Links to useful resources
We will be building a list of useful resources on the web that you might find useful when you are planning and designing your website. It can take time to find the really useful tools and information, so we hope this list will save you time and be of help.
We will keep adding useful links as we remember or find them.
Photographic images
Ophrys Photography for a good selection of images of British wildlife and flora.
Web building tools
If you want to check your HTML and XHTML documents for conformance to W3C recommendations and other standards the W3C validator is a free service you will find invaluable. There is also a service to check your CSS files.
Uptimebot offers a free link popularity check to get details of backward links for your site in the most popular directories and search engines. Doesn't always work on all the targets, but you can follow the links in the results and redo a test individually.
Another useful tool to see how your site is doing is Urltrends.
Browser News offers up to date information on pretty much every web browser known to humankind. A great resource; thank you Mr Upsdell.
Dont forget your favicon. The Favicon Generator will do a good job for you in minutes.
Accessibility issues
WebXACT was a free online service that let you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues. It did a great job but could be very slow and often timed out. Also it didn't work that well in Opera. Of course that is all a thing of the past because- "as an IBM company" - it is no longer a free service and has timed out for ever! Time to look for some more free tools!
UseableNet was the originator of LIFT a suite of tools to assist in building and checking accessible web design. This seems to be called UseableNet Assistive now. They no longer offer free services and their website indicates the business is really not interested in accessibility issues any more. The new website uses Flash and is not logically arranged. Very sad.
Juicy Studio is an independent site promoting best practice in web building. It has a number of useful tools like a readability test and links to many more.
Vision Australia has an excellent web accessibility toolbar available for free download. Unfortunately it is only available for Internet Explorer, but it does add some good accessibility features to an otherwise unhelpful browser. The toolbar includes many testing tools and links as well as assistance for disabled users.
The Mozilla Firefox browser has a good range of accessibility tools as standard.
Usability by Design is a leading UK provider of usability and accessibility services.
Protecting children - safe surfing
ICRA (formerly the Internet Content Rating Association) is part of the Family Online Safety Institute, an international, non-profit organisation working to develop a safer internet. They advocate a self-regulating system of labeling websites protects children from potentially harmful material yet does not interfere with the freedom of people to provide all sorts of digital content. This site is labeled with ICRA.
Web design directories and resources
Geographic listings of designers and other web companies can be found at the Web Design Directory
You can search for web designers (and other useful services) in your local area in the UK Small Business Directory
Listed under Website Design Companies in FreeIndex.co.uk
Security utilities and advice
It is always useful to be able to test how effective your firewall actually is. A useful set of tests is available at Shields Up.
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