Kieran Chapman Design » Tools

Reduce Your PNGs

admin — Fri, 14 May 2010 02:15:17 +0000

PNGs are pretty standard images on the web these days, but Photoshop tends to generate unnecessarily large files. And even though most people have high-speed access, any savings in image size is a good thing and will help speed page load times.

Enter PNG Thing for Mac. Running your Photoshop-generated PNGs through PNG Thing reduces their size: just drag your images onto PNG Thing and strips out unnecessary junk, making your PNGs smaller. (It does a better job on large files and doesn’t make much of a dent with smaller PNGs.)

Dave Shea says Fireworks does an even better job of reducing PNGs. But if you don’t have Fireworks handy, PNG Thing is a nice (free) way to go.

Search3.com: SEO Search Tool

admin — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:16:19 +0000

One thing I’m going to try to focus on for the new year is search engine optimization (SEO) tips. Yes, SEO is sometimes looked at as the smarmy, ugly work of spammers, but that’s not what I’ll be talking about. SEO is really just common sense web development with proper page titles and descriptions. The sites I build allow you to keep this information up-to-date, so how your site appears in search results is under your control.

Sample search at search3.com

So, how does your site appear in the major search engines? Search3.com is a tool that lets you easily see three sets of search results at the same time. This makes it simple to compare how your site appears on Google, Yahoo and Bing (you can also choose Twitter and eBay) and see where you’re ranked in each.

What if your site isn’t showing up in search results? Or you don’t like the text that Google is displaying to describe your site? I’ll be covering these topics in future blog posts; if your needs are more pressing, please feel free to contact me today.

Microsoft Word HTML Mess Cleaner

admin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:54:13 +0000

If you’re a web developer who’s had to deal with HTML code from Internet Explorer, FrontPage or Word then you know what a mess it can be. (And just calling it “mess” is being kind…) Next time you’ve got the unlucky task of wading through Microsoft-generated HTML, run it through Microsoft Word 2000 HTML Mess Cleaner first. It won’t make the code perfect, but it will clean things up well enough that you can actually find your way through it.

Testing with Internet Explorer

admin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:44:34 +0000

Something that’s very important when building websites is to test the site across all major browsers, not to mention any “minor” browsers that your site’s regular visitors might be using. Take a look at your server stats to see what people are using to browse your site.

As a developer, one of the biggest challenges with testing across browsers is Internet Explorer: some of your visitors will have the most recent version (currently IE8) but there are still a lot of people who haven’t upgraded and are still looking at your site with IE7, and even (horrors!) IE6.

Since Microsoft only lets you run a single version of IE on your Windows machine at a time, this can be a challenge. Enter Internet Explorer Collection: It contains multiple IE versions which are standalone so they can be used at the same time, making it easy to see how your site appears across different versions of IE. (You probably won’t like how IE6 treats your code…)

Harvest for Time & Invoice Tracking

admin — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:57:07 +0000

If you’re a freelancer or small businesses who needs to keep track of projects and billable time, I’d recommend Harvest. (Note: I’m not getting any kind of referral fee or kickback from Harvest with this recommendation — I just like the product.) Harvest is a web app that lets you easily track your time, expenses, and invoices, and does so with a very clean and intuitive UI.

I’ve been using Harvest successfully for the past year. Setup is fast and tracking your time is easy using the website, desktop widget, or iPhone app. Creating and sending invoices is very easy with their wizard-like interface, and you can add your company logo to the invoices it creates (that’s about the extent of the customization, though). Keeping track of time spent and expenses for projects, and sending and tracking invoices is probably the least fun part of creative work. But at least Harvest makes it quick and easy to do you can spend most of your time actually working. With a free trial available, it’s worth a test-drive.

For a more in-depth look, check out Simple Station’s comparison of Freshbooks, Harvest and Blinksale. Harvest comes away with their recommendation:

We highly recommend Harvest and are now using it as an integral part of our work flow, invoicing, time tracking and project management.

Lorem Ipsum

admin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:00:13 +0000

lipsum.com is a site I often use to generate dummy text for use in designs and wireframes. It allows you to specify a certain number of paragraphs, words, and list items, if you need a specific amount of text. Also, if you’ve ever wondered where “lorem ipsum dolor sit amet” came from, the site also has a little history behind it as well.