tool

Give it a Whirl…

A list of some website-related tools:

Links

Use Neil Patel’s backlink checker to see who is linking to your website.

Broken links on your website are really annoying, especially since they’re good at hiding. Use the Broken link checker to find all of them!

Color

Want to check whether the contrast between text and background on your website is big enough to be legible? Kontrast is a nice tool with free Firefox and Chrome addons.

Illustrations

When you need to create images for use in online promotion material, hotpot might be a nicer way to work than Photoshop. You start by picking a template from one of their categories and then you can edit them right then and there. You pay $1 when you want to download your finished image. Take a look at what they offer. You might like it. The picture of the blue orange was made at myhotpot.io

For free illustrations of humans, take a look at Humaaans.

In need of SVG illustrations? Look at unDraw.

Whether you have a lot of experience with Photoshop or Affinity, removing the background from a photograph is never fun. This web application isn’t infallible and you might have to tweak it a little but removebg can simplify the process. And with 50 free ones a month, it’s worth trying.

Responsiveness

You can test the responsiveness of your website in your browser, especially Firefox and Chrome are good for that but the Responsinator is a sweet online tool you can try as well.

From 0 to 255

A handy little tool for working with colors is 0to255.com
This one is not so much for finding contrasting or complementary colors, but nuances of the same color.

Compression: making pictures easier to load

For visitors of your Web site it’s important if the pictures they see there are as light as possible, so they’ll load as quickly as possible. If a picture is big that’s one thing (w x h in px), but it shouldn’t be too heavy (weight in kb), especially not for those who are using their cell phones. Thankfully, there are quite a few tools to improve the compression of a picture and one of them is this online one with a friendly panda:

If you don’t want to make your picture smaller but you do want to make it lighter,
you can use tinyjpg.com for  JPEG/JPG
and tinypng.com for PNG

With some pictures the improvement will be bigger than with other but I nearly always use this service.

More Color Tools

It just never ends, the use of color continues to give trouble, both in the area of
Color schemes: Copaso
and in the area of  accessibility: Contrast-A