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Swansea Leisure Centre

Swansea, South Wales

Laing O'Rourke

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This resources area is a collection of links to useful online tools relating to Photography, Architecture, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Web design and Social Networking.

Website Services & 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.
- Orangoo - Spell Check your website

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.

Free Developer 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.
- FileZilla - Good FTP program for PC and Mac.
- Open Office - Multi platform and multi lingual office suite. Compatible with other major office packages as well.
- GIMP - Image manipulation program for Mac, Windows and UNIX.
- Notepad++ - Source code editor and notepad replacement for Windows. Supports various programming languages.
- Blender - Free open source 3D content creation suite available on multiple platforms.
- Aptana - The IDE I use for web development (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP and more). A community edition and pro edition are available.
- Skype - Make your calls online - it's perfect for cheap international calls.
- SourceForge.net - Tons of open source programs available for download.

Designer & Developer Links

- 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.
- Lovery 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.

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.

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.
- Google Website Submission - Add your URL to Google.
- 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.