I’ve had my website in some form for about three years now; I created my original site using Weebly as my knowledge of HTML was (and still is) fairly limited, and I was more interested in quick functionality than building everything from scratch.
As I’ve gone along, I’ve found loads of places with useful information or gizmos for amateur website designers and developers, so thought I’d share a few in this post. These are just the ones I use and find helpful – there are plenty of others out there! I’m going to keep this list open and continue to add to it as I find (or remember) more useful stuff.
- Bitly ~ Use to shorten long or messy URLs; particularly for sharing links on Twitter.
- Social Media Design Blueprint (Hypebot) ~ Great chart/guide for image sizes on all social media.
- Color Code Converter (RapidTables) ~ Converts colour formats; I frequently use the RGB to HEX converter.
- Paletton ~ Free and easy colour scheme creator; just pick a base colour and scheme makeup.
- Twuffer ~ Simple Twitter buffer, allows you to schedule Tweets – previously blogged about here).
- Google Analytics ~ Very useful for tracking visits and collecting useful information for site development.
- W3Schools ~ Good HTML tutorials and copyable examples!
I’ve also found a lot of answers to my many, many questions by simply Googling and then using trial and error. If you’re thinking of setting up a site this academic year, do it! I’ve had a lot of fun managing and working on mine, and still have lots planned.