Generate a colour scheme for your site

Do ever struggle to come up with a colour scheme/palette when building a site from scratch? Yep, me too. So with that in mind, simply pick your base colour and go to the colour wizard and it will suggest a multitude of various colour schemes for you to use on your site.

Color Wizard - Color Scheme Generator - Color Theory for web designers

Google Website Optimizer tool

Google Optimizer is the latest in the amazing free arsenal of free tools from Google, the aim of which is to help you increase your web site converstion rates and ultimately you or your companies ROI. The Google Website Optimizer overview video tells you all you need to know to get started and here's a link to the Google Website Optimizer main page.

It basically allows you to create several different versions of a web page (which you design) which has some sort of 'call to action' and will then randomly serve these variations of the page to your users. It will then report to you which was the most effective in terms of conversation rates and will ultimately increase your ROI. Pretty interesting to see how good (or crap) your web pages are at achieving their goals!

Google Website Optimizer - Webinar

Great new web site SEO Optimizer tool from Google - watch the introduction video on YouTube now.

Introduction to Website Optimizer Webinar

Create a Flash photo album with JetPhoto

A very cool photo album creation tool. You can create impressive Flash and/or HTML photo albums, which can also integrate with Flickr, use GPS locations which links with Google Earth so you can see exactly where you took your photo! The majority of the features are free also.

See the cool Flash version of the Kleeneze Marrakech Conference album I created with JetPhoto.

Find broken links on your site with Sleuth

Excellent and more importantly FREE broken links checking tool called Sleuth. Pretty comprehesive and an invaluable tool in any webmasters toolbox, especially if you have a large site. I uncovered 6 broken links on the site I manage which I didn't know about.

Find broken links on your site with Xenu's Link Sleuth (TM)

SE XML Sitemap Autodiscovery using robots.txt

Tell Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc, how to find your XML Sitemap with Sitemaps Autodiscovery. This is something I have just implemented at work, not a tool as such but I thought it was a pretty important/useful piece of information.

Search engines will check your robots.txt file for a link to an XML sitemap file, then get the file from that location. This is a big plus because all the major search engines regularly check robots.txt files as part of their ordinary crawling. My Robots.txt file now does all the work for me in telling all the major search engines where to find my XML sitemap.

Search Engines Unite On Sitemaps Autodiscovery

Cooktop: The free XML editor

A free and easy to use XML and XSL editor. The good thing about this tool is that you edit your XML and XSL in different tabs and run the transformation at the click of a button to see if your files are valid and it transforms how you would expect (or not!) You can use it in conjunction with several XSL transformation engines, should you so desire.

Cooktop: The free XML editor for Windows

.htaccess file generator

A handy tool you can use to generate a .htaccess file. Very useful if you are running an Apache web server - NB - This doesn't work on sites hosted on IIS.

.htaccess Generator :: Webmaster Toolkit

Also, I found quite a good .htaccess tutorial to give you a good grounding of what you can and cant do with the file.