Bet you didn't know that there are all sorts of great online ways to check out your pages and solve your
problems? I'm going to give you the lowdown (and links) to some great online home page help sites that
can IMMEDIATELY help your site. Netmechanic: Here's a site jammed full of FREE online tools to improve your home page. My personal favourite? The handy-dandy GIFBot that takes any .gif or .jpg graphic that you have online and reduces it on the fly. What's the good of that, you ask? Well, smaller file sizes (not smaller pictures, mind you, but reduced in the amount of computer memory they use) help your pages to load faster (and keeps your visitors happy). You can get DRAMATIC results with a GIFBot reduction, without sacrificing picture quality!
Still not sure? Take a look at what GIFBot did for me!
The original image: a weighty 40k filesize
The GIFBot reduced image: 17k and virtually NO quality is lost!
And GIFBot is only ONE of several great free online services that netmechanic provides. Go check them out for yourself and see!
Dr.HTML: Have they got the prescription for you! First off, there is an online validator! (A what, you ask?) A validator checks (validates) your HTML code. It tells you what errors it finds (like missing end commands to your links or font codes) and also checks your spelling too!
Dr. HTML has other things in the medicine chest. One that is a lot of fun is the HTML Squisher. Yup, that's what it says, SQUISHER! It takes your page code and condense it as much as computationally possible so that it loads quickly. Be sure if you do this to a page you edit often, you also keep a bookmark to HTML Formatter which will expand your page back into something easily editable by humans!
I've hardly scratched the surface of the enormous amount of online HTML Tools and Utilities. If you've got more suggestions share them with other iVillage members in chat or on our boards (you can find all of these links from our Resource Center.
Return to the Tip Archive for other handy hints.
Created by Ancarett. Updated 28 June, 2001.
