Metafluence

My Favorite Tools

This week’s Advanced Operators topic asked for my Favorite Tools Round Up. I use tools to help me with web design and strategic decision making. I’ve broken up my list into three groups: web design, intelligence, and resources.

Here’s the break down of my favorites tools:

Web Design Tools

Paper and pencil

I start all of my designs by writing down the elements I need to arrange on the page. Then I start grouping them into logical sets. Finally, I sketch some wireframes and concept graphics. Love my black notebook and mechanical pencil.

Photoshop

Nothing secret here. While I might use Illustrator to create graphics, Photoshop is definitely my tool of choice for creating design mock-ups.

BBEdit

I prefer to hand code my XHTML and CSS, and BBEdit does a great job for me. Although, I’ve played with Coda, and it’s highly likely that I’ll be switching to it shortly.

Favicon Generator

I use this site to upload and convert a 16×16 file to a .ico for use as a bookmark icon. Favicon Generator is a good site for me because the name is easy to remember and it’s totally focused and simple.

iStock Photo

Don’t know if this is really a tool, but I certainly love it’s huge library of royalty-free art for $1.

Moo.fx

An amazing JavaScript library designers can use to add behavior to their flat sites. Easy to use.

MiniAJAX

A new addition to my arsenal, MiniAJAX is a collection of DHTML and AJAX scripts that go beyond Moo.fx, but they may not be as clean and lightweight. Still good lovin’.

Layered Photoshop form elements

This handy site has downloadable, layered .psd form elements that make it easy to include form design in your Photoshop mock-ups.

Lorem Ipsum generator

If you need to flow some placeholder copy into a design, this site will generate all of the Latin you need.

Icon Factory

This site has a huge collection of royalty-free icons that can be used as graphics for designs or to support a blog post. The icons scale as large as 128×128px, which is a good size for icons.

Fam Fam Fam

The most used library of royalty-free icons on the Internet. It’s hugely popular because the library is huge and icons are top quality.

Intelligence Tools

Google Analytics

Killer set of site analytics tools for free from Google.

NetNewsWire and my OPML

It’s the most popular Mac feed reader. I use it to stay on top of an information flow that would otherwise be impossible. I have a collection of sites that are part of my OPML, which I monitor to stay in the know.

Feedburner

I push all of my subscribers through Feedburner so I can get stats. Important to know stuff.

FeedRinse

I knew about this tool for awhile, but Marshall recently convinced me to start using it to filter feeds. Feed filtering really maximizes your effective feed consumption.

AideRSS

Another Kirkpatrick tip, AideRSS will sort your feed results based on the amount of buzz that surrounds the record on the rest of the web. It takes into account the number of comments, del.icio.us links, and more to determine the sort order.

Rep Tracking

Marshall strikes again by telling me about creating a spliced feed of persistent searches for my name to know when I’m being discussed elsewhere on the Internet.

PopUrls

This site has pulled in the feeds of the most popular information sources on the Internet into a single page. It makes it easy to stay on top of what’s popular by cross referencing them.

Developer Resources

SEO Tools

156 of the best SEO tools for you to use. It’s a good collection and they are ranked for usefulness.

Web Developers Handbook

A massive list of links to darn near everything you’d want to know about web development.

Highly useful web development resources that you’ll want to cntrl-p

My list of knowledge resources that I use to guide my own development and to educate clients.