Links
Here are some web development links that I find useful.
Advertising On Your Website
Google Adsense – The grandaddy of website advertising. Place ads on your site using this.
Komoona – Interesting concept that allows visitors to post ads on your site.
CSS
CSS-Tricks – Pretty self explanatory. Cool stuff here!
Design Tools
Batch Watermark Images – Add a watermark to your images with this online tool.
ColorZilla – Cool tools including color picker plugin for Firefox and gradient generator.
ConvertICO – Converts .png files to .ico files to make favicons that work with IE.
Font Squirrel – Tons of free fonts!
GIMP – Free image editing tool for those of us who can’t afford Photoshop.
Inkscape – Free drawing tool for those of us who can’t afford Illustrator.
kuler – Adobe’s online color tool. I use it all of the time.
Development Tools
Git – The de-facto standard in version control. You need it.
pingdom – Monitor your website load time using this tool.
Start Page Inspired by Windows 8 – Use this page as your browser’s default page; populate it with the links you use the most!
XAMPP – Apache server with MySQL for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Javascript/jQuery
(coming soon)
PHP
(coming soon)
Widgets, Plug-Ins, and Stuff Like That
500 Free Social Networking Icons – Every social network button you could possibly need for your website in one place
WordPress Plugins I Can’t Live Without
These are life-saving plug-ins that I use most of my WordPress sites. Alright, maybe “life-saving” is a slight exaggeration, but these can definitely cure some of your WordPress headaches.
Add to Head – Allows you to add arbitrary JavaScript or HTML code to the head section of every page. I use it to add to add the code to track which pages are generating Adsense income in Google Analytics, described in this article.
Adminimize – Get rid of confusing and unnecessary fields in your admin area for your clients.
Advanced Code Editor – Not that you should be editing source files from withing WordPress, but if you have to, ahem, view it, then this plug-in is great. It features color coding and line numbers.
Advanced Custom Fields – Customize the admin area for your clients using this plugin.
Duplicator – The best way to move or back up your WordPress site!
Global Content Blocks – Allows you to add HTML, PHP, or JavaScript code into your WordPress posts using shortcodes. Also useful to keep your code in a central place and avoid duplication.
Google Adsense and Analytics Remover – Will stop your visits from being counted in Google Analytics when you are logged into your site. It also greys out any Google ads on your site when you are logged in. Beware, this sometimes messes with the ad’s CSS styling (as far as centering is concerned) when you are logged in. Just remember to log out to do your final testing.
W3 Total Cache – Plugin that speeds up WordPress by a factor of ten by caching pages.
WordPress SEO – SEO plugin by the WordPress SEO guru affectionately known as “Yoast“. A cool feature is that it shows you exactly how your site listing will look when it shows up in Google search results. You can customize the text that people see in those results.
WP No Category Base – Removes ‘/Category’ from your category page URLs. I use this on every site I do.
WP Simple Adsense Insertion – Gives you a shortcode to easily insert Google Adsense ads. I prefer this to plugins that blindly insert ads automatically, even though that is convenient. Ads are too important to be done blindly. You should hand-insert them at the right places. This is an easy way to do that.
WordPress Themes
Cyber Chimps – High quality themes (including this site), both free and not free.
Elegant Themes – Not free, but definitely elegant WordPress themes.
New WordPress Themes – Good free themes.
Theme Forest – Lots of themes, starting at $1. These are some of the best WordPress themes that I have seen! Check out “Architec”, “Fashion 9″, “Wildhorn” and “Enfinity”.
Web2Feel – “Free WordPress themes that kick ass”.
Woo Themes – Not free, but worth checking out.