~ Software Credits ~

My experiences with website's began back in 1999 with help in the launch of my diving only website, since then my efforts to update it myself have not been altogether successful. After a while things started to come together, and I am now responsible for numerous key website's.

As a founding trustee of the "Whitby Historic Lifeboat Trust" I set up the trust website and was responsible for its maintenance, something I enjoyed doing. The former lifeboat William Riley was kept at a "The Stables" a local restaurant that with limited accommodation, which at that time had no website of its own, it was not long before I was designing and building a website for what is effectively a million pound business. It was quite a task to keep maintaining the website at the frequency expected, and one with some responsibility. I managed quite admirably in this role for two and a half year's, before moving onto bigger and better prospects. On top of this there has been a number of popular bed and breakfast guest houses two of which I am still actively involved with. With a few passions I felt the best option was to bring them together so that one domain is split into five different sub domains as well as having numerous main web pages, I am proud at how well it is doing.

It is not possible to produce any website without getting assistance in someway from third party applications. As you design a website you will have no doubt download something to enhance your web pages, it is therefore good practice to utilise third party software and or website's that specialise in making sure your website is working as efficiently as possible. I have put together a small sample of those I have used on a regular basis as I feel anyone looking at producing their own website has nothing to loose by at least considering using the packages below. I would like to point out I am not responsible for these third party website's, but that I have also had no problems when using them.

Although they remain unseen by all web browsers, almost all website utilise javascript's in one form or another. A typical example being the inability to not select text by dragging your mouse over this page or being able to 'right click your mouse' to open some options? In actual fact there must surely be many tens of thousands of individual scripts used in the billions of website's around the world. Dynamic Drive is but one website that has an array of weird and wonderful scripts. I have browsed the "DD" website extensively and found many interesting scripts, the best bit is that they are free to use and most are editable to suit your own purpose. The scripts all come with a small credit notice within the DHTML source code (which remains unseen) the end user simply agrees to not edit this or claim the code to be work of their own, how agreeable is that! As ever there are a plethora of website's that provide javascript facilities, but I have found the "Dynamic Drive" one easy to navigate and pretty much a one stop shop, so to speak, for JavaScript technology.

Scrub The Web is a wonderful tool and the logo above has a link to its website analyzer. The website has a good range of website tools that are still free, I found its web page analyzer quite helpful. Once you have input a web page url, the analyzer returns a report with information relative to your "META tags. I found Scrub The Web to be informative and very easy to use. Afterwards you have the option to submit your website to a number of search engines at no cost, including Google and Jayde Online no less. The website has other useful facilities and the option for many more if you choose to become a member. This is an ideal start to making sure your web pages are optimised for submitting to search engines.

Web CEO is the most complete SEO software package I have come across and one that I have found extremely invaluable for website design management. The software is very comprehensive and provides a wealth of administration tools and reports. The software allows you to add different projects and the range of options is simply staggering, I have found it to be a valuable asset to optimising my pages. The ability to be able to create reports as you work allows you to amend the structure of your website pages, it is a very comprehensive and free to!

Web site optimisation is the process of reducing website page sizes and complexity to maximize its performance. It is widely accepted that an average visitor will move to another page / website if a page takes longer than eight seconds to load. The website above provides a useful report of any specific page so that you can see how or where improvements can be made, there is also a very useful spell checking service.

A popular web utility with search engine optimisation facilities and Tools.

Lots of free tips, tutorials and articles on web design, promotion, earning revenue, PHP, JavaScript, and CGI. Best of all, they're all free.

A free and reliable website tracker that is highly configurable, the hit counter delivers real time detailed website statistics. Simply insert a piece of our code on your web page or blog and you will be able to analyse and monitor all the visitors to your website with detailed results.

An odd looking banner I grant you, but it links to a very powerful and extremely useful application. Today most website's have at least one page with links to website's however, for one reason or another website's may sometimes be unavailable, it can be frustrating to click on a link only to be greeted by 404 error page. This application allows you to completely check a website, simply enter a url and set it off. It is fast and easy to use, once it has completed its check you are presented with a full diagnostic report of broken links and which pages link to it. If like this website you have a significant number of links it can be daunting to process them, but it is surely better than leaving your visitors with blank pages? The last time I checked this website there were 1094 url's check, these being internal links throughout the site and external links, I could not envisage having to manually check each link and this is the without doubt a most useful application.

Ranks.NL is a website that on the face of it looks basic, its is however, quite a useful set of tools. You can examine your keyword density and placement as well as page's headers, page elements, outgoing links, Google Pagerank and much more.

Finally I have added this new link to a cool facility for creating buttons in a variety styles. It is an easy process with many types of customising to match your website.

There are many web design utilities, and you will no doubt come across additional ones to these I feature, I have however found these to be extremely handy and have qualms in recommending these to you.