Color Schemer – www.colorschemer.com
This site has a gallery of 3,600+ color schemes. If you buy their ColorSchemer Studio software ($49.99) you have the ability to download .cs scheme files or make and share schemes of your own. They also offer a couple of pretty nifty free apps. Personally, I just like perusing the gallery for ideas when I need help finding the right color to compliment what I’m working on.

Listamatic - http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic
This is the place to go if you are looking for tutorials on CSS based navigation lists. They offer great examples and code for everything from simple link lists to flashy, colorful, drop-down site navigation.

Browser Shots – www.browsershots.org
Browser Shots in a free online service that makes screen shots of your web design in different browsers. You can select what browsers, what version of browser, what OS, whether or not Javascript, Java, or Flash is enabled, screen size, and color depth for the screen shots you request. This is excellent for designers who don’t necessarily want to install dozens of browsers on their computer.

Media-Convert - http://media-convert.com
From the Media-Convert homepage: “Media-Convert is 100% free. No software is needed, and you don’t have to register. You only need your favorite Internet browser. Your files are ready 7/7 days 24/24 hours.” This site allows you to covert tons of audio files, video, presentation, document, spreadsheet, etc. files into other formats. You simply upload your file, let them convert it into the format that you request, and then download it. It’s a “must bookmark” site for anyone with a computer!

World Wide Web Consortium – www.w3.org
No matter if you are brand new to design or you are an old pro, you should definitely have the W3C site in your bookmarks. If you want your page to be accessible to the masses, web standards are very important. This is the site to learn all about them and to see if your site is compliant. The two pages I most frequent are the HTML Validator and the CSS Validator. I’ve heard before that some designers “worry too much” about whether or not their sites are compliant. Personally, I find much satisfaction when I see “Result: Passed” after checking my designs!

W3 Schools – www.w3schools.com
W3 Schools is another site that I feel designers of all experience levels can benefit from. It is the largest developer site on the web. You can find tons of tutorials and help. So if you want to learn HTML or if you need help inserting rows into SQL tables, this place has you covered.

XML Sitemap Generator – xml-sitemaps.org
If you want all of the major search engines to crawl your site, you need an XML sitemap. With the free sitemap generator, making your sitemap is as easy as typing in your websites’ URL.

Creative Commons – www.creativecommons.org
From Wikipedia: “Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow creators to easily communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of other creators.” In summary, licensing through Creative Commons allows you to share your creative content with the rest of the world while protecting your rights.

Google Webmaster Central – www.google.com/webmasters
Just like it reads at the top of the page, Webmaster Central is “…your one-stop shop for webmaster resources that will help you with your crawling and indexing questions, introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors.” You can do everything from enhance your page with Gadgets to find statistics about your site using Webmaster Tools.

Google Apps – www.google.com/a
The main reason I love Google Apps is for the email service. If you own your own domain and would like free “@yourdomain.com” email addresses, Google Apps is the way to go. Apps offers you up to 100 address with up to 25 GB of storage. It’s Gmail that uses your domain name, which is really nice – it allows you and anyone else who you give an “@yourdomain.com” address to check their mail via Email Application (POP3) or on the web. Some other useful Apps are Google Docs, Calendar, and Talk.

If you know of any other awesome free resources please leave a comment and share with us!

Tags: design, development, free resources

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Lists, Resources, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.