Some great free online tools for you to try

As I rummage around the Internet I find great new tools that can make every day life in my web marketing business easier, here is a list of some great ones that I have been using.  I am sure you can put some of them to use:

• Irfan View: this is a great tool for resizing and cropping images, free and available to download from download.com.  I found this tool quite a few years ago and find that it great for keeping image quality.  If you download it and need help using it, just email me and I will send you on a little tutorial document I put together info@dynamicwebmarketing.ie.  
• Email Encoder: Got problem with spam, this nifty little tool might help reduce it http://www.prioritysubmit.com/seotools-page-size-extractor.html.  Spammers automatically visit websites and scrape information, like your email address of it and then send you spam, using this tool to encode the email address before you put it on your website will mean that the spammers will only see a pile of numbers and letters but the user on the site will see the click-able email address. Nifty eh!
• SurrealCMS: Got a website but cannot update it?  Why not get this brilliant CMS added www.surrealcms.com, its easy to use and allows you to edit the page content, images and meta data.  It can work really well but it will depend on your website, sometimes it may not work that well if your site uses a lot of tables. Talk to your developer before trying to get it implemented.
• RGB to Hex / Hex to RGB Converter:Working in web marketing means setting up websites, blogs, newsletters and personalising social media pages for clients. So it is really important that I replicate the brand colours easily. On occasions I have been given the RGB colours of the brand but on the web everything is done using hex colour strings.  This great little tool enables me to convert the RGB to hex quickly http://www.javascripter.net/faq/hextorgb.htm  without having to annoy the client or their brand company.
• Colorzilla: This is a great Moxilla  ad-on www.colorzilla.com.  Unsure what designer created your logo and do not know how to get hold of the RGB or the hex code of any of your branding colours?  Simply download, click on the dropper in the status bar (bottom left), hover over your website and in the status bar you will see the RGB and hex of any colour on your website. Tip: You have to download it while in Mozilla FireFox browser, do not try to download it while in another browser.  I know because I tried to do it the very first time, granted that was a good many moons ago now.
• Broadband Speed Test: Got broadband, know what you are paying for but unsure what speeds you are actually getting?  www.speedtest.net allows you to test your upload and download speed. If you are experiencing problems, the best thing to do is complete a few speed tests at different times of the day, take a screen shot and email it to your provider.
• HTML & CSS Validation: All websites should have their HTML and CSS validated. Download this Firefox ad-on  and test to see if your CSS and HTML validate. If errors are returned, send them to your web developer and ask them to be corrected,  some errors can effect usability, accessibility and even your search engine performance.  Don’t forget to download it while in your Mozilla FireFox browser.  Once downloaded click on Tools – Web Developer and Tools.

Happy times with your free tools