Web Site Tools

AWStats
License: GNU GPL Last Reviewed: 2013-03-11
Version: 7.1.1 – Released: 2013-03-08 Windows: XP, 2003, Vista, 7
File Size: 1.38 MB
“AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages. It uses a partial information file to be able to process large log files, often and quickly. It can analyze log files from all major server tools like Apache log files (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF log format or common/CLF log format), WebStar, IIS (W3C log format) and a lot of other web, proxy, wap, streaming servers, mail servers and some ftp servers.
“As AWStats works from the command line but also as a CGI, it can work with major web hosting provider which allow Perl, CGI and log access.”
Anchor Link BackLinks Master
License: Freeware Last Reviewed: 2010-08-13
Version: 1.5 – Released: 2007-04-04 Windows: 98, 2000, XP
File Size: 1.26 MB
“It is well known that backlinks are an important way to increase your rank in search engines. No matter how you get inbound links to your site, you need a tool to control the status of these links – whether they still point to your website, what anchor text these backlinks have and so on.
“Of course, you can check the status of your inbound and reciprocal links manually, but it is a huge time-saver to use BackLinks Master instead. BackLinks Master helps you find who has links to you, whether these links are direct or embedded into JavaScript and what keywords they have in their anchor text.”
Anchor Link Browsershots
License: Free Online Last Reviewed: 2010-08-13
Version: 0.4.Beta.2 – Released: 2007-10-26
File Size: 841 KB
“Test your web design in different browsers!
“Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.”
Anchor Link ChangeDetection
License: Free Online Last Reviewed: 2010-08-13
“Every time your site changes, we’ll e-mail your visitors and let them know! Simply place a ChangeDetection.com link or panel on your site today, and your visitors can ask for ChangeDetection without leaving your site. Make repeat visitors out of casual surfers and keep loyal visitors coming back. Give your visitors the tool they need to take full advantage of your site. Enter your e-mail address and we’ll send everything you need. It’s free.”
Anchor Link CssCreator
License: Free Online Last Reviewed: 2010-08-13
Live CSS Generator
“CSS Creator allows you to choose a style for your web page. Select different Cascading Style Sheet properties from the page below. To select a color, look for the HTML tag you want to effect, click the field you would like to insert color into, eg color or background, then simply click the color you want from the colors grid on the left. Most changes will display on the page as you make them.
“Select the checkboxes below to display more HTML elements for you to style. Once you have selected all the styles you want click the ‘Generate CSS’ button at the bottom of the page.”
Anchor Link CSSplay
License: Information Only Last Reviewed: 2010-08-13
“I have created this site in the hope that it will help newcomers to CSS and show old hands that it is more than just a mechanism for styling your documents. It is oh so much more.
“Because CSSplay deals with experimental CSS that is exactly what you get JUST CSS, no javascript or any other programming language has been used in any of the demonstrations. For javascript demonstrations please click the javascript link in the main navigation bar which will take you to my other site which is dedicated to demonstrations using CSS and minimal, unobtrusive, javascript.”
Anchor Link DHTML Scripts
License: Freeware Last Reviewed: 2010-08-13
“Welcome to Dynamic Drive, the #1 place on the net to obtain free, original DHTML scripts and components to enhance your web site!”
Anchor Link FavIcon Generator
License: Free Online Last Reviewed: 2010-08-13
“Use this online tool to easily create a favicon (favorites icon) for your site. A favicon is a small, 16×16 image that is shown inside the browser’s location bar and bookmark menu when your site is called up. It is a good way to brand your site and increase it’s prominence in your visitor’s bookmark menu. Supported file formats: gif, jpg, png, and bmp.”
Anchor Link HTML and CSS Link Validation
Information Only Last Reviewed: 2010-08-13
“In a nutshell: this page lists HTML validators (which check HTML code for standards compliance and errors), CSS validators (which check Cascading Style Sheets for errors and standards compliance), browser compatibility checkers (checks your page to see if it is compatible with various browsers), broken link (or dead links) checkers, accessibility checking (check if your web page is accessible to people with disabilities), etc. Note that this page lists both online services as well as offline tools (programs). If you want to learn more about web page validation, check out my article, HTML and CSS Validation: Should You Validate Your Web Page?
Anchor Link Listamatic
Information Only Last Reviewed: 2010-08-13
“Can you take a simple list and use different Cascading Style Sheets to create radically different list options? The Listamatic shows the power of CSS when applied to one simple list.
“Selectors are one of the most important aspects of CSS as they are used to select elements on an HTML page so that they can be styled. Find out more about selectors including the structure of rules, the document tree, types of selectors and their uses. There is also a step-by-step tutorial showing how selectors are used in the process of building a 3-column layout.”
Anchor Link MailTo Protector
License: Free Online – S/W $19.95 Last Reviewed: 2010-08-13
Version: 3.0 Windows: 98, Me, NT, XP
Requires: IE 5.5 or later
“MailTo Protector is a tool for webmasters, used to create encoded mailto links for their web pages. MailTo Protector does two things for you.
“First, it lets you make ‘configured’ email links — so you can include things like cc:, bcc:, subject, and body directly into the email links in your page.
“Second, and more importantly, MailTo Protector encodes the mailto link information. This means that when spam-bots try to harvest email addresses from your page, virtually none of them can read the addresses — resulting, we have found, in a great decrease in the amount of spam you receive. It also helps eliminate virally generated junk.
“Now, both a free online generator and desktop software are available for your use, too. The software version looks and works like the online code generator, but does not include our tagline in the generated code.”
Anchor Link MarkUp Validation Service
License: Free Online Last Reviewed: 2010-09-16
Version: 1.3 – Released: 2010-09-16
“Welcome to the W3C MarkUp Validation Service; a free service that checks documents like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. There is also an Extended Interface available if you want to set any advanced options, and a Extended File Upload Interface if you want to validate uploaded files with advanced options.”
Anchor Link Microsoft Expression Web
License: Freeware Last Reviewed: 2012-12-22
Version: 4.0.1460.0 – Released: 2012-12-20 Windows: XP, Vista, 2008, 7, 8
File Size: 98.75 MB Both 32- and 64-bit compatible
Requires: Silverlight 4.0, .NET Framework 4.0
“Expression Web 4 gives you the tools you need to produce high-quality, standards-based Web sites: built-in support for today’s Web standards, sophisticated CSS design capabilities, and visual diagnostic tools. Whether you work with PHP, HTML/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP.NET or ASP.NET AJAX, Expression Web makes it faster and easier to create and maintain exceptional web sites.
“Please note: This free version of Expression Web is not eligible for Microsoft technical support and is community supported.”
Anchor Link Open Validator
License: Freeware Last Reviewed: 2012-03-21
Version: 2.7.1 – Released: ??? Windows: 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 7
File Size: 50 MB
“Open Validator verifies and corrects many aspects of conformance of Web sites to standards of Internet best practices such as W3C WCAG and ISO/IEC 23026:2006 – Software Engineering – Recommended Practice for the Internet – Web Site Engineering, Web Site Management, and Web Site Life Cycle. Features:
• Verification of a single page or entire web site at your option;
• HTML Validation against W3C DTDs and WHATWG (X)HTML5 pre-release schemas;
• Automatic checking and correction of many aspects of conformance to international best practices;
• Visualization of a snapshot with a given character encoding;
• Complete verification of links;
• Automatic correction of missing widths and heights of images to enable better responsiveness of web pages;

• Automatic correction of missing meta tags elements like default language and metadata;
• Support for web pages in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and many other languages;
• Performance optimization for multi-core processors;
• Validation during navigation;
• Application of standards during revalidation;
• Memory revalidation with no need to make all corrections of a web page at once;
• HTML Tidy accessibility check;
• Balloon tooltips for contextual help;
• Recursive validation for frames;
• Proxy support;
• Integrated web inspector with javascript debugger;
• Site map detection in 51 languages;
• Export reports to HTML;
• Bypass selected paths when using recursive options.”
Anchor Link PHP Manual
Free – Source Available Last Reviewed: 2010-08-13
Version: 5.3.3 – Released: 2010-07-22
File Size: 14.4 MB
“PHP, which stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely-used Open Source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.
“This manual consists primarily of a function reference, but also contains a language reference, explanations of some of PHP’s major features, and other supplemental information. You can download this manual in several formats.”
Anchor Link Robots Exclusion Standard
Information Only Last Reviewed: 2010-08-11
“The robot exclusion standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to categorize and archive web sites, or by webmasters to proofread source code. The standard complements Sitemaps, a robot inclusion standard for websites.
“The protocol is purely advisory. It relies on the cooperation of the web robot, so that marking an area of a site out of bounds with robots.txt does not guarantee privacy. Some web site administrators have tried to use the robots file to make private parts of a website invisible to the rest of the world, but the file is necessarily publicly available and its content is easily checked by anyone with a web browser.”
Anchor Link W3C CSS Validation Service
License: Free Online Last Reviewed: 2009-07-14
“Check Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and (X)HTML documents with style sheets.”
Anchor Link Web Design Group
Information Only Last Reviewed: 2010-08-13
“The Web Design Group was founded to promote the creation of non-browser specific, non-resolution specific, creative and informative sites that are accessible to all users worldwide. To this end, the WDG offers material on a wide range of HTML related topics. We hope that with this site as a reference, you will be able to create Web sites that can be used by every person on the Internet, regardless of browser, platform, or settings.”
Anchor Link Web Robots Pages
Information Only Last Reviewed: 2010-08-13
HTML Author’s Guide to the Robots META Tag
“The Robots META tag is a simple mechanism to indicate to visiting Web Robots if a page should be indexed, or links on the page should be followed. It differs from the Protocol for Robots Exclusion in that you need no effort or permission from your Web Server Administrator.”