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WEBSITE SERVICES AND TOOLS
Hetzner - Recommended hosting company with reasonable prices and excellent support centre.
Google Analytics - Google offers many free tools to maximise the efficiency of your website. Use Analytics to track who's visiting your site.
W3C - Visit the W3C for web content accessibility guidelines and much more about everything www.
Stat Counter - Free website tracker giving detailed real-time stats about who's visiting your website and where they're coming from.
Taskee - Taskee simplifies website task management communication process and makes it easier and cheaper to collaborate during website testing process.
Mon.Itor.Us - Checks server performance and availability, generates uptime and availability reports, tracks visitors, checks system resources, and alerts its users in case abnormalities are detected.
slashTHREE - A digital-art based community that periodically releases exclusive art packs.
CG Society - This community supports artists by offering a range of services to connect, inform, educate and promote achievements, excellence and innovation in digital art.
depthCORE - depthCORE is an international art collective focused on modern and abstract art, incorporating design, photography, animation and audio.
Behance Network - A portfolio-based site to assist with feedback exchange, cross-pollination between creative industries and access to jobs and collaborations.
Deviant ART - Diverse art community for digital painters, photographers, poets, animators, traditional artists and graphic designers.
DESIGN PODCASTS
Pixel Perfrect - Learn the tips and tricks you need to whip those digital pictures into shape with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator curiosity of Bert Monroy.
dekePOD - Deke McClelland is a popular lecturer on Photoshop and general graphics and design. His podcasts are well explained and entertaining. This one is highly recommended.
The Design View Show - A weekly podcast that examines design fundamentals, business, culture and professionalism.
Freelance Switch - Freelance Radio is the place to hear all the tips, tricks and news of freelancing.
PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS
Slife - Slife is a time and activity analytics application for both Mac and Windows that automatically keeps track of where you spend your time on your computer.
Klok - Keep track of your time with Klok's simple work timer and visual display of how your days fill up. Requires Adobe Air.
MATTE PAINTING
RECOMMENDED READING
Advanced Photoshop Magazine - Great magazine to help you keep on top of the latest graphic trends. You can see my gallery here.
.net Magazine - Aka Practical Web Design magazine. A great magazine to help you keep track of the ever-changing trends and technolgies in the web industry.
Imagine FX Magazine - Some of the best artists around are featured in this magazine - also a great source of inspiration.
FREE SOFTWARE DOWNLOADS
Adium - Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more.
Firefox 2 - Excellent standards compliant browser with a plethora of add-ons and themes.
Thunderbird - Free email client, also from the makers of Firefox.
Joomla! - Open source CMS software. Version 1.5 has officially been released.
CSS Play - An excellent CSS resource for web designers.
A List Apart - Great source of information and interesting articles for those in the web business.
Sitepoint - Web developer community portal with tons of great articles and tutorial about all the latest web technologies.
TredoSoft - Install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on your PC.
Lovely Charts - A free online diagramming application that allows you to create professional looking diagrams of all kinds, such as flowcharts, sitemaps, organisation charts, wireframes and so on.
Web Resources Depot - Design tuts, developer tuts, articles, resources, free website enhancement scripts and licenses.
FONT SITES
DaFont - Massive online collection of mostly free (also shareware and demo) fonts available for download.
Identifont - Need to identify the name of a font? This website has the largest independent directory of typefaces on the net.
What the Font? - Another site that will help you identify a font. Upload an image of the font and let the font recognition system do it's thing.
Typophile - Have a look at the forums - tons of experts to help you with all your font queries.
Free Mac Fonts - Over 6 500 free Mac fonts available for download.
Find a broken link? Please let me know: info(at)omegared.co.za.
ONLINE SEO TOOLS
Website Grader - Free tool to measure the marketing effectiveness of your website by providing you with a score that incorporates factors such as web site traffic, SEO, social popularity, and other technical elements.
Market Leap - Online tool for checking link popularity, search engine saturation and keyword verification.
SEO Tool Set - Contains a keyword density analyzer, competition research, ranked page reports and link analysis reports.
Google Webmaster Tools - Find out your Google crawl info and how your pages are indexed. There are also tips on how to increase your traffic.
DMOZ - Add your site to the Open Directory Project. The listings power the core directory services of AOL, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit among other search engines.
SEOmoz - Tools for term targeting, geo-targeting, popularity searches, link finders, rank checkers, page strength among other tools.
Blog Juice - Estimates blog’s value upon the approximate number of Bloglines subscribers, Alexa rank, the ranking assigned by Technorati and the number of inbound links.
UrlTrends - The tool collects information about incoming links from Google, Yahoo and MSN as well as social bookmarks which point to your site and presents them in Flash-based graphs. Thus you can observe directly, how your site is growing, which tendencies occur and what changes might be important to increase your popularity. Highly recommended.
SEO Workers - This SEO Analysis Tool is to help you analyze and measure the ranking potential of your web pages.
Website Grader - Website Grader calculates the marketing effectiveness of your web-pages based upon the keyword popularity, link popularity, page structure, traffic ranking, readability level and search results in Google.
Compete - Analyze the difference in growth of two or more web sites.
Microsoft Demographics Prediction - Predicts a visitor’s age, gender, and other demographic information according to his or her online behavior that is examined from search queries and page views.
Popuri.us - A tool to check the link popularity of any site based on its ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc.), social bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc), subscribers (Bloglines, etc).
Xinu - Find out how well your site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking and other site statistics.
UITest.com - The site provides validators, checkers, generators and tools for sophisticated web development. Accessibility checkers, validation tools and further services are listed.
RECOMMENDED BLOGS & WEBSITES
Roberto Blake - Blog of New York Roberto Blake. Great resource for interviews, tutorials, tips, videos and showcasing designer's artwork. This one is highly recommended!
Just Creative Design - Blog of Jacob Cass which focuses on graphic design - includes many interesting articles.
Freelance Switch - An excellent resource for freelancers with many interesting articles and a great podcast.
GoMediaZine - From the Go Media guys - great tutorials, resources and articles.
FREEBIES
Bitbox - Free textures, vector packs, website components and plug-ins.
