Useful Sites

Every so often I run across a page or site that’s really useful. Many I simply bookmark. But some I consider to be so useful that they warrant being listed here. This list will be added to regularly. And please feel free to suggest sites you find particularly useful as well through the comments.

Without further ado…

• TinyJPG – Compresses your jpg files to make them load faster.
• TinyPNG – Same functionality as TinyJPG, but for your PNG images. I’ve lowered the load time for entire websites by over 60% by combining the functionality of these 2 sites before launch.
• Optimize SVGs – Heck, as long as we’re optimizing images, might as well include those SVGs too! I know I’m starting to use them more and more myself.
• UnMinify – Occasionally I download a snippet of code that’s minified and I can’t locate the unminified version. This sweet little utility makes that minified code readable again.
• Postable – Sometimes you need to post some code to your page, but those pesky symbols end up breaking everything because WordPress content areas think they’re actually. Well, just paste that code here into Postable, click “make it friendly” and voila! All set.
• Clean Special Characters – I’ve run into instances where I’ve been copying text a client sent in a program like Photoshop into an html document, and it turns out there are some weird characters that happen. Sometimes it’s a hard space, or a curly quote, or whatever. But they can cause some real issues. Just run our text through this little gem before copying it into your code and you should be good to go!
• Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator – Gradients are fun. Gradients are easy thanks this generator.
• Subtle Patterns – When you’re looking for a ton of nice, easy-to-use background textures, this is the place to go.
• Bootstrap 3 Carousel Collection – Building a site using the Bootstrap framework? Chances are you’re going to need a slider somewhere along the way. This is a mighty-fine collection of them, although you’ll need to do some special coding to get them to work in WordPress (one of these days I’ll provide a few already setup for you).
• Bootstrap CSS – Speaking of Bootstrap, right here’s a good overview of most of the many features available to you in the Bootstrap framework. Everything from column offsets to forms and everything in between.
• RGB.to – I don’t own an expensive Pantone book. But if you need to get Pantone values from color values (hex, rgb, cmyk, etc.), here’s a handy dandy little site.
• GoQR.me – Sometimes a QR code is needed. This nifty site lets you create them for free. Works quite nicely!
• Microdata Generator – Google, Bing, and Yahoo! use a standard set of schema for data markup on web pages. This generator will help you get the proper markup for the different types of data.
• Get-Youtube-Thumbnail – There are instances where you need to grab a quick thumbnail of a YouTube video (for a gallery, etc.). Instead of doing a laborious screenshot, etc., just plug the video URL in here and it pulls it for you immediately! Easy!
• MobileTest – Although not a comprehensive emulator, it does have some of the major brands and sizes to test on, which can be useful when you have limited types of devices to directly test on.
• Some free stock photo websites – VisualHunt, AllTheFreeStock, and Unsplash.
• SEO basics – MOZ, Google Webmaster Guidelines, CTR.
• Create content – TextBroker, Upwork
• Proposals – BidSketch, Qwilr.
• CSS Inspiration – CSS Zen Garden. This is a long-standing website that provides a lot of really cool inspiration showing how powerful CSS really is. Enjoy.
• CSS arrow boxes

Note: This list will continually be updated. Won’t you tell me about some of the most useful sites you have in your bookmarks too?