Resources (freebies and tips!)
This page contains a growing list of tools that we like and use, including resources that will get you and your website going. We also give some mentions of good value commercial products (sometimes value is what it's about, rather than just saving a few dollars). Check them out below...
Free webpage editor software
NVU is a free webpage editor system with capabilities somewhere between Frontpage (where most people start) and dreamweaver (an expensive and excellent package the professionals use). For a free piece of software this is amazingly powerful. And it's regularly updated by a large development team which isn't going away, as NVU is slated to become part of the Mozilla suite of applications. Check out www.nvu.com for details.
You might find that building a website isn't as hard as you thought it was. And if you get stuck, there's always our Fido's Sitebuilder to get you up and going quickly until you learn.
Free Anti-virus software
There are a number of free antivirus packages out there. At the moment we recommend AVG as a free package. It's downside is that it has to be updated semi-manually and doesn't have all the features the others have. having said that, it's a great little free product, much better than nothing and could be all you'll ever need. Check out www.free.grisoft.com for details.
If you want a better package we recommend Kaspersky Anti-Virus. Contact our partner The IT Department for information and pricing on this best-of-breed product (we use it ourselves!).
Mozilla Firefox browser
A great alternative to Internet Explorer (IE) and totally free! It works differently from IE so is far more resistant to viruses and malware. It also has some great features that you won't find in IE (speed, tabbed browsing, anti-popup, etc). Give it a try at www.getfirefox.com. The usage of this browser is growing in the worldwide community at an astounding rate (from 6% to 22% in 6 months!).
TreeSize
This is a great little tool that lists the size of a directory in Windows Explorer. Currently you can only do that with Right-Click-Properties and this small tool adds a right click menu item which allows you to easily find the size of all the directories in a tree. It’s fast too; this is one of my favourite small tools. Useful for web design as it allows you to check out the sizes of page directories and hierarchies. Check out www.jam-software.com/freeware for more information.
FTP file transfer program
To transfer your webpages up onto your new website you need a program that does "FTP" for you to put the files there. SmartFTP is one such semi-free program. Check out www.smartftp.com for further information. Note that SmartFTP is shareware and needs to be registered (it's cheap) for commercial use. We like SmartFTP because it is fully featured and easy to use.
There are a number of other good, completely free FTP tools out there, if you like any of them in particular please let us know.
Royalty free stock photo library
This is a great site; not free but so close to free its not funny! You can get great quality photographic images for use on your web site for around $1 each, fantastic value when you consider how much they usually cost! Have a look at www.istockphoto.com, you can browse the images for free and pay to download. Getting suitable images can be one of the hardest parts of web design.
Website statistics
Want detailed statistics of who is visiting your site, where thay are going and how long they stayed? Visit www.statscounter.com and have a look, they have a comprehensive system of keeping you in touch with who vists your page. We do provide statistics on the site but statscounter have a great system including some basic graphs, comparison of unique versus repeat versus first-time visitors, and session tracking so you can see which pages a visitor looked at.
Free PDF generator
You don't have to pay hundreds of dollars to generate PDFs (if you don't already know, PDF stands for Portable Document Format and is a way to generate printouts that can be reliably emailed around without losing their formatting). There are a number of these but amongst the ones we tried PrimoPDF was the best. Check out www.primopdf.com for more information.
DogFrog logo images
Want to provide a link to the WhiteDogGreenFrog website?
Thanks!
Here's six images
that you can use on your web pages to help spread the DogFrog spirit.
To download an image to your computer simply use the right button of your
mouse to click on the the picture, and then choose "Save Picture/Image
As..." from the popup menu. All of the images are 250x70 pixels and
around 12KB in size.
 That clean green frog feeling |
 Want to add a bit of frog? |
 Or perhaps add a bit of dog to your frog? |
 Try some fresh doggie style |
 Everybody needs more dog! |
 Or perhaps try something a little bit arty |