Webcreme.com   WEBSITE

Coming up with fresh designs may be one of the most challenging aspects of being a good web designer. Web Creme helps keep ideas fresh by providing an archive of the web's best designed sites to serve as inspiration for other designers. I like to send my clients here to get their creative web juices before we sit down and design their site. They also allow you to refine the list by colors which is good for getting ideas if you already have brand colors to work with. It's an amazing site.

DynamicDrive.com   WEBSITE

If it can be done using dynamic HTML including Javascript, AJAX and the like, you will find a script for it here. All for free! I like to come here for non-flash based navigation solutions. They also started up CSS Drive but I haven't had time to check that out yet. Since the vast majority of their scripts deal with Ajax and CSS, it makes sense they'd branch into that field.

Submit Corner's META Tag Generator   WEBAPP

Meta tags are a requirement these days if you want to have any sort of SEO game so you might as well have a way of doing them fast. That's where these guys come in. They provide a step-by-step web application that kicks you out all of the tags lined up and filled properly. When I generate my tags, I leave the description blank or type "desc." as it's important that each page has a unique description tag and fill in only about 6-8 of the main keywords as I like to add some page relevent keywords to each page's keyword bank. Generate, Copy and Paste into each page's header. Go back and add the description and the page-relevent keywords and you're golden!

Flashden.net   WEBSITE

So many people are astounded as to how we make some of the things we do in the amount of time they give us. This is our little secret. It has hundreds of stock Flash files for purchase that you can use with only a little customization. The authors aren't required to but more times than not provide wonderful and prompt support for the Flash files they write. Whenever we need to add that special something to a web site, this is the source we turn to first.

TweakPNG v1.2.1   APPLICATION

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TweakPNG is a low-level PNG image editing utility. It basically lets you tweak the backside properties of a PNG image. We use this to remove the gAMA property from our PNG files as they appear slightly discolored in older browsers. It is extremely useful for web designers who use transparency in their design aesthetics. About 95% of the image files we use are in the .PNG image format. With out this utility, we wouldn't be able to make our web sites as beautiful as they are.

This is a PHP-based script that's being used on this site as we speak. The "portfolio at a glance" section uses this to reload a new site from my web design portfolio every time the page loads. This seems like a simple enough script but surprisingly this type of script exists in two forms from what we can find and this is the only one that is PHP-based. It works beautifully and was very easy to implement.

Forms are ubiquitous now and an easy, spam free, secure method of retrieving form data has been hard to come by but Tectite.com's Form Mail php script is a godsend. They use clever php coding to leave spambots stumped when they try to attack the form resulting in no erroneous data submissions or having email addresses end up on spam lists. Their site is really easy to use and the script even comes with a configuration wizard that sets up all the retrieval variables ahead of time so implementation is quick and easy.