An effective, well-organized workflow is an important asset of professional web designers. The more useful and time-saving your tools are, the more time you can focus on important things, thus creating a foundation for timely good-quality results. The problem is that there are just way too many tools, services and resources out there, so it has become difficult to keep track on them and find those tiny little time-savers that will spare you headaches and save time in a long run.

And this is where we come in. Back in old days, Smashing Magazine used to publish lists after lists, with plethora of links that covered different topics all somehow related to web design and development. We have undergone quite a development since then, and are now publishing almost only in-depth articles — written by some of the best professionals in the industry. However, useful, carefully prepared and filtered lists are still useful, and therefore we keep publishing them as well.

Below you’ll find 50 useful tools and time-savers for web designers and developers. Among other things, you will find recently released tools, useful reference sheets, articles and further resources. Such posts are prepared over months, each containing resources found, reviewed or bookmarked by the Smashing Editorial Team. We hope that at least some of them will help you improve your workflow!

Typography

Meet Your Type: A Field Guide to Typography (free PDF)
This eBook will help you better understand the foundation of typography and overcome common obstacles and problems when choosing type.

Web Font Specimen
This template lets you check the typography by analyzing the HTML-specimen in your browser. The specimen contains whole paragraphs in various line heights and font sizes, different headings, ordered and unordered lists, as well as italic and bold text. You can analyze the body size comparison that reveals aspects of the typeface that can’t otherwise be seen and study single glyphs, measure, grayscale as well as light on dark and dark on light previews. You may want to check out Good Web Fonts for the actual specimens of various legible screen fonts.

Font Anatomy Wallpaper
This wallpaper (1920×1200) covers the terminology of typography, showcasing indi­vid­ual parts of the char­ac­ters of the alpha­bet.

Web FontFont User Guide (PDF)
This Web FontFont User Guide contains information about typography aimed at different groups of people: web developers, system administrators and website visitors. You may want to consider giving it to your clients or colleagues.

AltFontPrev
This is a simple JavaScript bookmarklet that lets you view the font stack of any website and then deactivate each font with a single click. It makes it easy not only to make sure everything looks okay when certain fonts aren’t installed on a user’s system, but also to view the fonts included in the website’s font stack in a single click, rather than opening the source code. You can even specify a custom font, which makes it handy when you’re considering changing a design’s current font.

Typografix
This tool is an HTML re-processing script for creating beautiful typography. It corrects things like ellipses and smart quotes and adds tags for <script>, <pre> and <code> automatically. The en dash, for example, is created automatically when a hyphen is surrounded by spaces, and the em dash is created when two dashes appear in a row. Typografix is written in C#, requires Windows Installer 3.1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.

Unicode Codepoint Chart
This chart is broken down neatly by type of character and symbol (and by language in many cases), with a visual reference under each category. From there, just click on the symbol or character you want and you’re brought to a page with detailed information about the character, along with a browser test page, an outline (in SVG format) and a variety of encodings and character sets (HTML entity, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, ISO-8859-8, etc.).

Bookmarklets

Quix
We have covered Quix several once already, but when one talks about bookmarklets, it is just necessary to mention Quix as well. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a powerful command line in your browser, some kind of shell that lets you use handy commands and shortcuts for a quicker and more productive workflow? That’s exactly what Quix offers. The tool is a clever extensible bookmarklet that lets you both access your bookmarks and perform various operations on other websites.

WP-Toolbar bookmarklet
This tool will save a lot of clicks as you edit or update posts on your WordPress-powered blog. The bookmarklet gives you quick access to the entire administrative back-end directly in your browser’s window. There is also a GreaseMonkey script that automatically loads the toolbar when you visit a particular website.

Print Friendly Bookmarklet
This bookmarklet strips advertising, navigation and all things that you don’t want to have when you decide to print out a page. It formats the content of an article or a document for great readbility and generates a minimal and clean PDF for printing.

Bookmarklet Combiner
This tool creates a master bookmarklet which can either run all bookmarks at once or display a menu at some area of the page. Nice service for users who wants to avoid using a special folder only to hold all bookmarklets.

The Printliminator
The Printliminator is a bookmarklet with some simple tools you can use to makes websites print better. One click to activate, and then click to remove elements from the page, remove graphics, and apply better print styling.

Bespin Bookmarklet
Using the Bespin Bookmarklet, you can replace any textarea you encounter with a Bespin editor, making editing the text much more pleasant.

CSS, HTML and JavaScript Tools

eCSStender
Extensions built with eCSStender simplify the design process because you can author modern CSS using advanced selectors, properties such as border-radius, or custom font faces and rest assured that your design will work — even in IE6.

CoffeeScript
This is a little programming language that compiles JavaScript while simplifying the code that developers actually have to deal with. It works with current JavaScript libraries and compiles clean code, leaving even comments intact. Once developers familiarize themselves with how CoffeeScript works, they could potentially save themselves a lot of time and headaches with the simplified code.

#grid
#grid is a little tool that inserts a grid onto the Web page. You can hold the grid in place and toggle it between the foreground and background. To display the grid, just press a hot key on your keyboard, and you can set your own short keys to switch views.

Primer CSS
This tiny generator works online and has only one function: it extracts from an HTML page (copying and pasting will do) a framework of classes and IDs that can be used as the foundation of an external style sheet. This can be wonderful if you work by first doing the structure in HTML, and then the forms and colors in the style sheet.

CSS Usage
CSS Coverage is an extension for Firebug which allows you to scan multiple pages of your site to see which CSS rules are actually used in your site. Each time you run a scan, the CSS files that are included in the current page are shown with the number of times the rules has been found applied on your page before it.

JS.Class: Ruby-style JavaScript
JS.Class is a set of tools designed to make it easy to build robust object-oriented programs in JavaScript. It’s based on Ruby, and gives you access to Ruby’s object, module and class systems, some of its reflection and metaprogramming facilities, and a few of the packages from its standard library. It also provides a package manager to help load your applications efficiently.

JS Bin
JS Bin is an application specifically designed to help JavaScript- and CSS-developers to test snippets of code, within some context, and debug the code collaboratively. JS Bin allows you to edit and test JavaScript and HTML (reloading the URL also maintains the state of your code, new tabs doesn’t). Once you’re happy you can save, and send the URL to a peer for review or help. They can then make further changes saving anew if required.

jQuery 1.4.2 Visual Cheat Sheet
jQuery Visual Cheat Sheet is a updated version of the useful jQuery Cheat Sheet. It includes all the reference you will need for jQuery 1.4.2 API.

Turbine
Turbine is a collection of PHP-powered tools that decrease CSS development time and help you avoid headaches. Among other things, it has a simple syntax, automatic packing and gzipping of multiple style files, OOP-like inheritance and templating features as well as a shell for experiments and debugging.

Jo: JavaScript Application Framework for HTML5
Jo embraces JavaScript’s object model and leverages CSS3 to handle as much of the presentation and animation as possible. It also provides a consistent and modular event model between objects and plays nicely with other libraries like PhoneGap.

Sencha: HTML5 Mobile App Framework
Sencha Touch allows you to develop web apps that look and feel native on Apple iOS and Google Android touch screen devices.

Aloha Editor, The HTML5 Editor
Aloha Editor is an advanced browser-based editor that is faster than other editors and provides you with better and richer formatting in real-time in your browser.

JavaScript Regex Syntax Highlighter
Do you want RegexPal-style regex syntax highlighting on your webpages? This library takes care of it for you, so you can spend more time writing regular expressions and less time deciphering them. Currently, JavaScript regexes only are supported.

OpenStack Open Source Cloud Computing Software
The goal of OpenStack is to allow any organization to create and offer cloud computing capabilities using open source software running on standard hardware. OpenStack Compute is software for automatically creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers.

sweet-template
Sweet (Simple WEb front-End Template) is a lightweight JavaScript template with high performance. It’s small, fast, easy to use, and, most important, extensible. It also can be integrated with jQuery.

jQuery Deconstructed
The Deconstructed series is designed to visually and interactively deconstruct the internal code of JavaScript libraries, including jQuery, Prototype and MooTools. It breaks the physical JavaScript into visual blocks that you can easiliy navigate. Each block opens to reveal its internal code. Clickable hyperlinks allow you to follow program flow.

Alloy UI
Alloy is a UI metaframework that provides a consistent and simple API for building web applications across all three levels of the browser: structure, style and behavior.

Google JavaScript Style Guide
This document provides a set of conventions (sometimes arbitrary) that hold the style guidelines used for Google code. It covers general good practices for open-source projects and well-written and well-documented code. It covers a lot of ground, from “use camelCase for variable names” to “never use global variables” to “never use exceptions.”

gleeBox
Gleebox provides a way to navigate web pages via keyboard. For instance, it allows you to hit the ‘G’-key and every link on the page will be highlighted. This application is available as an extension for Firefox and Google Chrome.

shellinabox
Shell In A Box implements a web server that can export arbitrary command line tools to a web based terminal emulator. This emulator is accessible to every browser that supports JavaScript and CSS and does not require any additional browser plugins.

Juicer: a CSS and JavaScript packaging tool
Juicer is a new command line tool that helps by resolving dependencies, merging and compressing files. It can check the syntax, add cache busters to and cycle asset hosts on URLs in CSS files.

Jake: A Build Tool for JavaScript
Jake is a new build tool built entirely in JavaScript that runs on top of the CommonJS. As its name suggests, it is based on the existing and already popular Rake tool and benefits from the same simplicity.

Closure Compiler
The Closure Compiler is a tool for making JavaScript download and run faster. It is a true compiler for JavaScript. Instead of compiling from a source language to machine code, it compiles from JavaScript to better JavaScript. It parses your JavaScript, analyzes it, removes dead code and rewrites and minimizes what’s left. It also checks syntax, variable references, and types, and warns about common JavaScript pitfalls.

Useful Online Tools and Services

ComparePSD (Win only)
This tool lets you compare two Photoshop files side by side and see every little difference. Look for differences by layer or by effect. You get a scaled view of the files, so you can see them next to each other and pick out differences more quickly. ComparePSD is available for Windows only and is free to download and use.

Secure Passwords Generator
The tool lets you enter parameters, including the length of the password, whether to include uppercase and/or lowercase letters or numbers or punctuation and whether to eliminate characters that resemble each other (such as i and l, 1 and I, and o and 0). Then, just select the number of passwords to generate, and it returns a list. It even includes phonetics for each password to make it easier to read out loud (in case you’re giving a password to someone over the phone, for example).

SwatchSpot: Random Color Swatch Generator
This tool creates random color swatches to inspire you. Lock in the colors you like and shuffle away the ones you don’t. Once you’re done, grab the color codes or download your palette.

Yuuguu: Instant screen sharing and web conferencing
This tool provides instant web-conferencing, online meetings and collaboration and enables you to work with your cusomers, partners and colleagues right away, without a single download. The free version allows for 100 minutes per month of web conferencing.

Web Form Recovery Firefox Plugin
Lazarus securely auto-saves all forms as you type, so after a crash or server timeout you can go back to the form, right click, “recover form”, and breathe a sigh of relief.

Which loads faster?
This tool lets you see two websites load side by side in real time. Then it shows how long each took to load and the percentage difference.

Faary
Faary is an online form builder that operates with the help of text lines, and the form is generated as such. The tool creates an HTML form with CSS, which can be downloaded as a ZIP archive.

Scr.im
Scr.im lets you use a shortened URL to give out your email address safely and securely on forums. Just enter your email address on Scr.im and it will give you a link to a page with your email address, with security to prevent bots from viewing it.

Name Checklist
This tool will help you find out if your brand name, username, domain and vanity url are still available online or they are already taken.

Quora – Web Design
Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. You can follow web design, usability and related discussions and ask your questions as well.

Todo.txt Command Line Interface
If you’ve got a file called todo.txt on your computer right now, this script is for you. You probably don’t want to launch a full-blown text editor every time you need to add an item to your to-do list, or mark one that’s already there as complete. With this simple shell script, you can interact with todo.txt at the command line for quick and easy, Unix-y access.

Note and Point
This gallery highlights beautiful Keynote, PDF and PowerPoint-slides on the Web (mostly Web design-related) which is great for inspiration if you are thinking about creating beautiful and attractive slides for your next presentation.

ManyBooks
This site offers a huge collection of public domain e-books, as well as other newer books that have been released in the public domain or under Creative Commons licenses, in a variety of formats.

Tweetment
This service allows you to design sexy web pages for your tweets.

Browser Cover Generator
This simple tool generates a browser preview of an uploaded image and can add address bar URL, window title, shadow, status bar and various browser skins to the image.

Linkification Firefox Plugin
Linkification Converts text links into genuine, clickable links. To view and set options, you can use the Linkification right-click context menu.

Useful References and Guides

Design Is History
This resource showcases the evolution of design through time. It was created as a teaching tool for young designers just beginning to explore graphic design and as a reference tool for all designers. As a designer it is important to understand where design came from, how it developed, and who shaped its evolution. The more exposure you have to past, current and future design trends, styles and designers, the larger your problem-solving toolkit. The larger your toolkit, the more effective of a designer you can be.

User Interface Style Guides
This page features some useful links to style guides used by large websites, corporations and news agencies (e.g. the BBC Style Guide), including editorial guidelines, quality guidelines and online standards.

Trademarkia
Trademarkia is a free search engine for U.S. federally registered trademarks on the Internet. They provide up to the minute contextual information about the current use of interesting business names, slogans, and logos through pictures, commercials, and conversations from Flickr, Google, Youtube, and Twitter for each U.S. trademark filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) since the year 1870.

Icon Reference Chart
This chart, created by Jon Hicks, was created to collect the sizes, formats and the related information about icons used on different devices. At the moment it covers browsers, Android, iPad, iPhone, iPhone 4, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. And you can also download a template for iPhone and iPad icons. Useful.

OpenWith.org
OpenWith is a directory of existing file extensions and free tools to open them. You’ll find a free program for just about everything you would ever need to open, including source code, data files, disc images, spreadsheets and video files.

ScriptSrc.net
This site puts all the latest versions of script tags from the various JavaScript libraries in one place. Whether you use jQuery, swfobject, Chrome Frame, MooTools, Ext JS, YUI, Prototype, Dojo or Scriptaculous, you’ll find the most recent script tags here.

Colours In Cultures Chart
This map shows how colours are perceived in different cultures and nations across the globe.

Guidelines and standards manuals
Handy examples of guidelines and standards manuals used by companies and brands online. Also check Branding & Corporate Identity Design page.

Code Standards and Front-End Development Best Practices
This document outlines de-facto code standards in professional modern front-end development. The primary motivation of the document is code consistency and best practices. By maintaining consistency in coding styles and conventions, we can ease the burden of legacy code maintenance, and mitigate risk of breakage in the future. Nice and useful overview.

Essential Tools You Always have Handy When Fixing a PC Problem?
This forum thread features must-have tools that you should keep loaded on your thumb drive when asked to deal with a family member of friend’s personal computer issue.

Project Management For Dummies
Because of the ever-growing array of huge, complex, and technically challenging projects in today’s world, project management has become a critical skill. This page provides a nice project management cheat sheet that will help you handle your project management assignments, such as confirming a project’s justification, developing project objectives and schedules, and maintaining commitment for a project.

Expression Engine Reference Chart
A quick and useful reference guide for ExpressionEngine users. A PDF-version is available as well.

Computer Hardware Chart
A detailed and handy hardware chart for notebook RAM, desktop RAM, CPU sockets, hard drives, ports, processor card slots, processor card sockets, peripheral cards, desktop card slots and power connectors.

Corporate Identity / Logo Usage Guides
A collection of documents that illustrate how organizations and companies ensure that their branding remains consistent online and in print.

ASCII: The Pronouncation Guide
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Computers can only understand numbers, so an ASCII code is the numerical representation of a character such as ‘a’ or ‘@’ or an action of some sort. The non-printing ASCII characters are rarely used for their original purpose. This page features an ASCII character table and includes descriptions of the first 32 non-printing characters and the guide to their pronouncation.

Name Pronunciation Guide
Inogolo is a practical, easy-to-use website devoted to the English pronunciation of the names of people, places, and miscellaneous stuff. The site contains a searchable database of names with both phonetic and audio pronunciations in English.

Usability and User Experience

Hand picked UX related resources
UXMARKZ is a collection of hand picked UX related resources, updated daily. You will find interesting sites, articles, videos, images and slideshows from the field of interaction design, usability, information achitecture, user interface design and other. All submissions are moderated.

UX Myths
This ressource is supposed to help you build your website based on evidence, not false beliefs. UX Myths collects the most frequent user experience misconceptions and explains why they don’t hold true. And you don’t have to take their word for it, the site shows you a lot of research findings and articles by design and usability gurus.

User Interface Design Patterns for Ideas and Inspiration
A user interface design pattern library. It is a collection of Web design patterns and best practices which helps you to find inspiration and design interfaces with great user experience. It is also a user interface gallery full of real world examples of our patterns.

Last Click

How Do I Win Rock Paper Scissors Every Time?
Now, that’s a handy resource: have you ever gotten tired of being crushed by Rock, cut to shreds by Scissors, or smothered by Paper? This graphic has information compiled about Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS) from the World RPS Society, the masters of Rock, Paper, Scissors, to help you overcome your opponents and understand the strategies needed to win Rock, Paper, Scissors every time.

The Universal Packing List
This tool generates a custom packing list for your journeys. You have to provide some basic information about the journey and a packing list appears immediately.

Ex-blocker
The Ex-blocker is a plugin that hides any information about your ex online. The tool is available as a Firefox and Chrome extension.

Not Beans Again
An online tool that finds a recipe from your ingredients. Enter what you have got in your fridge to the “Ingrediometer” and see if the tool can come up with a recipe for you.

A Coder’s Guide to Coffee
As most software and creative professionals know, coffee is an important technology for boosting mental acuity and maintaining peak on-the-job performance. But did you also know that coffee can be a damn tasty beverage? All you need is the appropriate amount of disrespect for the mainstream coffee industry and a desire to enjoy a better beverage.

Flipboard
Flipboard is a free personalized social magazine for your iPad. It allows you to quickly flip through news, photos and updates your friends are sharing on Facebook and Twitter. The emergence of tools like this is what will make iPad a truly useful and handy device for many people.

Creative designers can do some amazing things with jQuery. A wide variety of animation effects are possible, and these 35 tutorials provide excellent learning resources for anyone who is wanting to brush up their skills in this area. You’ll find tutorials for creative animated navigation menus, as well as for other types of animation that use jQuery instead of Flash.

Animate Image Filling Up Using jQuery

Animate Curtains Opening with jQuery

Building an Animated Cartoon Robot with jQuery

jQuery Animations: A 7-Step Program

jQuery and CSS Sprite Animation Explained in Under 5 Minutes

Fun with jQuery’s Animate () Function

Animate a Hover with jQuery

How to Create a “MooTools Homepage” Inspired Navigation Effect Using jQuery

Crafting an Animated Postcard with jQuery

How to Create a Drop-Down Nav Menu with HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery

Creating a Polaroid Photo Viewer with CSS3 and jQuery

Quick Tip: Easy Sequential Animations in jQuery

Build an Incredible Login Form with jQuery

Learning jQuery: Revealing Photo Slider

Using jQuery for Background Image Animations

Animated Menus Using jQuery

Create a Cool Animated Navigation with CSS and jQuery

Animated Drop Down Menu with jQuery

How to Load In and Animate Content with jQuery

Puffing Smoke Effect in jQuery

How to Make an Impressive Animated Landscape Header with jQuery

Make an Animated Alphabet Using Keypress Events in jQuery

How to Make a Smooth Animated Menu with jQuery

Sliding Boxes and Captions with jQuery

Create a Realistic Hover Effect with jQuery

Glimmer “Freestyle” Animations

Create a Funky Parallax Background Effect Using jQuery

Create a Stunning Sliding Door Effect with jQuery

How to Build an Animated Header in jQuery

Create a Unique Gallery by Using Z-Index and jQuery

jQuery UI Animation Effects

Animate Your Message Boxes with jQuery

Sexy Opacity Animation with MooTools or jQuery

Controlling Animation Timing in jQuery

Methods for Animation Effects with jQuery 1.4

Browser Comparison – Google Chrome v6 depends on all

other browser producers had no sleep This is to the following browsers compared with various benchmark tests show. Winner of this little comparison, all still in development browser, is the developer version of Google Chrome version 6. This marked, in all the tests that were run through 5 times and each of them then the average value was calculated, the partial distance with the best results.

To illustrate the positive development of each browser based on the values obtained here, in the following, the same comparison of early March this year.

Test the latest browser versions – Download!

Who should have one of you according to these results of interest to also take a look at this part, want to take only two to three days old versions, this is by using the following download links.

· Chrome 6.0.477.0 (Developer Version)

· Opera 10.60 (RC1)

· 5 Safari (Webkit Nightly Build)

· Firefox 4.0 b1 (FTP download)

· Internet Explorer 9 (Platform Preview Version 3)

Conclusion: Although the third preview version of Internet Explorer 9 still in a development phase is always mediated, that regardless of their functional limitations a more positive impression of what might await us in the future. Also positive in the browser versions tested here is the speed of Opera 10.60 RC1. However, the values of the 6 version of the Google Chrome made with, it is likely the Google browser is increasingly easier in the browser market, its claim to rank three or even expand it can be. Unfortunately, it would not be surprised if it also costs of Firefox would do on this, its values really are not outstanding. But each of these statistics is worthless if a new version of the Light of the world beckon.

Browser News – The last few weeks in terms of browser updates, some new, still in development, well-known browser brought to light music. Whether the third of the Internet Explorer Platform Preview 9, the first Release Candidate of the Opera 10.60 or a development version of the Google Chrome browser in version 6 All browser manufacturers praise of course in addition to the implementation of new standards like HTML5 and CSS3, or at least the improved support of this, especially the fast-charging behaviour, due to new or improved rendering engines. One thing is for sure without an optimization in this area is a further merging of Web and PC applications, hard to implement.

If your business has a presence on Facebook, then you’ve already taken the first step toward connecting with your current and potential customers on one of the most popular social networking sites to date. But to fully benefit from having a fan page on Facebook, you’ll need to actively engage your fans to maintain their interest and keep the momentum going for your business.

So how can you accomplish that? Let’s look at seven ways:

1. Advertise your fan page. To get the most out of your page, you can’t rely on the mantra: “Build it and they will come.” You’ll need to get the message out to your current and potential customers by advertising your new Facebook page. At the very least, you should link to your fan page directly from your website, blog, Twitter page, or other online forum. You’ll want to make sure that the link is at the top of the right or left column on your website, especially in hot spots like the masthead. Including a Facebook icon is the best way to draw attention to your link.

   To boost your advertising even further, try using Facebook ads, blog posts, or other messaging to communicate your page’s existence to future fans.

2. Build your brand. You should mention your Facebook page on all of the elements in your marketing program. One of the quickest ways you can do this is to include a link in your email signature. You can also mention your Facebook page on any fulfillment materials, invoices, packing slips, company brochures, or business cards. To gain popularity, you’ll need to spread the news through every customer contact avenue that’s available to your business.

3. Include company information. On your Facebook fan page, there’s an Info tab that allows you to include information about your business. At a minimum, you should provide an overview of your company, information about your products or services, and a link to your website. But you don’t have to be constrained by the current categories. With a little creativity, you can expand on this part of your page and use it to drive conversion in other areas. For example, in the Company Overview section, you can place links to specific pages on your website, or you can add a sign-up form that lets people subscribe to your email newsletter. This area is also a great place to put links to your other social networking sites, such as Twitter.

4. Create a landing page. One of the greatest aspects of Facebook’s fan page is the ability to create a landing page that leads into your “actual” page. Facebook provides an application called Static FBML (Facebook Markup Language), which allows you to use basic coding to create a small landing page that becomes the first thing people see when they come to your fan site.

   To install this tool, log in to Facebook and add Static FBML to your page. Once you’ve installed it, you can insert your code and adjust your settings on your wall so that people who aren’t yet your fans will land on this particular page first. To get the most out of this technique, you should provide a short description of your business and request that people become a fan of your page. I’ve known businesses that have used this technique and have been highly effective in converting visitors to fans.

5. Provide engaging content. Having a Facebook fan page provides an ideal opportunity to interact with people. The more information you include on your page, the more inclined your fans will be to stay involved. But remember, interaction requires the efforts of both you and your visitors. And when your fans are more involved, they’re more likely to take advantage of special promotions you might be offering or to suggest your fan page to their friends.

   To encourage interaction, you can adjust your wall settings to allow your fans to post comments, links, or videos on your page, and you can host a miniforum by using the Discussions application. If you have videos on YouTube that are related to your products or services, you can educate your fans about your videos by using the Notes application. You can also import an RSS feed through this application, which is an excellent way to provide relevant content to your readers.

6. Make offerings. Besides creating a landing page, you can use Static FBML to create coupons and rewards, promotional announcements, or even a little shopping area. If you can imagine it, you can create it. Start thinking of your Facebook page as an extension of your main website. If you publish an email newsletter, you can use the markup language to create a subscription form for sign-ups. If you use an email marketing program, you’ll need to put the code for your subscription form in FBML to create a tab on your page.

   Above all, make sure that you’re following the Facebook Pages Terms to avoid making mistakes that could inadvertently cause your Facebook fan page to be deactivated.

7. Do your research. Facebook provides the Insights tool that allows you to view certain metrics about your fan base. It’s not extremely robust, but it does provide a snapshot on things such as the number of active fans you have in various age groups, the geographic breakdown of your fans, and the growth of your fan base over time. This is helpful information when you’re deciding which promotions to advertise to your fans or whether you should target your messaging to a specific age group.

   You should also research other businesses on Facebook to see what they’re doing to promote their page or to engage their fans. Pay attention to what features they’re using, what kind of content they frequently post for their fans, and what methods they use to interact with their visitors. There are a lot of very successful Facebook fan pages that offer a number of creative and effective ideas you can try on your own page.

Blogging has become a very popular method for sharing knowledge, discuss viewpoints, personalize your business and increase the opportunity for inbound links and traffic. Given the increasing popularity of blogging today, it has become imperative that you choose the perfect medium for posting your blogs. Blogger and WordPress are two leading blogging platforms that have gained in popularity over the years.

Blogger can be described as a popular free hosted blogging platform while WordPress is a popular self hosted blogging platform. However, recent times have seen a switch to more WordPress blogs than Blogger. In order to understand the reasons for this shift and whether it makes sense to switch or not to WordPress, it is important to understand the innate differences between the two and the advantages of one over the other.

• WordPress allows you to freely host your blog site onto your hosted website or anywhere else for that matter, which is not possible with a Blogger blog. WordPress hosted on your own server under your own domain will help much more with SEO than having a Blogger account at a separate Blogger URL which directs traffic to them and doesn’t keep them on your site.
• The amount of control you exercise over your blog site is limited in Blogger as you do not have the option of choosing your content etc but in a WordPress blog, you are given complete control of your blogging content, which makes the latter more compatible for those wanting to market their businesses.
• WordPress blogs provides you with more options for customization than Blogger blogs. While this may be intimidating to a novice, it is not very difficult to learn or master.
• Changing your layouts and templates using WordPress is very simple and can take place even if you are not aware of programming or coding. However, this is not the case with Blogger blogs, where you need to understand coding, if you want to make changes to your template.
• While both WordPress and Blogger offers the user a variety of plug-ins and widgets to use from and create a blog site, it is important to note that WordPress offers more variety and types in comparison to Blogger, whose options are pretty limited in the area. Moreover, the kind of widgets offered by WordPress are more sophisticated than the Blogger ones, like those that allow you to keep track of traffic to your website or even allow you to put up spam filters and the like to ensure good traffic to your website.
• It is interesting to note that with WordPress, you can create static pages and generate SEO friendly links with the click of a single button, which again is not possible with Blogger, although many may argue that Blogger is more recognized by Google, as it is owned by Google.
• Though both blogs are easily picked up by RSS feeds, a WordPress blog can actually help you monitor your tracking statistics, which makes it more attractive in the long run as the same is not possible with Blogger.

Social media is a great way to listen to clients’ needs and build a credible web presence that extends beyond your website….but did you know you can use the social web to generate leads? Below are some tips on how to acquire new business using popular social media sites. If your current and prospective clients are there, you should at least be in on the conversation.

Twitter – Twitter search is one of the most powerful lead sourcing tools available. Using this feature, you can see in real-time what people are tweeting about. Search "email marketing" and see how many people are tweeting about it….hundreds! Now, how many of those people are looking for an email marketing expert? How many need an SEO expert? The list goes on and on — don’t let these cries for help get snatched up by someone else.

Search for your area of expertise. Find the leads. And then send them a friendly tweet letting them know you can help. Remember: people hate spam. Don’t hit potential clients over the head with your pitch. And before you start hunting for leads make sure your Twitter profile outlines your expertise and includes links back to your credible website, portfolio, etc.

Facebook – Like Twitter, people share their thoughts on services they want or need. And you can use their search feature to see who may need your help. Try searching "email marketing" in Facebook’s search feature. On the left sidebar, look at the option to choose Posts by Everyone. This is everyone that is currently posting about email marketing. Again it’s a lot of people….but one of them might be a potential client.

LinkedIn – As you probably know, LinkedIn is a fantastic place to network and join groups of like-minded professionals. But are you using it to garner business? Does your profile mention that you’re a Constant Contact Business Partner? LinkedIn is a great site to promote your services.

First and foremost, add an offer to your profile updates. What’s more compelling to a potential client: "Looking for a new car" or "Get a Free analysis at (insert your url) and see what I can do for you!" Also make sure your specialties and summary include your strongest skills. If you want to drive business make sure you have the profile to back it up.

Craigslist- Much more of a barebones approach as opposed to the previous mentioned sites, but definitely another great place to find people looking for your expertise. You can use Craigslist’s search feature to look for "gigs" in your area that apply directly to your expertise.

Features

• Bookmarks are displayed as icons as opposed to a list.
• You can use Google search via the top right bar to search the web.
• There is a default start page which contains Google search, a link to their mobile sites directory, access to their interactive tutorial, a link to leave feedback and a link to ask questions.
• You can share the current web page via email.
• You can copy the current URL to the device clipboard.

Likes

• It’s totally free – there is only ONE version so, there’s no paying for a “full” version.
• There is a short interactive tutorial to help you get started with Tiki’Surf.
• “Instant visualization of your bookmarks: just by running your finger above your bookmarked sites you get an instant snapshot of the actual site always updated.”
• Save time by tapping and holding a category to visualize the sites in that category without having to actually dig deeper; the sites within that category will appear above the category area.

Dislikes

• There are 6 categories for your bookmarks and they’re not customizable.
• You can only have 6 sites within each category; you’ll start out with 6 default sites that you can then replace according to your own preference.

If you’re someone who has a lot of frequently visited sites that you need to access quickly, then this browser is for you. Though lacking in other features, it’s beautifully made and a real time saver when it comes to accessing bookmarks.

Blogger has recently introduced "Blogger Template Designer" feature for Blogspot users and give more benefits to the end users as far as designing of blog is concerned. I personally have tried this fascinating feature and i am very very happy while using it. it is using a very handy process called wizard, you need to do is just select some options and apply and save it and your blog’s design template will be no more remains the same as old one. you will get the same feeling as i have feel, so why not check this feature in Blogger Draft. Those who have less knowledge about CSS and HTML can also create their own personalized template for blogspot blogs. The feature “Template Designer” is now on Blogger Draft and soon it will be placed on Main Blogger area.
To try this Blogger Template Designer first open this Link: http://draft.blogger.com/
Now Click on Layout and there you will see Template Designer feature.

There are Four Main features. Template, Background, Layout and Advance.
Template: In this section you can select different style of templates provided by popular template designers.

Background: If you want to chage background color you can do that from background properties. Plenty of colors and customization are available to add in your blog in this section.
Layout: This is one of the most useful feature for bloggers. you can easily change the Layout of your blogspot blog to Two Column, Three Column and make customize template. you can also customize your blog headers and footer section withing layout. you can Move the position of all widgets to left, right top or down (which was not possible before without having XML knowledge).

Advance: Using this option you can change color for Page Text, Background, Blog Title, Tabs Text, Date Header, Post, and Links color. There is anotherfeature under Advance option called CSS. You can add any CSS code in side the box to add new stuffs to your blogspot blog.

So just go ahead and try this very nice feature of blogger

Note: Before making any changes to your blog design and template don’t forget to take full backup of your template.

So are you pleased with this move from blogger? Share your experience with me.

Here are some methods to increase traffic to your blog or website. Some of these techniques will help increase sales as well as hits.
1. Have Your Own Domain – If you use WordPress or blogger, try to avoid using sub-domains or free hosting services. Pay for some web hosting and get your own unique domain name. This will make your website more memorable and encourage visitors to return.
2. Create a Professional and Unique Design with Logo – Code your own template or modify an existing theme for your site or blog. What makes your blog so special if it looks the same as 1000 others on the Internet? Make sure you have a great memorable logo so when people see it; they know it’s your websites. Your design should be clean and simple so it’s easy to navigate. Once you have made it, test it and check everything works, a site with errors will lose visitors.
3. Content is King – You need to consistently write great content on your blog or website. The posts that you make need to be worth reading and have some impact on the visitor. If I am visiting your website for the first time, I want to be impressed and bookmark your website so I return to see what else you compose.
4. Post Linking – When a link is made to your blog from another blog, if activated, it places a link in that blogs comments back to the relevant post. This will help increase back links to your blog and therefore increase traffic.
5. Personality – Do not pretend to be someone you are not as a blogger. Be yourself and do not act otherwise. This is best because your readers want someone to connect with, someone who is a real person and not just a blog with no face.
6. Always Room for Improvement – Always strive to improve your blog or site any way you can. Play around with ad placement, colours and graphics and other features to make your blog more appealing. Ask for reviews to find area’s for improvement.
7. Reply to Your Readers – This means replying to comments and any e-mails that you receive. This is part of your personality and showing that you are a real person who exists and cares about the topic you are blogging about.
8. Real Posts – Ensure that you sound human in your posts. Do not post in the third person. Use words such as “I” and talk about your personal experiences.
9. A Picture – A picture paints a thousand words so why not show your readers who is writing the blog. Upload an image of yourself onto your about page, or if you are not quite comfortable to do that then have a cartoon of yourself made.
10. Comment on Other Blogs – This is a very powerful technique, I know I find myself clicking the link to a person’s website after I have read their comment and this is what you can achieve by leaving your comment on as many other blogs as possible. Blogs that are about the same topic will help you get targeted traffic. Ensure your comment is worth reading and not just a load of rubbish.
11. Question Your Readers – Ask your readers questions in posts, this will help to provoke a response from them. You give them an important role to play and they respond by commenting their opinion. This will encourage repeat visitors to respond to your posts with their opinions.
12. Internal Linking – Linking to previous posts that you have made will create more back links and also encourage readers to re-read or look at some of your older work. Readers of a particular post will be interested in related posts so ensure you link to them.
13. Alternate Text Images – When you use images on your site, ensure that you use alternate text “alt” tags to insert keywords or the name of the image. This will help get the images listed on image search engines and result in traffic from that source.
14. Submit to Directories – Submit your site to online directories. Do this to as many as you can to improve your PageRank. This increased back links to your website and there for you receive higher rankings on search engines. Quality back links are important so try and obtain some from high Page Ranking sites that have similar content to your websites.
15. Image Use – Try to use images when posting on your blog. These make posts more fun to look at and can break up boring text.
16. Join Forums – Join many forums and message boards that are related to your websites content. Place a link back to your website in your profile and signature and frequently post useful information to other members.
17. Keyword Rich Content – When writing articles or posts on your site or blog, ensure you include relevant keywords so that people searching for the topic will have an easier time finding your article.
18. Write Intriguing Post Titles – Ensure that you write intriguing post titles that have keywords in. This is what is going to show up on search engines so ensure your spelling is right and that you would want to click it.
19. Meta Data – Get as much use out of Meta data as you can. Try to have a different page description and keywords on every page of your website.
20. Write a Press Release – Write a press release about something to do with your website and publish this on news sites or press release websites along with sites that are relevant to your niche.
21. Merchandise – Create pens, pencils, t-shirts, mouse mats etc that have your websites logo and address on. Maybe sell the t-shirts from your website however give you the free pens in your local area.
22. Advertise Locally – Place an advert in your local business newsletter or in a local shop. List what the purpose of your website is and hopefully you will receive some interest. Local traffic can really help especially if you are selling something. Visitors will be much more inclined to purchase from someone locally than from the other site of the world.
23. Share a Secret – It is likely that your website will be based on something you have an interest in, so why not share some inside knowledge that many of your readers may not know. Let them know something that has helped you and only you in the past. Curiosity is a marvellous thing.
24. Advert Experiments – Naturally most will want to make some money from their website and therefore adverts will be on there. Try and experiment with your adverts placement to see which gets better results. Do not overload your website with adverts because this will deter visitors. Maybe implement a membership system that removes 50% of adverts when logged in.
25. Social Bookmark Posts Plugin – If you have a blog then get a plugin for your posts that allows your readers to click a button and this will then bookmark your site on digg, stumbleupon, reddit etc. 
26. Ask for Diggs – There is no harm is asking your readers to Digg posts that you have written. This will help increase the number of dig users visiting your website.
27. Ask for Comments – Ask your visitors in your posts to post their comments about the post. If you are not getting as many comments as you would like then anything is worth a try. 
28. Ask for Subscriptions – While asking for comments you may was well ask for other things such as subscriptions to your RSS feed. Ensure there is a big button that can be clicked that allows subscriptions to be made simple and stress free.
29. E-mail Subscription – Allows users to sign up by e-mail so that your blog posts are delivered to their e-mail address. This will ensure visitors do not miss any of your posts.

30. MyBlogLog – This is a great service that shows an image of your visitors on your website if they are registered. There are similar blog social networking sites that can also be used for this.
31. Post Rating – Enable a plug-in on your blog that allows visitors to rate your posts. This is a simple way that does not require registration to enable readers to report on how good a post is.
32. FeedBurner – Using a service such as Feed Burner allows you to monitor the number of subscribers you have. Many readers will be interested to see how many other users are reading your blog and are subscribed to it. Use their publicize services to show the number of readers.
33. Commenting – Try enabling and disabling the “must be registered to comment” feature to see which yields more results. You should find that without registration, more comments will come through; however this does mean that you should implement some spam protection feature.
34. Online Homepages – Many people use Google for example and have iGoogle activated. This is why you should have an RSS plug-in that allows users to click and it adds to feed to such services.
35. Write a List Post or Article – Writing a bulleted list can sometimes be easier on the reader and writer if you have lots on information to roll off in one post. This is a list post and makes for easy reading.
36. Article Marketing – Write an article and post it on sites such as article beech or ezine articles. Ensure you include a link back to your site in the article. Make sure the article is great so that people will want to read more of your work.
37. Autopinger – use sites such as autopinger.com to submit your blog to lots of websites.
38. Submit Site to Search Engines – Manually submit your site to the major search engines on the web and also use auto submitter websites for lesser known search engines. Organic search engine traffic is great and will increase your ad revenue.
39. DMOZ – Submit your website to dmoz.org. if you manage to get listed this will really help your traffic stats.
40. Site Contests – Offer a prize to the 1000th subscriber or commenter to encourage whatever activity you want. The prize could simply be a text link on your website, however the more appealing the better.
41. Banner Exchanges – You could try a banner exchange service however you may not be able to choose what type of banner is placed on your site. Try and contact other bloggers with similar content and ask for a link exchange.
42. Site Load Time – Check how long it takes your website to load and increase the speed if necessary. This is important to ensure visitors are not leaving before the site has fully loaded. Try to use smaller images or multimedia if your site is slow.
43. YouTube – Create a YouTube account and add you link in your profile so that you might get traffic from people who view any videos that you upload. Make videos relating to your website content so any traffic is targeted.
44. About Us – Get your site listed at Wiki – about Us Wiki Page, this is another way to increase back links. On the site you can put information about your website.
45. Tags – Tagging your posts or articles on your website is a great way of entering keywords to help search engines. Make the most of these where you can.
46. Categories – If you have a blog then use blog categories with meaningful names that use keywords so that these show up in the websites URL and on SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages)
47. Permalink – Check to see if this features is enabled. If its not then enable it and have the post title in the URL.
48. Holidays – These are great for marketing so ensure that you are ready. Start making posts and site content about Christmas / Easter or whatever about a month before the event. This gives search engines chance to list your posts. Then when people search for Christmas XXXXXX your site will be there. – Maybe decorate your site to suit the holiday theme.
49. Interviews – Interview other sites and post the interview on your website. Alternatively get interviewed by other sites yourself.
50. Selling your site? – Pretend to sell your website. I sold a site recently and the traffic shot up. If you can list your site free then you have nothing to lose apart from responding to offers. However the chances of any of the traffic you received returning is slim. You may benefit from padding out your MyBlogLog section.
51. Surveys – Have a survey or poll on your website, not large, just a small one in the sidebar somewhere that allows visitors to vote on a controversial question or something that will change on your website depending on a vote.
52. Blog Networks – Create a blog network where you can link all your blogs together. This will take up a lot of your time, however if you have it spare the more the better providing the content is unique and remains at a high standard.
53. Create a Site Template or Blog Theme – As the title states, create a theme and have a link back to your website in the footer. 
54. Plugins / scripts – If you have the knowhow, create a plug-in or script for a website and have a link back to your website.
55. Comedy Writing – If you can write funny content, this will attract lots of readers. I know I have returned to a blog in the past due to its humour.
56. Social Networking Site – Use social networking websites such as MySpace, gain lots of friends and then post a bulletin about your website.
57. Reviewing – If you are honest and able to post great reviews then review sites and products and post about them on your website. If this is successful then other sites will want to be reviewed by you.
58. Get Reviews – Go to other sites and ask them to review your website. No one like’s criticism so be prepared to take some. It is likely to benefit your site in the future though.
59. Post News – Try and be first to post breaking news in your niche. Get listed on news websites such as Google News which will increase your traffic.
60. Awards Program – Create an awards brand. Get webmasters to submit their site and you offer prizes or just a graphic that states they won or passed your tests for a great website. Use your imagination.
61. Resources – Write posts that link to resources that may be useful to your type of reader. A webmaster blog may link to free stock photo sites as a post and list them in order of best first.
62. Treat others as you wish to be treated – This speaks for itself. If a reader of yours needs a hand then take the time out to help them. They will appreciate you for it.
63. Edit Posts – Go back over old content on your website and update it if it needs updating. Insert relevant links into old pages that go to content that is similar.
64. Yahoo Answers – Get an account at Yahoo Answers and post your blog URL in answers where appropriate. Only do this when you have a good reputation and the content is relevant and will actually help the user.
Great! That’s it for this time. If you learned at least one thing from this post it was worth reading!