Web Site Support - Development Tools

145 Resources on Online Tools, Generators, Checkers - Your one-stop source of many, many useful, popular, free tools for Webmasters.

Browser Check - Ever wonder if people who view your Web site with different browsers are seeing what you want them to see? Go to ZDNet's Browser Check site and enter the URL of your Web site. It will automatically check your site and show you which parts of your site could cause trouble for users of Internet Explorer versions 2, 3, and 4, and Netscape versions 2, 3, or 4.

CSS Code Assember - An online tool that uses drop-down menus to help you quickly create Cascading Style Sheets for your Web site. Can also be downloaded to run on your PC.

HTML Converter - Have you ever created a document in Microsoft Word, then clicked on "Save As HTML", and discovered that the HTML document's formatting was all messed up? I sure have. Here's a site where you submit any Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Text, Rich Text, or Adobe PDF document, and it instantly converts your document to HTML and emails it back to you. The documents it creates are supposed to look a lot more like your original documents than those created by the "Save As HTML" option in Microsoft's programs.

LINK CHECKER - HitBox Doctor is a free service that will check your Web pages (one at a time) for your choice of broken hyperlinks and image links, HTML syntax errors, spelling errors, loading time, and Meta tags. The service that finds broken links is limited to the first 50 links on each page. For software that you install on your PC to check for broken links on all of your pages at the same time, see LINK CHECKER on my Software page.

Modifying Dreamweaver 4 To Produce Valid XHTML - AListApart.com has an excellent article that describes how to manually edit several of Dreamweaver 4's configuration files so that it will produce valid XHTML instead of HTML code. The article includes a link to a downloadable copy of all the modified files, in case you'd rather replace your files instead of manually modifying them. It also includes a link to a Dreamweaver extension that you can download and install into Dreamweaver to automatically convert your existing Web pages from HTML to valid XHTML. Both the downloadable configuration files and the downloadable converter extension worked great when I used them, saving me from having to manually change thousands of HTML tags in this Web site to their XHTML equivalents.

PDF TOOLS - Send an email with an attached PDF file to pdf2html@adobe.com, and Adobe will email back an HTML version of that PDF file. Send an email with an attached PDF file to pdf2txt@adobe.com, and Adobe will email back a plain text version of that PDF file.

SEARCH ENGINE TOOLS - Submit Express - A free service that quickly and automatically submits your Web sites keywords to 40 of the major search engines, including Excite, InfoSeek, AltaVista, AOL Netfind, HotBot, LookSmart and Lycos. Want even more? Then download a free trial version of AddWeb software, to submit a limited number of your Web site's keywords to up to 500,000+ Search Engines, Directories and link resources. If you like it, you can buy one of several different versions, depending on how much you want it to do for you. (Thanks, Andy.) LinkPopularity - A free service that quickly and automatically checks multiple search engines and shows you how many other Web sites have hyperlinks to your Web site. You can even sign up to automatically receive an email message with that information for free each month. Search Engine Saturation Check - According to this Web site, "Your Search Engine Saturation simply refers to the number of pages a given search engine has in its index for your website domain. Not all search engines report this information but enough of them do to create some meaningful benchmarks for your search engine marketing campaigns."