WHATS IN YOUR TOOLBOX?
During the last few decades, web technology has emerged quite rapidly. This dynamic advancement makes it even more difficult an endeavor for every web designer and developer to be on top of their game. Being a freelance web designer or having your own web design studio, you always need couple of useful and affordable tools that can make your work easy and efficient.
When maintaining or running a website, Webmasters need to focus on several fundamental issues such as website testing, website loading speed, visitors analysis, good hosting services, seo and the overall look and feel of a website.
Once a website is created, webmasters tend to perform various tests regarding various parameters such as, its loading time, page analysis, web server testing, traffic analysis, browser compatibility, scripts, etc., by which to ensure the functionality of a websites fine-tuning, and whether it’s rendering the desired results. Your website / blog are your precious assets which deliver useful content or services to users. But a website itself requires some services by which to monitor and increase its presence.
We have collected 15 Essential Tools for websites which every webmaster should have, the following list of tools here are free services will enable webmasters to maintain and optimize their websites/blogs easily. If we have missed few, feel free to suggest any tools or web apps which you have found to be useful, by commenting below or sending us a tweet at @dezignmatterz, we would love to hear your feedback, we hope you enjoy the post.
1. CloudFlare
CloudFlare is a Content Delivery Network service provider which helps to deliver content faster. CDN automatically caches your static files and these files are stored closer to the visitors while delivering the dynamic content directly from your web server. It is a Content Delivery Network service provider which helps to deliver content faster. CDN automatically caches your static files and these files are stored closer to the visitors while delivering the dynamic content directly from your web server.
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2. Disqus
Disqus allows you to turn your old comment system into a new way to engage your visitors. From small blogs to massive websites, Disqus is the easiest way to build active communities. It’s free to use and works with virtually any type of website. It helps to receive feedback from your user. It also supports threaded discussion, spam protection and lot more.
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3. Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools will display the links that are incoming to your site. By clicking on each field, you can see the total number of links, and the number of linked pages. This tool is useful for checking the pages that have backlinks, and to check the quality of the links. However, there are two major drawbacks: it is not possible to see the links and anchors of the links; you must have access to view the linking websites for this information.
[zilla_button url=”https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en” style=”black” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
4. Flow : Website Traffic Visualization App
Flow provides the visualization of paths, displaying real-time data and offering all of this with a slick, impressive and intuitive interface. Rather than a chart, it displays a diagram of the actual paths people take when they browse your site and you can easily drill-down by clicking each item.
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5. YSlow
Yslow is an exceptional tool that analyzes web pages and suggests several ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. It has numerous number of features such as grades web page based on one of three predefined rule set or a user-defined rule set, displays statistics about the page, provides tools for performance analysis including Smush.it and JSLint, summarizes the page’s components and offers suggestions for improving the page’s performance.
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6. Favigen : Favicon Generator
Favigen helps you to generate cool favicon for your websites which makes your websites visually good.
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7. Feedburner
Feeds are a way for websites used to distribute their updates to their visitors via Email, News reader, Feed reader etc.
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8. Cluster Maps
ClusterMaps provides a widget which could be embedded in to the site. It provides real time information about the visitors
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9. Gravator
Gravator provides image of the user based on their email address. User has to create a account in Gravator and upload their image to it. If they provide same email address in our site then using Gravator API, user images could be retrieved in various formats and dimension.
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10. Add This
AddThis is a social media widget which helps your site visitor to bookmark your site content to various social media site. It also maintains analytics of the content being shared.
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11. Image Optimizer
Using this free online service, you can resize, compress and optimize your image files. Using the service is as easy as clicking of button! Optimized images are better! They are more suitable for web pages, email attachments, or even storage on your disk.
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12. Google Analytics
This is a most important and must for every website. Google Analytics tracks your website visitors and provides information about their Country, Page visited, Number of pages visited etc. It is capable to generate reports in various dimensions.
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13. Zoho Form
Zoho creator helps to create your own forms/tables afresh or import data from standard formats (.xls .csv .mdb) and get your database application online within minutes.
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14. Pingdom
Pingdom monitors your website and sends downtime alerts. It is difficult to manually monitor the uptime of the site. Pingdom helps to generate uptime reports.
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15. Load Impact
Load impact basically assists users to know how much traffic their sites can handle at once, it performs a test on user’s site which includes 50 simultaneous users who visit the website at a same time to monitor user’s site from different locations. It also includes a page analyzer which performs another test to let you know how fast your pages are loading from the server; it displays the page loading time after analyzing the pages of particular site.
[zilla_button url=”http://loadimpact.com/” style=”black” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
