Designing a new website or updating an existing one takes a wide variety of tools. Today, most web hosts give clients access to a control panel that allows for the quick installation of forum and blog software, the ability to backup and restore websites, and a handful of simple design tools. Even if you used a website builder to create your site, you may want to make a few adjustments that can’t be done with point and click automated website builders. Check out our list of free software for webmasters!
Color Pickers
Color pickers help you to create the perfect color scheme, so that your site blends together and has a natural flow to it.
ColorZilla
ColorZilla is a Firefox add-on that can analyze any color on a web page and create a corresponding element. ColorZilla sits conveniently in your system tray until you’re ready to use it.
Just Color Picker
A freeware Windows program, Just Color Picker helps identify specific colors used in images or web pages and spits out the corresponding values in five formats.
HTML Editors
HTML editors simplify the process of coding a website. WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors make designing a website easy for even a beginner. Text based editors are for more advanced users who are familiar with HTML tags and like the convenience of taking a few shortcuts.
NVU
NVU is a text and WYSIWYG editor, perfect for everyone! NVU runs on Windows, OSX and Linux.
Amaya
Amaya is an open source program that’s been the choice of professional developers since 1996. Amaya is best for advanced users and handles both HTML and CSS. Amaya is supported by Windows, OSX and Linux.
HTML Kit
HTML Kit is a popular WYSIWYG program for beginners using Windows.
HTML Optimizers
HTML optimizers reduce unnecessary code from your web pages, shrinking them in size, which helps them to load faster.
Google Website Optimizer
If you’re using Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools you also have access to Google Website Optimizer. Google’s tool is a free web based website testing wonder. Choose which pages you want to test from the online interface and Google will do the rest of the work for you.
iWeb Tools
iWeb Tools also has a free online optimizer. Simply copy and paste your HTML into their convenient online form and they’ll clean it up for you.
Meta Tag Generators
Meta tags in websites help identify your pages to search engines and other bots crawling the web.
Add Me
This web based software does all the hard work for you; simply input your data and Add Me will give you the properly formatted meta tags.
Online Meta Tags
Online Meta Tags is another free, web based application that automatically generates meta tags.
What are your favorite webmaster tools?