CSS3 Button Maker

The CSS3 Button Maker gives you a number of sliders and color pickers to style your own CSS3 button. Then you can grab the code to use in your own project.

CSS3 Generator

Select from a list of CSS3 properties, fill in a few parameters to fit your needs, and it spits out the generated code along with a live preview.

CSS3 Please!

CSS3 Please! is a CSS3 rule generator that acts as a sort of playground. It allows you make various CSS3 tweaks and see a live preview. Then you can copy and paste into your own file.

CSS3 Gradient Generator

The CSS3 Gradient Generator was created as a showcase of the power of CSS based gradients as well as a tool for developers and designers to generate a gradient in CSS.

CSS3 Transforms

CSS3 Transforms gives you a set of sliders to experiment with various transforms such as position, rotation, skew and more. It also generates the corresponding code on the fly.

CSS3 Selectors Test

CSS3 Selectors Test automatically runs a large number of small tests which determines if your browser is compatible with a large number of CSS selectors. If it is not compatible with a particular selector it is marked as such. You can click on each CSS selector to see the results, including a small example and explanation for each of tests.

Picking any old shopping cart is easy, but finding the right one can be a herculean task. It’s not about finding the best; it’s about finding the one that’s best for you.

Magento

Magento is a free open source shopping cart with an impressive depth of features. For those looking for an enterprise grade ecommerce platform, it can be a serious option. It comes with multi-store as standard, flexible pricing functionality and a hierarchical administration and permissions system to support multiple users. With Magento Connect, it’s possible to install a host of quality modules to add additional functionality.

Magento’s additional functionality comes with a price: reduced usability. If you’re looking for the simplest shopping cart, and don’t need all the bells and whistles, you may find yourself feeling better satisfied with another option. Magento also requires more sophisticated programming skills than some competing carts. For smaller operations, the hosting requirements can be quite cumbersome.

Oscommerce

The software is free and open source, existing since March 2000. In August 2008, it powered over 14,000 online shops. In June 2009, that number is closer to 12,000. While Oscommerce’s popularity may be in decline, that’s not to say it might not be the right solution for you.

Oscommerce is often criticised for having too complex code. This can make changes difficult and laborious. However, it has a strong community that provides free support and its extensive range of modules can help you to achieve an optimum solution.

Zen Cart

Zen Cart and Oscommerce share a lineage. Using Oscommerce’s code, Zen Cart became a standalone project. And, similar to its cousin, Zen Cart is free and open source. While Zen Cart and Oscommerce have many of the same advantages and disadvantages, Zen Cart has demonstrated better competence and direction.

PayPal Shopping Cart

While PayPal’s Shopping Cart is free, it comes with two main catches. Firstly, you have to process payments with PayPal (which is rarely the cheapest option.) Secondly, PayPal tries to encourage each of your customers to sign up for a PayPal account and could damage your conversion rate in the process.

If you want to have a PayPal payment option, you do not have to use PayPal’s shopping cart. Most leading shopping cart options come with a PayPal payment option, which is testament to its ubiquity.

PayPal’s cart is lacking in features and sophistication. Its true benefit comes in its ease of set up. All you need to do is copy and paste code which directs visitors off your website onto PayPal’s.

Google Checkout

Google Checkout is similar to PayPal in its simplicity and ease of set up. Code can simply be copied and pasted into your website, or you can integrate Google Checkout as a payment option into another cart.

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is a free and open source shopping cart that is aimed primarily at small and medium sized businesses. While it was started in France, the project is fully supported in English as well. A key feature of PrestaShop is PrestaStore, a website selling themes and modules for website customization.

PrestaShop is lightweight and has clean code, giving it a key advantage over some of its competitors. The software also comes with a high degree of flexibility around pricing and back office administration requirements.

Despite that, PrestaShop is still seriously lacking in some areas. Firstly, there is a lack of templates and modules available compared to some of their competitors. And, secondly, support could improve too. With time and growth, both of these issues could improve.

Shopify

Shopify is a hosted solution that is simple to set up. For those who do not want to manage their own hosting and security, Shopify will take care of that on your behalf. The cart comes with a good range of templates and designs can easily be customized. The shopping cart software has a strong feature set; you can also access modules and applications developed by others.

With shopify, you will always be tied to the company and their platform. Another disadvantage of Shopify relates to their pricing policy. Prices range from $24-$699 per month with a transaction fee of 0%-2%.

About the Author

Jeff Foster is a co-founder of WebBizIdeas, a web design company specializing in social network development and ecommerce web design.

Creating a mobile version of WDL has been on my to-do list for a while now, but yet there is still no mobile version of this site. Sensing that I’ve been putting it off for far too long, I’ve started to do research on the best mobile solution for Web Design Ledger. I’ve found that there are a number of solutions out there that make it easy to go mobile with your website, but here are eleven of the best.

WPtouch

WPtouch is a mobile theme for your WordPress website. Modeled after Apple’s app store design specs, it loads lightning fast and shows your content beautifully, without interfering with your regular site theme. WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, or BlackBerry Storm touch mobile device.

MoFuse

MoFuse is currently being used by over 23,000 blogs for their mobile versions. Some notable “big-name” sites are Mashable and Read Write Web. MoFuse gives you tools to promote your content, build and measure your audience, and even make money.

Mippin Mobilizer

Mippin Mobilizer helps you get your site mobilized in just a few quick steps, and give you full control over the branding and logo. It also give you the ability to monetize your mobile site through advertising.

Mobify

Mobify gives you full control over the layout of your mobile site with CSS, and it supports over 5000 mobile devices. It also gives you tools to manage mobile advertising and analytics.

Wirenode

Wirenode currently hosts nearly 40,000 mobile webpages, and include in those are some popular brands like Reebok and Ford. With Wirenode it takes about 5 minutes to get a mobile version of your site up and running, and it gives you features like mobile widgets, RSS mobilization, and mobile polls and forms.

WPtap

WPtap delivers mobile themes/plugins that can instantly convert your WordPress site into web-application experience when viewed from iPhone, iPod Touch, touch-based Blackberry, and Android smartphones. WPtap offers comprehensive mobile theme solutions for your WordPress website. It comes complete with all the standard WordPress blog features: search, login, categories, tags, archives, photos & more. WPtap also offers many customization features through a user-friendly WordPress admin panel.

mobiSiteGalore

mobiSiteGalore is a mobile website builder that allows you to easily build, publish & share a full-fledged mobile website that is guaranteed to work fine on any mobile phone. Design templates allow you to completely customize the colors, fonts and layout on the page to create a unique looking mobile version of your website.

WordPress Mobile Pack

The WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit to help mobilize your WordPress site and blog. It includes a mobile switcher to select themes based on the type of user that is visiting the site, a selection of mobile themes, extra widgets, device adaptation and a mobile administration panel to allow users to edit the site or write new posts when out and about.

Zinadoo

Zinadoo is a web solution that allows you to create a mobile version of your website in just a few minutes. You can also optimize your site for Google Mobile with keywords and tags, and make use of their special mobile widgets.

Winksite

Winksite was the first standards-compliant mobile Website builder that included RSS-driven content deployment and mobile-tuned community features such as forum, chat, and polls. It also allows you to monetize your mobile site with advertising from leading advertising networks. Your revenue share is 100%. Winksite does not take a share of the revenue that your mobile site generates.

MobilePress

MobilePress is a free WordPress plugin which turns your WordPress blog into a mobile friendly blog when viewed on a cell phone. MobilePress also allows you to create custom mobile themes for different handheld devices and mobile browsers such as the iPhone, Opera Mini and Windows Mobile.

Color Expert

Color Expert contains powerful tools to help artists and designers identify, translate, capture and showcase color. Look down. See the color of that Pomegranate in your cart? Go get it. It’d be perfect for the project you’ve been working on. Whip out Color Expert and it tells you that shade is PANTONE® solid coated PANTONE 220 C. The interactive color wheel then finds the perfect color schemes and palettes to match. Now, email that color scheme to your friends or clients. But, you might not want to tell them you’re still in the check-out line.

FontShuffle

FontShuffle is the fastest mobile source of typographic inspiration. 650+ font families are sorted by visual similarity. Without any previous knowledge about type design, you can quickly discover 6 typefaces of similar style in just two taps by navigating the simple category menu. Choose the list view to examine up to 24 similar typefaces.

iMy

iMy is a full MySQL client for the iPhone. It features the ability to generate complex queries without ever using the keyboard. The interface of iMy is very close to MobileCan.

Brushes

Brushes is a painting application designed from scratch for the iPhone and iPod touch. Featuring an advanced color picker, several realistic brushes, multiple layers, extreme zooming, and a simple yet deep interface, it is a powerful tool for creating original artwork on your mobile device.

iBlueSky

iBlueSky is a brainstorming and mind-mapping solution. Collect and organise ideas you have at odd moments, then email the complete project in PDF and PNG formats to any contact. You can even print a hard copy of your work from the PDF file.

Jobs

Jobs has just the right features to make it a powerful time tracker, but none of the fluff, so it is intuitive and lightning fast to use. Each job features an hourly rate, flagfall, associated client and total time spent on the job (broken up into sessions that are logged every time you pause or restart a job). To make things even quicker, your hourly rate and flagfall are automatically set to a default rate, but can be overridden on a job by job basis.

HEX RGB Colors Guide

This application gives you an easy reference to RGB and HEX color codes right on your iPhone or iPod touch. This app is designed for anyone who deals with HEX and RGB Color codes when it comes to designing offline and online media of multiple types.

WordPress

With WordPress for iPhone OS, you can moderate comments and create or edit posts and pages. All you need is a WordPress.com blog or a self-hosted blog running WordPress 2.9.2 or higher.

jQuery Cheat Sheet

Even seasoned jQuery developers need a quick refresher course in jQuery syntax and arguments from time to time. jQuery Cheat Sheet is designed to address that need. Use it as a quick reference for topics you’ve already learned but need a few reminders on, or if you’re still a beginner to jQuery, use it to better understand what jQuery is capable of.

FTP On The Go

Download files and use FTP On The Go’s built in text editor to fix text right on your iPhone. Find and Replace features make it a snap. Click the Save button to upload your changes back to the server and you’re done. You can even change file permissions (CHMOD) on the server to manage your website from anywhere.

There are extensions for just about everything, but in this post we’re focusing on helping you save time in your everyday tasks. Web workers have to do a lot of little things throughout the day that seem to add up and take up a lot of time. So here are 10 Time Saving Google Chrome Extensions that can hopefully help you streamline your daily work flow.

Session Manager

Based on what kind of task I’m working on, I normally keep a set of websites and web apps open at all times. Session Manager lets you save sessions of your opened tabs and windows, and to quickly re-open them whenever you like.

Google Mail Checker

I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time flipping over to check my GMail. Google Mail Checker displays the number of unread messages in your Google Mail inbox. You can also click the button to open your inbox.

DayHiker

DayHiker lets you check Google calendar from the toolbar. Check and schedule tasks. Manage content on the fly. Soft reminders, plus an alarm clock.

goo.gl URL Shortener

goo.gl url shortener is an extension which allows you to shorten the current website URL with the new Google URL Shortener service http://goo.gl/ Once compressed the url is automatically copied to clipboard and you can share it with Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Delicious, Digg, MySpace, Google Reader, Gmail or your default mail client.

Brizzly

Brizzly is a reader for Twitter and Facebook. It simplifies your browsing and updating experience, while adding a few nifty extras.

Pixler Grabber

Sharing screenshots can be time consuming. Pixler Grabber allows you to edit, save and share screen grabs all from the browser.

FastestChrome

FastestChrome helps you save time and enhance your productivity. Key features include:

• Endless Pages automatically loads the next page just before you reach the end so you don’t have to click “Next” or wait
• Look up definitions instantly by highlighting a word
• Better Google: shows you relevant results from real-time and shopping search engines such as OneRiot and Amazon
• Search more conveniently: select text then click on a search engine to search
• Automatically turns text URLs into links
• Adds related articles to Wikipedia

TooManyTabs

It never fails. Every morning, after I’ve been working for a couple of hours, my tabs are out of control. TooManyTabs helps you manage your tabs, improve your browsing, and maintain your sanity when you have many tabs open.

Web2PDFConverter

This extension lets youconvert any webpage to PDF including most SSL based sites. Key features include:

• Includes a direct link if the process is taking too long.
• Allows you to view the converted PDF using Google Docs.
• And of course you can download it to your computer.
• Easy Options section.

Auto Copy

Auto Copy streamlines the process of copying text. It automatically copies selected text to the clipboard and has options for copying as plain text; including the URL in the copied text; etc.

#grid

#grid is a little tool that inserts a layout grid in web pages, allows you to hold it in place, and toggle between displaying it in the foreground or background.

Gridmaker

Gridmaker is a handy tool for creating grid templates for use in Photoshop. There’s also a plugin.

960 Grid System

The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem.

YUI: CSS Grid Builder

CSS Grid Builder is another tool that lets you design your own grid by specifying body width and number of columns. This one even lets you enter content for the header and footer. Once you’re done you can easily copy the generated code.

1 KB CSS Grid

The 1 KB CSS Grid is a simple, lightweight approach that doesn’t require a PhD. When server-side options for templating and sub-templating are limited, the grid can be used as an alternative page templating engine. Its convenient row and column syntax provide all the necessary scaffolding.

netProtozo: Grid Generator

Grid Generator allows you to design your own grid by specifying the usual parameters like column width, gutter width, etc. You can then download grab the css or a png of the grid.

Blueprint

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.

Typogridphy

Typogridphy is a CSS framework constructed to allow web designers and front-end developers to quickly code typograhically pleasing grid layouts.

The Golden Grid

The Golden Grid is a web grid system. It ’s a product of the search for the perfect modern grid system. It ’s meant to be a CSS tool for grid based web sites.

YAML

“Yet Another Multicolumn Layout” (YAML) is an (X)HTML/CSS framework for creating modern and flexible floated layouts. The structure is extremely versatile in its programming and absolutely accessible for end users.

Grid Calculator

Grid Calculator allows you to choose the font size you are going to use, and then select the number of columns, column width, and gutter width based on that base font size. As you fiddle with the dimensions, the total width is dynamically updated, so you can check that you haven’t gone over that magic 1024px.

Gridr Buildrrr

Gridr Buildrrr is a useful tool to help you layout your own grids.

Fluid 960 Grid System

The Fluid 960 Grid System templates have been built upon the work of Nathan Smith and his 960 Grid System using effects from the MooTools JavaScript library. The idea for building these templates was inspired by Andy Clarke, author of Transcending CSS, who advocates a content-out approach to rapid interactive prototyping, crediting Jason Santa Maria with the grey box method.

There are several different routes that a designer can take for creating wireframes, and there are even applications designed specifically for this. For this article, we’ve rounded up 10 excellent tools for creating wireframes.

MockFlow

MockFlow allows you to design and collaborate (in real-time) user interface mockups for your software and websites. It comes with numerous built-in components & icons.

Axure

Axure enables application designers to create wireframes, flow diagrams, prototypes, and specifications for applications and web sites. It lets you use ready-made widgets including buttons, form fields, shapes, and dynamic elements that you can edit and format in a familiar environment. Or you can create your own custom widget libraries.

Balsamiq Mockups

Using Balsamiq Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it’s digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner. With 75 pre-built controls to choose from, you can design anything from a super-simple dialog box to a full-fledged application, from a simple website to a Rich Internet Application.

Pencil Project

The Pencil Project is a free addon for Firefox. Some key features include: built-in stencils, multi-page document support, and multiple export options.

HotGloo

HotGloo is completely web based with lots of features that let’s you drag and drop and scale items easily. It also has support for realtime collaboration.

Mockingbird

Mockingbird is another web app with a focus on collaboration. It allows you to link multiple mockups together and preview them interactively to get a feel for the flow of your application.

Cacoo

Cacoo is an online drawing tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams such as site maps, wire frames, UML and network charts.

ProtoShare

ProtoShare is an easy-to-use, Web-based prototyping tool with a focus on collaboration. Team members can review work and provide timely feedback, ideas, and suggestions on clickable wireframes or creative content.

iPlotz

iPlotz allows you to rapidly create clickable, navigable mockups and wireframes for prototyping websites and software applications.

OmniGraffle

OmniGraffle is an app for Mac OS that gives you plenty of tools to create amazing wireframes and mockups, but it’s also great for creating all kinds of charts and diagrams as well.

JAWStats

If you like Awstats, you will certainly appreciate JAWStats as well. JAWStats runs in conjunction with Awstats and produces more graphics than Awstats.

goingup!

Goingup! is one more tool website stats freaks will love because it offers many kinds of statistical data, which is represented in visually attractive ways. A substantial part of the functionality of goingup! is SEO-related, so if you don’t use any other SEO-tools, this tool will do this job as well.

Clicky

Clicky also made the list of useful website analysis tools not only because it has tons of great features but also because it is one of the few website analysis tools you can use from your iPhone.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is rightfully considered one of the best because it is really a comprehensive tool, which gives you tons of useful data about your site.

W3Counter

W3Counter is a free, hosted website analytics solution for answering the key questions about your website: who’s your audience, how they find your site, and what interests them.

Woopra

Woopra is another excellent website analysis package. It has many, many features and there are webmasters, who name Woopra, not Google Analytics, the most comprehensive website analysis tool.

W3Perl

W3Perl can use server’s logfiles and/or be used as a page tagging tool. The perl scripts analyze logfiles and produce HTML/PDF reports. It can be run from the command line or from the web interface.

Piwik

Piwik has all the features you can expect from analysis application. Its main advantage is that its features come in the form of plugins, which means you can choose which features to get and which to skip.

TraceWatch

TraceWatch lets you keep track of the visitors to your website in real time with detailed statistics and deep analysis using an innovative user interface for FREE and helps you make your website more effective. It can be easily installed on any website supporting PHP and MySQL. You only need to upload some files to your server.

Snoop

Unlike almost all the other tools on the list, which are either used on the server of their developer, or have to be installed on your web host, Snoop is a desktop application. Snoop has a Windows and Mac version and after you install it, it runs in your tray and you get notified if an important event on your site occurs.

Certainly there are other great and useful website analysis tools in addition to the ones we have listed. If you try them and see that they aren’t what you are looking for, rest assured – there are many more website analytics tools for you to try! You can always start with the website analysis tools in your web hosting account but sooner or later you will feel the need to find more tools and get more data in addition to what you are getting for free with your business hosting or your cheap website hosting.

About the Author

Vanessa Davis writes for WHS, which lists reviews of leading hosting companies. She is deeply involved in writing web development and webhosting articles covering almost all topics from best cheap hosting to business hosting.

In this article, we’ve rounded up 12 lesser known web browsers that you might want to try. Who knows – one of them might be a perfect fit for your browsing needs.

Maxthon

Maxthon has been around for a while. In 2003 it was known as MyIE2. Over the years it’s become a powerful tabbed browser built for all users. Besides basic browsing functionality, Maxthon Browser provides a rich set of features to improve your surfing experience. Some key features include: mouse gestures, anti-freeze, and magic fill which allows your to fill out forms with a single click.

Operating System: Windows

Arora

Arora is a lightweight cross-platform web browser. Arora uses the QtWebKit port of the fully standards-compliant WebKit layout engine. It features fast rendering, powerful JavaScript engine and supports Netscape plugins.

Operating System: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux

Amaya

Amaya is not only a web browser, but it’s also a web editor. Browsing features are seamlessly integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment. This follows the original vision of the Web as a space for collaboration and not just a one-way publishing medium. Amaya is an open source software project hosted by W3C.

Operating System: Windows, Mac OS X, Unix platforms

Flock

Flock is a browser with a focus on social media. It has features built in for just about every social media site you can think of. This browser is built on Mozilla, so as expected, there are also extensions available to expand it’s functionality even more.

Operating System: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux

Stainless

Stainless has features you won’t find in Chrome or in any other browser. One example is parallel sessions, which allow you to log into a site using different credentials in separate tabs at the same time.

Operating System: Mac OS X

Cruz

Cruz is a new social browser for Mac OS X with Twitter built-in. With Cruz you can view your Twitter Timeline and “@” Mentions in a split pane while browsing other sites. Cruz also allows you to open links from your Twitter Timeline in new tabs or browse multiple pages simultaneously in split views. Cruz has an open plug-in API for extending browser functionality.

Operating System: Mac OS X

Sunrise

Sunrise is an open-source web browser based on WebKit. It’s designed to be easy to use by making frequently used features easily accessible. The main window of Sunrise has the browser, bookmarks, downloads, source codes and find bars.

Operating System: Mac OS X

SeaMonkey

SeaMonkey aims to be an all-in-one internet application suite. So not only is it a web browser, but it also includes an email & newsgroup client with an included web feed reader, HTML editor, IRC chat and web development tools.

Operating System: Mac OS X, Windows, Linux

Lunascape

Lunascape is the world’s first and only triple engine browser. So it’s three web browsing engines rolled into one: IE (Trident)＋Firefox (Gecko)＋Chrome・Safari (Webkit). It allows you to choose the right engine at the right time, realizing a dramatic decrease in web-browser compatibility issues, long loading times, and messed up websites display. Lunascape is also compatible with the expanding array of Firefox add-ons in addition to the already supported Internet Explorer add-ons.

Operating System: Windows

SlimBrowser

SlimBrowser is a fast and secure tabbed web browser software fully loaded with powerful features. It saves you the burden of completing web forms with intelligent form filler.

Operating System: Windows

Midori

Midori is a lightweight web browser built on WebKit. Some key features include: user scripts, styles support, and a customizable interface.

Operating System: Linux, Windows

Camino

Camino is an open source web browser developed with a focus on providing the best possible experience for Mac OS X users. Some key features include: annoyance blocking, malware protection, and tab overview, which allows you to all of your open tabs at a glance.

Operating System: Mac OS X

Here are 13 Google Chrome extensions that you should find very useful.

Color Picker

Color Oicker lets you quickly get the Hex and RGB values of any color! Also adjust Hue, Saturation, and Balance.

Firebug Lite

Firebug Lite is a tool for web developers, that allows you to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Domain Availability Checker

This extension checks the availability of a domain name. What’s the point of going to another page when you can check it from your toolbar.

Aviary Screen Capture

Aviary Screen Capture allows you to ake a screenshot of any webpage and edit it directly in your browser with Aviary.com applications. Plus it has convenient access to the Aviary website and tools.

Lorem Ipsum Generator

Lorem Ipsum Generator gives you an easy and convenient way to generate dummy text for your design mock-ups.

IE Tab

Use Internet Explorer to display web pages in a Chrome tab. Some sites can only be displayed using IE, and with this extension you can now see those sites without leaving Chrome. Great for web developers who want to test the IE rendering engine, users who use sites with ActiveX controls, and users who want to use the explorer view for local files (i.e. file:// URLs).

MeasureIt!

MeasureIt! gives you the ability to draw out a ruler that will help you get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.

PlainClothes

This extension styles — or rather “unstyles” — the web. Just imagine: text is black, backgrounds are white, unread links are blue, visited links are purple, all links are underlined. Or any other colors you like. And all text is rendered in your default fonts (as defined in “Options” > “Under the Hood” > “Change font and language settings”). Everywhere. Automatically.

Eye Dropper

Eye Dropper and Color Picker extension which allows you to pick color from any webpage or from advanced color picker.

Speed Tracer

Speed Tracer is a tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications. It visualizes metrics that are taken from low level instrumentation points inside of the browser and analyzes them as your application runs. Speed Tracer is available as a Chrome extension and works on all platforms where extensions are currently supported (Windows and Linux).

Pendule

Pendule extends the already built-in developer tools of Chrome.

Resolution Test

Resolution Test changes the size of the browser window for developers to preview their websites in different screen resolutions. It includes a list of commonly used resolutions as well as a custom option for you to input your own.

Snippy

Snippy allows you to grab snippets of web pages and save them for future use. It captures rich contents and preserves formatting, so you can capture paragraphs, images, links and more.