Evan Kleiman
- 2001.08.01
Q. I'd like to start my own website for some personal things
- pictures, etc. - I want it to look cool, but I don't want to
spend a lot of money. What are some good free resources for web
masters?
A. There are many websites and services that offer free things
for webmasters, but since there are so many, no one ever knows
which are the best ones Today I will help you out pick the best
ones for your time and web space.
Best Free Text Generation/Graphics tool
My personal favorite for this stuff is the Webgfx Rendermachine,
by Webgfx. It has many super
features such as the try-o-mat, which is quite similar to
Microsoft's Wordart, but it has much more, such as dozens of
textures and patterns for your text object.
Another cool feature of this site is the nav-o-mat, which can
create custom navigation bars for your website with things such as
roll-overs and custom graphics. Also included with your free
subscription at Webgfx is the log-o-mat (to create your very own
website logos; similar to the try-o-mat) and the page-o-mat, which
of course, lets you create your own custom web pages with navbars,
graphics, etc.
Best Free Website Counters
There are many free counter services, and many of them will
tailor to your different needs, because some websites will need
different counters than others. But one of the best, and my
favorite, is Microsoft's own bCentral. bCentral is
more focused towards the more business and professional end of the
website spectrum, so it might not be for some of you, but it does
have such good, common features as a customizable counter and
emailable reports of your site's hit count progress.
Another good free website counter service is The Counter. It has such features
as customizable interfaces and counter reports, but is made more
for personal websites, not small business ones, etc.
Best Flash Site
My favorite site for Flash stuff is Extreme Flash. Even though I
don't use Flash on any of my websites, you can use it, as now it as
easier than ever, especially with this Extreme Flash.
Extreme Flash has many cool tutorials for people with any kind
of experience using Flash, from none to a computing professionals.
By using these tutorials you can be able to create the beginner's
flash site of your dreams.
Best Free Web Space
There really are three main free web space providers out there,
and they've been around pretty much since the old era of easy
computing and easy web pages design was around, before the iMac and
such, and these providers are Xoom (now part of NBCi), Geocities (owned by Yahoo),
and Tripod (run by
Lycos). All three are just as good as each other and offer pretty
much the same features, and all have been around long enough (with
many different owners, of course) to pretty much say that they'll
be around for some more time, so stability is an easy thing with
them.
Best Overall Website Developer Website
My personal favorite site for developer tools is developer.com. This site has all of
the tutorials, articles, and how-to's you will ever need to get
started - plus links to many other great sites out there.
As always, there are many other free websites out there that
will give you the same services, but, these are the best and
easiest sites on the Net.
Get out there and keep building those websites!
