If you're not an advanced Web designer, and you don't want to pay a company to create a Web site for you, there are services across the Web that can help you create the site you want. All of the tools listed below are designed specifically for beginners. If that's you, give them a whirl.
Get your design on
Color Wizard: Having trouble finding the right color for a portion of your site? Color Wizard will help you determine which color works with your current color scheme.
When you get to Color Wizard's site, just input the color you want to match. From there, the service will spit out several colors that match well with your base color. If you're unhappy with all the colors on your site, you can also use the site's sliders to create a color you desire. It then gives you a color tag that you can place in your site's HTML. It's a simple, neat tool that I use quite often.
Color Wizard helps you match colors or create your own.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)CSS Typeset: If you're looking to quickly edit portions of CSS from your site, CSS Typeset is one of my favorite tools to do just that.
The premise of CSS Typeset is simple: take some CSS from your site, modify it with the drop-down lists featured at the bottom of the page, and CSS Typeset generates the CSS code you can paste back into your site. You can change the font type, its color, alignment, and more. If you need a little help with CSS, CSS Typeset is the service for you.
CSS Typeset will help you change your site up.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
Yahoo Smush It finds Web site images that can be put on a diet.
(Credit: CNET News)Yahoo, which has considerable expertise in maximizing Web site performance, has long offered advice on how to speed up sites up by minimizing photo size. Now it's released a tool to help Web programmers automate the process.
The Web-based tool, called Smush It, can perform multiple operations to shrink graphics file sizes without impairing visual appeal, Chris Heilmann of the Yahoo Developer Network said in a blog post after tool creators Nicole Sullivan and Stoyan Stefanov announced the tool at this week's Ajax Experience conference.
Among the things Smush It can do: convert GIF images to the PNG format; reduce the range of colors used in PNG files; strip out textual metadata from JPEG images.
Web developers can upload images to the site, send it a Web site address, or install a Firefox extension that submits a particular Web site with the click of a button. The tool presents users with a downloadable package of the smaller images that can be substituted.
Perhaps Yahoo should try its own medicine. I ran the tool on the Smush It announcement page and found that Yahoo could be trimmed away 23.6 percent of its graphics heft, saving 20KB of data. The Yahoo Developer Network page could be pared down 9.2 percent, saving 19.5KB.
Adobe's Kuler (coverage) is neat for finding color schemes that are aesthetically pleasing, but what about when you want to figure out what colored text will look like on a colored background? You can either spend time trying each combination in something like Dreamweaver, or by using this handy tool, which lets you select a background then the secondary color (for something like text) by just hovering over each color hash with your mouse.
Even if you're not a cutting edge Web designer it's pretty fun. Plus, once you've found your colors you can match them up with Flickr photos using Kuler's latest release.
(Found on Delicious)
Swatches may have lost their cool in the '80s, but these color samples are timeless for Web designers. This tool lets you figure out what's hot and cool by just mousing over the colors.
(Credit: CNET Networks)These are some of our favorite new designs, and redesigns from 2007. We don't often blog about outstanding design as much function at Webware, but it's a very important aspect of how we interact with Webware, and what people see when they first come to a site. All of these sites were either new in 2007, or received major redesigns.
Twitter, which has really taken off this year, took a page from some popular blogging services like Wordpress and Blogger to let users tweak and style the way their user pages look. Beyond that, the service has a lot of character and a simple design that's easy to use.
Apple .Mac photo galleries
Apple's .Mac service got a considerable upgrade earlier this year, and even non-members can enjoy the new photo galleries. These things are gorgeous, and can be tweaked for both color and presentation by whoever is looking at them.
Continue reading to see the rest... ... Read more
The clip above is a demonstration of the newly announced Aviary, a suite of Web tools for tackling "creation on the fly" (the product's motto and URL). You can think of it as having a similar goal for the creative crowd to what Zoho aims to do for organizational productivity: create a diverse set of light but still functional Web-based applications that enable portability and collaboration.
When the suite is final, it will optimally include more than a dozen applications, each named after a different kind of bird. Each one will handle a different niche of multimedia editing, from typography to audio editing to monetizing the content you create. (Think CafePress.com on steroids). They'll all be compatible so that you can use multiple applications on the same Aviary project, and you'll be able to collaborate with other Aviary users, Google Apps-style.
I know what you're thinking: wow, that's ambitious.
And it is. I saw an in-person demo of the first Aviary application to exit the gates, image editor Phoenix, and I was very impressed by the functionality and speed of the program. But you really can't deny that this is a tough market to enter, as video remix tools and Web-based versions of big-name applications pop up left and right.
The catch is that the folks who make up the team behind Aviary have a pretty unique kind of experience under their belts: they're the same people who run Worth1000, the photoshopping community that stresses artistic expertise over comic value. (No Microsoft Paint here.) That means that while developing Aviary, they've had access to years of direct experience with the Web's creative community. They also now have a loyal pack of early adopters for their new products.
Aviary's success may indeed depend on having those skilled beta testers on board to help shape the new suite into a robust set of applications and spread buzz about it across the rest of the Web.
The beta test of Aviary's first two applications, Phoenix and color swatch tool Toucan, is invite-only, but you can put your name in the hat here. The next Aviary application to be rolled out will be vector editor Raven, with the rest to follow over the next few months.
Kuler is a free tool from Adobe Labs that lets users design and share color schemes for use in Web sites or other projects. If you've ever designed a Web site or PowerPoint presentation before, you know that choosing a color scheme is often trial and error. Kuler lets you tune up to five different colors at once and makes the process surprisingly easy, allowing users to simply adjust selectors over a large color wheel. Users can then go deeper, adjusting the finer details of a color, and Kuler makes small adjustments to make sure the other colors will be compatible.
For nondesigners, Kuler is still fun to play around with. If you end up creating any color sets you want to use, you can save and export them to use with any of Adobe's Creative Suite 2 applications. For home-improvement enthusiasts, Kuler provides extensive color information like CMYK and RGB values, which your local paint store might be able to match.
Kuler runs right in your browser. Try it here.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
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