Archive for the ‘Free Tools’ Category

Sitemap generators

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

Every Once in a while a client and/or friend ask me to take a quick look at their site.  When I get around to it I head over to their site and look around.  But the first thing I want to do is look at a sitemap of their site to see how many pages they have. It is usually the case that they don’t have a sitemap on their site so instead of me clicking on each page and following links around which can get pretty cumbersome I use some freely available tools. This tool with a single click gives me the information I am looking for. Mainly the numbers of pages on their site and the url.   Here is one such tool that quickly lets  you see a list of all the pages of a website.

http://www.akamarketing.com/html-sitemap-maker/

Enjoy! :)

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Affordable website design

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

smallAt an Internet Marketing conference the other day the spokesman continually referred to certain websites as Jimmy’s websites. Let me explain. He said there is always a teenager in every town or neighborhood that can make you a website for cheap or for free.  And that pretty much is true.  If you are just making a website for personal or family reasons and you don’t want visitors aside from your own friends and/or family then Jimmy can make you a website that suits your needs. It will certainly be an affordable website. But if you want much more visitors then you have to consider other alternatives.  And since this post is about affordable website design I will show how to get the best website for your money.

If you want a personal website for free; by personal I mean a website where you can put personal information or family information and don’t care about traffic and don’t want Jimmy to do it for you and you don’t really care about the looks or design of it then you can create a free account at the many free website places out there.   Here are some websites that will allow you to have something up fast.   They will give you your down domain like www.mysite.blogger.com or www.mysite.wordpress.com.  And they both have tutorials to help you get started fast.  If you want more flexibility both of this sites will allow you to customize many things you will just need how to do things.   And both allow you to use your own domain name if you choose to buy one.

  1. https://www.blogger.com/start
  2. http://wordpress.com/

COST: Free !
TIME: 1-3 hours to get everything going !
Learning Curve: Easy to Medium

If you want an affordable website for your business but you don’t care about traffic.   Then you ca get a domain name from about $5.00 - $20.0 a year and get a hosting plan for about $5.00- $15.00 a month and you are good to get set. Then you get get a free template at places like http://www.freewebsitetemplates.com/ and start putting your information in there with an html editor like http://www.coffeecup.com/free-editor/.  Of course you will need your own content and images if you want to change the default themes ones.

COST: $65.00-$180.00!
TIME: 3-10 hours  !
Learning Curve: Medium to Hard

If you want an affordable website with traffic then you will need to do the step above but then you will need to learn SEO and invest some time and effort in marketing your site. If you have the time you can try some methods available out there but they are time consuming and take months to see results.

TIME: 3-10 hours  !
Learning Curve: Medium to Hard

To summarize.  There are plenty of affordable ways to make a website but that website doesn’t guarantee you any traffic no matter how beautiful it looks.  And doing things on your own can be time consuming.  So that is where we can come in.  Creative Webs was established with the understanding that business want affordable websites.  We have packages for every scenario.  And we take of everything so you don’t have to. If you just want a site up quickly we can have it up fast as long as you have the content ready.  We have plenty of  templates ready ot go to publish to your site fast.  View our services page to view our affordable website prices.  If you need a little more custom we have a graphic designer that can create whatever you desire. And if you want to generate traffic we have the partnered with an SEO expert team that will generate that traffic for your site.  Don’t hesitate contact us and let us give you a free quote.  Try us, you will see that we are the most affordable website design firm around.

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Chrome is not ready for main street

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

Like all geeky people out there, once Google’s Chrome browser came out. I downloaded and installed it. I read the cartoon that explained a little of how it worked under hood. Its pretty information and it was a good read. Unfortunately, well its a good browser but its not ready for prime time. Maybe in a few years it will be ready. It has a lot of catching up to do with Firefox.

The reasoning and logic, which you can read about in the cartoon, for creating a new browser makes sense but since they pretty much started from scratch they still have lots of features to add.  But I am sure that once they get lots of the kinks worked out, and add all those features that make Firefox so good, the Google browser will slowly gain a wide audience.  Specially since people do love google products like good docs, gmail, picasa, etc.

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Nostalgic for Opera’s Rewind Button!

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

The Opera browser is yet another alternative to Inernet Explorer and its really good. For older computer with less processing power and ram, Opera is great. The only reason I don’t use it all the time is because I have many extensions in Firefox that I need to use.

Either way Opera does have this great feature that I wish Firefox had and that is a a rewind button.

opera-rewind-button

The Left arrow is the regular back button, but the double left arrow is the rewind button and its great. Here is how it works.  The following is an exerp from the Opera website.

Specifically, what happens when you rewind is that you go back to one of these points in your history, whichever is latest:

*    The last page you visited on a server, if you have left the server
*    The first page you visited on a server

Suppose that you have a browsing history like the following:

1. www.opera.com
2. www.opera.com/about
3. www.opera.com/download
4. www.opera.com/mini
5. widgets.opera.com
6. widgets.opera.com/yetanthetclock42
7. widgets.opera.com/yetanthetclock43
8. widgets.opera.com/yetanthetclock44
9. mini.opera.com

Rewinding will then take you back through the URLs that are emphasized in the above list.

So why is this good? Because it saves you tons of clicks.   Say you go to google and  search for ‘computing tips’. You will get tons of sites. You click on first result and go to that website, call it example.com . The site is good and you visit 12 pages of its site. But you want to go back to google’s results to check out other sites.   With the  traditional back button you have to click back 12 times to get back to google, or with Firefox you can click drop down box and try and find google’s result page.   Those methods are fine , they are just too messy or waste time. With Opera’s rewind button you are back where you want to be with 2 clicks. The first click will take you back to the first page you visited on example.com then the next click your back to where you want to be. Google’s results page.  Then you can visit the next result.

I used Opera for bit at a time, but every time I use other browsers I find myself missing this feature. All browsers should definitely implement it. :)

What do you guys think? Should browsers implement it? If you have not tried it, download opera and use it for a week and see what happens. :)

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Posted in Browsers, Free Tools | 2 Comments »

Open Office Writer beats Microsoft Word 2007

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

So I am the occasional typist. I pop open Microsoft Word 2007 when I need to type something fast and need to correct it.  The grammar check and spell check is pretty darn good…. no complaints there. But today I needed a little something more involved. I was created a 3-4 page report, with nested list number list and bullet list.  I tried for about 30 minutes a simple example to get everything to align correctly. But I simply couldn’t.   Its probably due to the fact that I have not studied the new interface, but well to me it seems that it should be pretty intuitive.  The goal was something like this.

1.0 Main

1.1 submain

*

*

2.0

What a pain, just to get the simple thing. I would click multi-list button and i would be the first item. If i gave it heading 1, the number would dissapear. For the sub items I tried looking for heading 2. But no where to be find. I didn’t want the identation for subitems… no where to be found(probably cuz i don’t know where to look)… i wasted too much time.. I admit I was doing it in word because the different styles look good, but i now I just wanted it to work. I gave up.

I soon pop up. Openoffice writer.  Quickly I had a multi-list. I quickly realized that the headings(heading1,heading2, etc) correspond to items on multist. So all I had to do was type something and give it heading 1 or heading 2 and it would automatically know what number to put beside it. also I found the ‘bullets  and numbering’ button and wow. Everything is there.  Level by level. You click on level one, you can adjust the numbering scheme, the indentation, everything .wow. Click on level two and do the same. I wanted level 1 and level 2 to look exactly the same, I just changed heading 2 to look like heading 1. What a freeze. Took me 15 minutes to get the hang out it.. And now I have a 4 page document looking good… and i just tested the table of contents feature… and wow. Automatically created it. :)

So Word is good… but when you on the run and need to create somethign fast with multilist… somethign simpler like Open office write could save tons of head aches and hassle.

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Posted in Free Tools, Software, What is | 2 Comments »

The beauty of the Inernet

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

The beauty of the Internet lies in communities and free public programs.  Not communities of people( well those are good and have their purpose) but communities of knowledge.  Every topic out there pretty much now has a page. If the topic is of vast interest it might even have a forum.  If the forum is established and popular you can find information going back years and years.  I will give one example of a great community.  Recently I came across a trojan called Virtumonde on a computer. Damn thing would not come out. Norton could not remove it. Spyware search and destroy could not destroy. Jeezzzz!. What could remove it? Well that is where this communities of knowledge come in.  Look into the right forums type of your problem and you will get plenty of information to lead you in the directions.  I got plenty of information and hopefully eventually to a solution that works for me.

So this communities of people sharing information exist all over the world.  If they have been around for a while they will have plenty of users and information you can acess and read.  There is pretty much a forum from everything from congressional bills to the color blue.

So free programs. Yes. They exist. There are tons out there and some really great ones. They can possibly take a bit longer to learn then the main stream programs but hey if you have the time why not. And on ocassions this free programs work even better then commercial ones. Take my example. NOrton could not fix the  trojan Virtumonde but guess what a free program did. How about that?

So to conclude the post. Whatever you are looking for…. Sometimes it takes a while to reach the right site, but once you do you have reached a wealth of information that can keep you reading for as long as you want.:)

p.s. Google, Yahoo, and MSN don’t always have this great sites at the top of the searches; look past those few pages of search results.

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