Friday, March 6, 2015

Helpful Websites for Webmasters

As a webmaster I find myself bookmarking a lot of sites that help me. Here’s a list of the most helpful ones. Each of the websites listed are free or offer a free service.

Domain Name Finders

Need to find a good name for your next website project? These sites will offer a lot of great options.

http://www.leandomainsearch.com

http://www.dotomator.com/web20.html

http://www.impossibility.org

http://www.bustaname.com

http://www.hipsterdomainfinder.com

SEO Tools

Some tools to help with SEO.

http://alexa.com

Alexa is a great way to track the popularity of a website. It has other interesting information too.

http://rankpay.com

I’ve tried their service before and they charge a lot more than you expect. However, they do offer a free lookup to see how many monthly searches a keyword has. This is useful for finding the right name for an article or website name.

http://woorank.com

This page will analyze your website and give recommendations based on what it found to improve SEO.

http://www.semrush.com/info/history/index.html

A cool tool to track and compare the popularity of competing websites.

http://siteliner.com

This tool will analyze all of the content of your website to see if you have duplicate content.

http://www.google.com/adwords

By going to tools > keyword planner you can do research on which keyword terms are higher traffic than others. This is helpful for deciding what the title of a page should be or the content of your site. This keyword planner is a free tool and does not require the purchase of any adwords.

Analytics Tools

Gain insight to the users that are visiting your page.

http://www.google.com/analytics

Google Analytics is a super easy and beautiful analytics tool. I’m not a fan of Google and wish I could find another free alternative to website analytics but their tool is the best I’ve used.

https://www.google.com/webmasters

Google Webmaster tools will show you a view into what search terms people are using on Google to access your website.

http://piwik.org

If you want to bring your analytics internally piwik is probably the best choice to use.

Free Images

http://www.flaticon.com

This site has a huge database of free vector graphics and icons.

http://fontawesome.io

Fontawesome combines with Bootstrap in a way that extends the basic Bootstrap icons into many more.

https://www.iconfinder.com

This site has both free and paid vector images and icons.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/tag/freebies

Smashing Magazine often releases freebie icon packs. This is a large trove of vector graphics and icons that are free.

Command Reference

http://devdocs.io

Previously called dochub.io and before that instacss. Devdocs is a easy to use cheat sheet for looking up html, css, javascript, and many other web programming language commands.

http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_quickref.asp

W3Schools is a great place to look up commands for web programming languages. The link will take you directly to the SQL quick reference guide which is what I use the site mostly for.

Misc Tools

http://trello.com

A fantastic note keeping tool. I use it to track bugs, write ideas down, and create to do lists for websites I’m working on. It works great with multiple users at once and has a nice API that you can use to bring specific lists onto your own website.

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