Sebas

Open Web Design is a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information. Helping to make the internet a prettier place!
http://www.openwebdesign.org/

The Open Design Community is a hub for open source website designers from around the world providing thousands of XHTML and CSS based free web design templates available for download. So, please feel free to take a minute or two and browse through the designs that our fabulous designers have submitted and see if one might work for you! And remember "They're free!".
http://www.opendesigns.org/

Open Source Web Design is a site to download free web design templates and share yours with others. We help make the internet a prettier place. http://www.oswd.org/

http://www.opensourcetemplates.org/

http://www.oswt.co.uk/

http://www.free-css.com/

http://www.opensourcetemplates.org/

Style Shout!
http://www.styleshout.com/

Recently, we covered research showing that nearly half of open source developers are focused on applications for delivery in the cloud. Software as a Service (SaaS) applications are increasingly either employing open source or are built entirely on it. And all of this adds up to an increasing premium on web development skills and good tools for web development in the open source community. The good news is that there are many open source tools to help you with your web project, and given the costs of web development environments and the like, they can save you a lot of money. Here are over 15 good examples of tools and tutorials, with a few that we've covered before appended at the end, in case you missed them.

Of course, one of the most beloved tools for web developers is the Firebug extension for Firefox. If you're deep into development for the web, you probably already use it. In this post, Reuven points out that: "[With Firebug], experimenting with CSS changes no longer requires that you reload a page dozens of times; using Firebug, you can dynamically edit an HTML element's styling, looking at the effects as you change each variable value. Similarly, Firebug's JavaScript console makes it easy to work with JavaScript interactively."

Dragonfly is an open source (under a BSD license) tool for debugging web pages from the folks at Opera. Dragonfly is built to support remote debugging with other Opera sessions, on many types of machines and devices; this is especially useful for non-PC devices. We covered it in its alpha version here, and it's made much progress since then.

Cloud computing is all the rage these days, but did you know that there are many open source infrastructure tools for cloud computing that can provide free flexibility, cost savings, and more? Try these five examples.

There are a number of excellent sites where you can get tutorials on open source web development topics. DevShed is a great one, with multi-chapter tutorials on everything from Python, to PHP to Tomcat performance tuning. W3Schools is an excellent site for learning everything from CSS to AJAX to PHP, and it lets you see how your published attempts will look online. You can also find many good screencasts on web development topics online, and visit OpenSourceCMS if you'd like to try open source content management systems such as Drupal and Joomla for free.

Ruby On Rails has emerged as a giant hit with web developers, and one of the best places to find open source Rails applications is Open Source Rails. There are free starter kits there for everything from launching a blog to starting a wiki, and much more.

One challenge in delivering quality sites and applications on the web is delivering solid uptime, and monitoring network applications and devices. This job often falls on developers. There are numerous good open source site monitoring tools available to help. Nagios is well-liked for its complete site monitoring services for both Windows and Linux platforms, and is built in to other open source monitoring tools. It provides flexible reporting, and can help solve problems with failed applications, while constantly monitoring routers, switches, firewalls and more. We also covered Groundwork Monitor Community Edition here, and Groundwork Monitor 5.3 here. Groundwork monitors hundreds of devices from a single management server. Groundwork Monitor incorporates Nagios 3.0.6.

Are you in need of a web site design? Mike Gunderloy has covered Open Source Designs, which provides over 2000 web site designs, with the majority of them XHTML/CSS-based. This looks like an awesome way to get a site going with a good theme, look and platform to build on. In a similar vein to Open Source Designs, check out Open Designs. This site relies on The Open Design Community (TODC), a group of Open Source Website Designers from around the world providing thousands more XHTML- and CSS- based free web design templates for download.

Most web development environments cater especially to developers who favor certain languages and environments. Kompozer, seen at left, is a huge favorite with developers who are into CSS (cascading style sheets). Kompozer's rendering engine uses Gecko, the same layout engine in Mozilla's Firefox. It stands out for its very easy-to-use CSS editor, and strong WYSIWYG features. You also don't have to be very experienced with HTML or other web development langauges to use Kompozer. Windows, Mac and Linux users can get going with it.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization--you're probably very familiar with it, but there are many new, free tools to help you bring traffic to your web site that you may not know about. I'm a big fan of the list of 10 of these from Not Your Average Geeks. You'll find free, graphical tools from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, among others.

Piwik, at left, is open source web analytics software, and I've written once before about it--highly recommended. When it comes to doing web analytics, it's beneficial to get as many views of your data as possible, so you can use Piwik in conjunction with a tool like Google Analytics or on its own.

Piwik's features are built inside plug-ins, and a community of developers contributes interesting plug-ins. It also has a very customizable interface where you can drag and drop site metrics widgets you would like to keep an eye on onto web pages.

Quanta Plus is a very rich, open source web development environment, especially popular with those who concentrate on PHP for building sites and applications. It's based on KDE, so it appeals to those in the Linux community most. It does a good job of letting you work with multiple pages at once, and has very complete PHP debugging.

I'm always surprised by how few people doing advertising-driven things on the web don't know about OpenX, a free, open source ad server that serves more than 30,000 customers. OpenX recently secured $15.5 million in second round funding, and stands out for its flexibility. You can use it as a hosted service or you can download it if you want to run it on your own servers, keeping your ad revenue and information in-house. OpenX is ideal for small- to medium-size publishers who may not meet the hefty thresholds for traffic that can be required for big ad revenue dollars through other ad servers.

With OpenX you can deliver ads from multiple advertisers and ad networks, give high priority to higher value ad campaigns, increase overall click-through rates by limiting how often visitors see a campaign, and integrate the service with most popular existing databases.

Finally, many web-based projects are now including video. There are also a lot of good open source tools for creating, editing and working with it. Check out my list of favorites and the many excellent, free tools cited in the reader comments. I happen to work with web-based video intensively, and I was surprised by the quality of the recommended applications that readers came up with there in the comments, including the incredible MediaCoder, and MPEG Streamclip.

I’ve written previous on how to get competitors Adwords spend using SpyFu, but sometimes you just want to know how much traffic a certain site is receiving, particularly if they are within your chosen sector - which can be useful if you are thinking about making a purchase of a domain, or if you are just plain nosy. Some of the following tools can help webmasters estimate website traffic levels, both by examining the blogosphere - (works well if they actually run a blog on their site), and from looking at inbound links dotted around the web.
PopURI

http://popuri.us/

This site looks at a couple of freely available metrics, namely Pagerank, Alexa Rank, Compete Rank, Quantcast, Google Backlinks, Yahoo Backlinks, Live Search Backlinks, Technorati Links, Delicious Bookmarks, and Bloglines Subscribes. All lumped together for simplicity. nice.
Ranking.com

http://scripts.ranking.com/data/details.aspx

I couldn’t get any useful information out of this site for us, but the more popular the site is that you are researching the more accurate its results. I’d take results with a pinch of salt though. Ranking.com claim to pull their information from browser behaviour.
Google Trends for Websites

http://trends.google.com/websites

With the recent inclusion of traffic data sharing across sites (for those webmasters who enable Benchmarking in Google Analytics), Google will only continue to get more useful in this area. Google Trends for Websites (a new feature of Google Trends) allows you to take a look at traffic trends for different websites, and also gives you a feel for the other websites in that chosen sector that are visited by your visitors. Which may possibly highlight linking partners if they aren’t directly competing with you.
MarketLeap

http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/

MarketLeap allow you to test your chosen website against three others, which can be useful if you are directly gauging yourself against online competition. However this is more about link popularity. Which is one of the better ways to measure your website’s online success. Simply put, link popularity refers to the total number of links or “votes” that a search engine has found for your website, and that equates to more visitors, higher pagerank and overall greater website success.
AttentionMeter

http://attentionmeter.com/

AttentionMeter gives an Overview for Compete, Alexa and Quantcast data. I haven’t individually reviewed each one of these tools as they are well enough known in the Analytics world already. Both Quantcast and Compete are much more commercial tools and are mentioned later. Attentionmeter grabs the freely available data from each one of these sites, and correlates it nicely together via a few graphs. Well worth checking out.

Alexa

Alexa, a company (owned by Amazon) has traditionally always received alot of flack about the inconsistency of its data, however when you are trying to gauge potential traffic from competition, and don't have access to their statistics package, it has always been worth checking. They also list other websites owned to many webmaster’s disgust.
Other useful bits.

A few other competitor analysis / market intelligence tools.

Our Review of SpyFU SpyFu Reviewed.

SEOMoz article on competitor analysis online:http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-blog-stats

Commercial Tools.

http://hitwise.com/

http://compete.com

http://quantcast.com

http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/solutions.jsp?section=sol_4&nav=4

There are a number of useful tools at the disposal of us olde search optimisers. So you’ve spent months chasing a specific keyword, dropping links like a maniac, until you reach that top ten position on your search engine of choice, only to find that traffic dribbles in slower than a snail on crack. So what do we do? We research. The following paid and free research tools are well worth a shot at determining how much your chosen keywords are likely to bring in.
Google Adwords Free Tool

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Firstly we start with ye olde Google. If you uses adwords advertising you will know all about this keyword tool. It is of course free to advertisers and search engine heros alike. Unfortunately it doesn’t really give us exact details on search volume, instead using charts to show the competition. The excel downloads dont give much information either.
Yahoo / Overture Free Tool

http://inventory.overture.com/

Overture (Read Yahoo) also has a tool for determining potential traffic from specific key phrases.
Msn Keyword Tool

http://adlab.msn.com/ForecastV2/KeywordTrendsWeb.aspx

At the minute this is absolutely my favourite tool for predicting search results. Im going to let the pretty screenshots shown below speak for themselves as the level of information you can get for competitive terms. I tested the word “viagra” to see what comes up (forgive the pun). There is also a raw data (in text format) and flash version of the same graph.

trendslinechartaspx.jpg

And now for the third party tools..
HighPosition.net SEO Tools

http://seotools.highposition.net/Keyword-Research-Tool.aspx

Seo tools shows a good old fashioned HTML table. But you have to wonder on its accuracy considering the graph we see above for MSN.
Wordtracker

http://www.wordtracker.com/index.html

Ah, Wordtracker. Every search engine optimisers favourite tool. Wordtracker have been extremely clever in their past marketing efforts themselves. Tempt us in with a free trial..then grab the bigger players with a paid option. Wordtrackers own backlinks stands at a hefty 80,000 + backlinks at time of writing, which show their own knowledge of the search industry. They have recent moved to a “give me your credit card so we can renew your free trial” AOL type business model, so for your benefit we’ve decided to take the trial and show you guys around. The montly subscription costs $59, but can be cancelled at any time.

So they have their backlinks built, and their traffic and are moving towards a more shrewd business model. Anyway, onto the service and the screenshots of what you get.

blog1.jpg

This shows an overview of the features you get from the service, I started with going to the keyword researcher. This allows you to search for keyword in a variety of ways, and pick up alternatives / mis-spellings and figures for the quantity of searches performed across the engines. Starting with a seed keyword it suggests a few alternatives. It also distiguishes between UK and US based searches which is pretty cool.

See the screenshots below for further bits and pieces. It also gives two interesting reports showing that the porn industry is live and well online. The search reports for the recent search trends (short term keywords) and the long term keywords. I’ve saved and uploaded them here for you to get a look at ‘em. You can select further options after the search is performed to determine the level of searches your chosen “basket” will amoun to.

blog2.jpg

blog2.jpg

Overall I was very impressed with the service, the excel spreadsheet export is also pretty neat. I also learned that I might need to change a few things about my own site, that could result in new traffic so overall I think its a very powerful tool, and well worth taking the trial for the seven days to find out what you are missing out on. For those of you who knew the service before, that the old Wordtracker keyword tool (with the small dig button - as in a spade not as in social bookmarker) is still alive and well from within the control panel.
Nichebot

http://www.nichebot.com/

I have seen various blogs mention the joys of nichebot before, but I personally didn’t like the design (or lack thereof ) of the site - it looks like a ten year old threw it together and therefore I wasn’t going to part with the $1 fee for a signup. It uses Wordtracker data anyway, so nothing we cant get already.

nichebot.jpg
Keyword Discovery

http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

The keyword discovery site took absolute ages to load for me. I dont know whether this is a sign that they are busy, or are on a poor hosting server, but anyway..their free tool is available at the below URL. At time of writing I couldn’t get on to review their tool properly, but I do know that the main site is a paid model, the link below is a freebie.

http://api.keyworddiscovery.com/cgi-bin/addme/free.cgi
Wordze

http://www.wordze.com

keywordresearch1.jpg

With Wordze, this is a similar service to Wordtracker, giving similar results. One thing I did notice with Wordze is that it gives poorer output options for downloading your keywords, and isn’t as highly regarded in the search engine industry as Wordtracker would be. I’ve included here for completeness anyway. This isn’t a free service at a cost of $45 dollars monthly for the all singing all dancing monthly subscription. This is compared with $59 for Wordtracker.

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

This free tool taps into Wordtrackers database, and is extremely useful if you are on a budget. Aaron Wall the developer of the tool, is an extremely highly thought of SEO in the industry, so you can trust the results.
NicheWatch

http://www.nichewatch.com/

Not so much a keyword tool as a competition tracker, it gives comprehensive data on the following bits and bobs, for particular phrases.
Symbol Definition
BLD Backlinks to the domain in Yahoo.
BLP Backlinks to the webpage in Yahoo.
PRD Pages Rank of domain.
PRP Pages Rank of webpage.
Count Keyword/Keyphrase occurrences on webpage.
Pages Pages indexed of domain in Yahoo.
Anchor All in Anchor Rank of domain in Google.
Title All in Title Rank of domain in Google.
Text All in Text Rank of domain in Google.
Miva

https://account.uk.miva.com/advertiser/Account/Popups/KeywordGenBox.asp

Miva, gives out the number of searches for keywords or phrases based around their advertising networks and is useful for gaining a perspective of how many searches are performed - especially if your niche is highly competitive.

Some other useful Keyword tools

Some of these may not be specifically keyword traffic tools but they can be leveraged to gain useful information on the competition and related keywords.

Google Suggest

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

Google suggest, obviously this is used to try and predict what users may be searching for before they actually finish typing, we can use it to see related stubs related to keywords and phrases.

Google trends

http://www.google.com/trends

See peaks and falls across the year (i.e. seasonal changes in keywords / phrases). This would be particularly useful for determining when to launch a marketing campaign which is affected by the weather or country of origin etc.

Spyfu

http://www.spyfu.com/

A mighty useful tool to see what other websites in your chosen subject area are chasing. Type in your competitors domain to see what they are targetting in both the natural search engines and the pay per click model.