Have you stumbled upon a new resource or tool that you find useful or cannot live without and are willing to share?  If so, you’ll definitely want to attend the next Webmaster’s session on Thursday, June 8th @ 2pm in the Graduate Student Center (211-A West Cameron Ave.)
 
We will be sharing and documenting free, cheap, or otherwise life-simplifying tools that improve your work on the web. Come prepare to share your personal favorites and gather suggestions of new tools that others find helpful. From photo editing to user testing, metrics reporting to code updates, this session will share a wealth of worthwhile tools.  Let’s learn from each other!

Tool Time Part 1, Links and Resources – Updated!

  1. CSS and Web Design
    1. Paletton
      1. Color scheme designer, with web page examples
    2. Adobe Color CC
      1. Color theme designer, integrated into Adobe Creative Suite
    3. Design Seeds
      1. Color palette inspiration
    4. CSS Zen Garden
      1. A demonstration of what can be accomplished through CSS-based design.
    5. Adobe Capture CC (mobile app)
      1. Turn any image into a color theme, pattern, unique brush, Look, or vector graphic that you can use in your creative projects on desktop and mobile devices.
  2. Mobile/Responsive Design
    1. Chrome Developer Tools
      1. The Chrome Developer Tools (DevTools for short), are a set of web authoring and debugging tools built into Google Chrome.
    2. Responsive Web Tester
      1. Quickly preview your responsive website designs at the dimensions they will be seen on popular mobile devices.
    3. BrowserStack – A cross-browser testing tool ($)
      1. Live, Web-Based Browser Testing
  3. Debugging 
    1. Chrome  Developer Tools
      1. The Chrome Developer Tools (DevTools for short), are a set of web authoring and debugging tools built into Google Chrome.
    2. The Web Developer extension
      1. adds various web developer tools to a browser.
    3. Regex 101
      1. Web based regular expression tester and debugger
  4. Accessibility
    1. WAVE Toolbar
      1. The WAVE Chrome and Firefox extensions allows you to evaluate web content for accessibility issues directly within Chrome and Firefox browsers.
    2. WebAIM: Color Contrast Checker
      1. Quick color contrast ratio tester for accessibility
    3. Colorable
      1. Take a set color palette and get contrast values for every possible combination – useful for finding safe color combinations with predefined colors and includes pass/fail scores for the WCAG accessibility guidelines.
    4. Tota11y
      1. tota11y helps visualize how your site performs with assistive technologies.
    5. W3C Markup Validator
      1. This validator checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc.
  5. Usability
    1. The Readability Test Tool
      1. The Readability Test Tool provides a quick and easy way to test the readability of your work.
    2. UXSort
      1. UXSORT is a card sorting tool that allows user experience professionals or marketing managers to plan card sorting activities, manage participants and cards, collect card sorting data, analyze data, and create a report.
    3. Qualtrics
      1. The Qualtrics Research Suite is a powerful online survey tool available to all UNC Chapel Hill faculty, staff, and students, for UNC-related projects.
  6. Image/Media management and analysis
    1. Aspect Ratio Calculator
      1. Calculate and adjust the size of objects while maintaining a specific aspect ratio. This is useful, for example, when resizing photos or video.
    2. MS Picture Manager info and download
      1. No longer part of official MS Office suite but still available
    3. Adobe Spark Post (mobile app)
      1. Create social media posts and images
    4. PIXLR
      1. Photo editing apps for web and mobile
    5. Canva
      1. Social media image and graphic design creator
    6. GIMP
      1. The Free & Open Source Image Editor
  7. Icons
    1. Icon Finder
      1. Search for free or premium icons
    2. Font Awesome
      1. Font Awesome gives you scalable vector icons that can instantly be customized — size, color, drop shadow, and anything that can be done with the power of CSS.
    3. Noun Project
      1. Nearly a million curated icons, created by a global community. Useful for identifying icons for concepts.
    4. Canva
      1. Social media image and graphic design creator
    5. Nucleo Icon Set ($)
      1. Search, Customize, Export 8387 Icons
  8. JQuery/JavaScript Extensions/Add-ons
    1. JQuery
      1. jQuery is a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library. It makes things like HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax much simpler with an easy-to-use API that works across a multitude of browsers.
    2. JQuery UI
      1. jQuery UI is a curated set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library.
    3. JSLint
      1. JSLint is a JavaScript program that looks for problems in JavaScript programs. The JavaScript Code Quality Tool.
    4. React.js
      1. A JavaScript library for building user interfaces
    5. Zurb: Foundation
      1. A responsive front-end framework.
  9. Charts/Maps
    1. HighCharts
      1. Highcharts makes it easy for developers to set up interactive charts in their web pages
    2. MapBox
      1. APIs for maps, geocoding, driving directions, and more
    3. TileMill
      1. TileMill is an open source map design studio