Useful tools for website designers
Website translation
WorldAccent Translation provide designers with professional website translation and multilingual localisation into any language.
Engaging copy is just as important in a foreign language as in English. Quality is ensured by mother-tongue, professional translators from around the world, selected according to their language skills, educational background, subject knowledge and experience.
Based in central London, WorldAccent have been providing professional translation services to companies at home and abroad for more than 20 years. Clients range from global corporations, top agencies and NGOs to small businesses, local authorities and one-man design studios. Their process ensures comprehensive translation of source files, including all alt, title and meta tag text, while leaving the rest of the code intact.
On-page optimisation for multilingual SEO is also available.
The W3C markup validation service is one of the first tools any web designers should know about. The service is run by the World Wide Web Consortium and allows any visitor to check is the HTML or xHTML code is correct. This service is entirely free and does not need anyone to sign up or provide any personal information. By simply entering in your domain name into the box provided and clicking the check button any mistakes will be flagged up. The great point about this tool is that it will point out exactly where any errors are in your source code and possibilities to what needs correcting.
Once your code has been approved the W3C will provide the user with code that can then allow the web designer to display a badge of approval on their website. This tool is also useful to convince any difficult customers that you have in fact provided a quality website design service.
In addition to the xHTML and HTML service, the W3C also allow web designers to check their CSS (creative style sheets).
Website Grader run by HubSpot is one tool I would strongly recommend. This tool will check the effectiveness of your website by evaluating search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic and site performance. It will then provide you will a badge with your grade out of 100 to place on your website.
Important information it will provide you with will include your blogs overall performance, how well your content is written, how many pages have been indexed by Google, how many inbound links your site has gained, plus it will check to see if your META tags are effective.
Extras it will also measure include your RSS Feed and Twitter grade.
This is a free statistics counter that is a must for web designers. Most web designers will advise that you use Google analytics to measure the performance of your website, but I personally find that the Stats Counter is a much more user friendly tool.
Apart from covering the basics such as the amount of unique visitors, page loads and returning visitors it also gives a wealth of extra information. One of these stats that is very useful for websites selling advertising space is the exit link function that will allow you to know how many times visitors have click on their banners. A function that is good for measuring your SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques would be the recent keyword activity page that will show what keywords were used to find your site and when. However probably the most interesting is the recent visitor map, this provides you with information about visitors from all over the world.
The Search Engine Genie is a website created for SEO (search engine optimisation). Although this site seems to have an endless supply of information on the subject, although the most useful tools are the ones targeted at Google.
Picking out some favourites would include the Google position checker tool. This tool will allow you to find out where your website is found for a specific term searched in Google. The tool will allow you to search amongst the top 1000 sites listed in any country.
Another useful tool would be the Google Page Rank checker tool. Unlike similar sites, this tool will allow you to check a multiple number of sites at once, which is great as a source of comparison.
PageLime is a very useful remote content management system. This system is so simple for a web designer to implement and for clients to use, plus it’s free! With no need to download any software all any designer needs to do is add this code: 'cms-editable' to their Div tag and that area will become editable, allow clients to edit text and images.
The great point about PageLime apart from its flexibility and ease of use is that it displays the web page to the client with edit buttons next to the editable regions. This can make the client feel more comfortable about using a content management system, especially if they have not used one before.