStone Image Viewer is a fast and robust image viewer, editor and converter. It supports many features such as resizing, removing red eye, cropping, etc., and is more than adequate as a portable application.

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5 Image Editor Portable Apps for Web Designers and Developers Must Know is a post from: denbagus blog

6 Utilities Portable Apps for Web Designers and Developers Must Have

denbagus — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:44:42 +0000

i love portable applications, because the application is easy and requires no installation to run. Used as a web designer / web developer to work with different computers. Instead of keeping my laptop all over the world prefer to frequently used applications on the disk USB.I collect 6 Utilities Portable Apps to share with my readers. Enjoy it !

KeePass Password Safe Portable

KeePass Password Safe allows you to receive data and passwords on disk USB. I have a lot of different clients, and I should be able to access the FTP server from time to time. You can use your user name and use the master password to protect. So basically can remember only one password to access the Login information.

7-Zip Portable

7-Zip is a popular free file compression and archive program. It supports multiple formats such as 7z, ZIP, RAR, etc., and now you can use this application with the USB-disk, resulting in a portable version of portableapps.com.

Font Matcher

If you have a web / graphic designer, I am sure that it is necessary to deal with different sources every day. Font Matcher is useful if you want to find the source of the image. Currently font Matcher works only for fonts TTF.

IcoFX

IcoFX is a free icon editor that has many functions, such as a symbol of transformation, creation, extraction, etc., and supports resolutions up to 256 × 256 and can easily import and convert images to icons.

PicPick

PicPick is an all-in-one suite of applications for designers and developers to implement measures such as screen capture, color and image editing. The application itself is in a specialized area of the system to make it easily accessible to the tools.

VirtuaWin

Linux users are familiar with multiple desktops. Well VirtualDub to bring this functionality to Windows users, and allows applications to run without installation. However, there are things, be careful when you use it, read the FAQ for more information.

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6 Utilities Portable Apps for Web Designers and Developers Must Have is a post from: denbagus blog

8 Very Useful Tutorial Jquery Form

denbagus — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 01:28:46 +0000

forms are definitely the most important part in the website. Because this will petrify your readers. I’ll share a link tutiorial about jquery form. enjoy it!

1. Build A Login Form With jQuery

In this lesson we will create a sliding panel, which show more content using JQuery to revive the height of the slides. In this case, we create a login for a hypothetical new tutsplus area in the near future.

2. AJAX Upload

AJAX Upload allows you to easily upload multiple files without refreshing the page and use any element to show file selection window. It works in all major browsers and starting from version 2.0 doesn’t require any library to run. AJAX Upload doesn’t pollute the global namespace, so it’s compatible with jQuery, Prototypejs, Mootools, and other JavaScript libraries.

3. FCBKcomplete

Facebook users to express their imagination, as dynamic entries with auto-complete and pre-added tax.

4. Radio Button and Check Box Replacement

This tool replaces the JQuery radio buttons and checkboxes with an attractive display.

5. Submit a Form without a Page Refresh

6. jQuery AJAX Contact Form

7. Simple jQuery Form Validation

8. jQuery inline form validation

8 Very Useful Tutorial Jquery Form is a post from: denbagus blog

5 CSS framework for web designer

denbagus — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 02:44:26 +0000

There are many great CSS framework. But most of them concentrated on the grid.

CSS frameworks continue to grow and become popular in recent years, enabling developers to rapidly design a prototype.

The idea of CSS frameworks make a simple repetitive tasks, so that they can learn faster results.

In this article I will share information about css framework for web designers

Blueprint

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of and Plugins are available for buttons, tabs and sprites.

960 Grid System

960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem.
The premise of this system will work for rapid prototyping is ideal, but just as good, if they are integrated into the production environment. There is a drawing sheets for printing, systems development and style sheets have the same dimensions.

Atatonic

Atatonic is a CSS framework to focus not only focus on the field, but also about the printing press. The main purpose of this project is to create a solid foundation of the project together for each file to start only 5kb. Gzip and Deflate, which was reduced to 3 kbar. Atatonic CSS framework is still very young. This is the basic configuration of typography and tools in the network. These changes will be made and things will be added to the plans process.Feature plugins icons, better control over form, and possibly some of the graphics standards, such as dialog boxes, bars, buttons and more

xCSS

xCSS is the CSS framework that allows object-oriented work and save your workflow as a “dry” as possible. xCSS allows a simple workflow, and object-oriented style in the development of complex cascades.Using xCSS mean a dramatic reduction in development time: an intuitive view of the overall structure of the CSS, use variables, re-use an existing style waterfalls and many other practical functions. However, most cumbersome and inflexible frame, is not it? No xCSS! It is easy and fits nicely into any existing workflow. In addition to reducing overhead costs for CSS, and save (X) HTML attributes of semantic.

CSScaffold

CSScaffold is CSS framework written on PHP. Instead of trying to static framework of standard features CSS, such as the concept, which extend applications using PHP to create CSS. The syntax looks and feels the same way as CSS, if you have some powerful new features.

5 CSS framework for web designer is a post from: denbagus blog