30 Free and Useful Web-Based Tools For Designers

Here s a list of 30 web-based tools I currently or often use as a web designer to speed up the design process or to collaborate with my clients.

Browser Shots

Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers and in different OS platforms. But be patient! It can take a few hours to complete.
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Google Analytics

Apart from giving you detailed statistics about your visitors, Google Analytics has a Website Optimizer that helps you find out which page designs, headlines, and graphics convert the most visitors.
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ClickTale

ClickTale reveals what visitors are doing inside your webpage (mouse gestures and clicks). Also scrolling heatmaps show where visitors look and how far down they scroll.
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CrazyEgg

Lets you visualize where your visitors click on your webpage.
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Conceptshare - Online collaboration Tool

ConceptShare allows you to setup secure online workspaces for sharing designs, documents and video and invite others to review, comment and give contextual feedback anytime and anywhere without a meeting.
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Cozimo - Collaborative Tool

With Cozimo you can collaborate and review images and videos in real-time. Get feedback from clients and colleagues instantly.
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Stixy

Stixy is online white board to easily organize and share photos, projects at work, files… I have been using this application for a while but I always found it very busy and messy. It is far from being as clean and polish as Conceptshare in my opinion.
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ReviewBasics - Collaborative Tool

Similar to Conceptshare and Cozimo. This is not my favorite collaborative tool but they recently improved the UI that makes it pretty pleasant to use now.
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Pingdom - online tool

Test your webpage to see the total time it takes to load the page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.
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Color Explorer

With the colorful toolbox at ColorExplorer you can easily create, manage, and explore color palettes for use in web designs, desktop publishing, or any other graphic design process.
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Color Blender

Free online tool for color matching and palette design.
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280 Slides

Create beautiful presentations, access them from anywhere, and share them with the world.
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HTML Playground

HTML + CSS reference by example. Select a HTML tag from a list, modify the code if you want and see the result.
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QuarkBase

Quarkbase is a free tool to find complete information about a website. It gives information such as Google and Alexa ranks, top countries, popular pages, traffic rank, social popularity…
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Test Everything!

Test Everything! allows you to test your website with over 100 tools.
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SEOmoz - Trifecta

Measures metrics to estimate the relative popularity and importance of Page, Blog or Domain.
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SEO Centro - online tools

SEOcentro has some nice online SEO tools such as Meta Tag Analyzer, PageRank Check Tool, Link Popularity Tool, Search Engine Saturation, Keyword Suggestion Tool…
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Domainr

Domainr helps you explore all the domain names. A green square appears next to the suggested domain name when available. A great tool to help you find an original domain name for you next project.
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CopyScape

Website Plagiarism search. Search for copies of your page on the Web.
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DabbleBoard

Dabbleboard is a powerful online whiteboard that s actually easy and fun to use. Draw with flexible tools. Reuse previously-made drawings. Share and collaborate in real-time.
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WhatTheFont

Font recognition system. Upload a scanned image of the font and instantly find the closest matches.
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Online Image Optimizer- GIF, JPG, and PNG

Image Optimizer lets you easily optimize your gifs, animated gifs, jpgs, and pngs, so they load as fast as possible on your site.
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WebSnapr 2.0

websnapr lets you capture screenshots of (almost) any web page.
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Favicon Generator

Online tool to easily create a favicon for your site.
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CollabTRACK

A free, flexible, easy to use web-based project tracker for web designers and their clients.
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Project2Manage

Project2Manage is a great tool to keep you organized. It has a ton of features that allow you to create, manage and complete projects in your day to day activities as well as your professional life.
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FreshBooks

Fast and simple invoicing and time tracking services that help you manage your business and invoice your clients.
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Remember The Milk

Manage tasks quickly and easily and receive reminders via email, SMS, and instant messenger (AIM, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, Skype and Yahoo! are all supported).
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XML-Sitemaps

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YUI: CSS Grid Builder

CSS Grid Builder is a simple interface for Grids customization.
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More please!

What? Not enough? Errr… Okay, then, check tlbox. This is an online tool that lets you collect interesting links and online tools for web designers, programmers and system administrators. You might find something interesting there. Visit site

What free Web-based tool do you use? Share it with us in the comments!

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