This is a compilation of all the sites, tool and software I’ve used when working on my website, building it and researching. I find them useful, and they’re well worth reading / using if you get stuck. I built this website by myself, so had to do a lot of research over the years. These should help save you some tips and time.
SEO and Marketing
- Neil Patel – I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve come across this website when Googling for an answer. I never book mark it, but I always tend to click on it if I’m searching and come across a link on his website. Really recommended it. He’s wrote a lot of topics on things that I’ve been interested in experimenting with as I thought they were “problems” with my SEO and Conversion rates. Optimised keywords, and colours for example. Certain keywords and colours work better for conversion.
Website Design
- Favicon Generator – This is a simple website, basically chuck in a picture, and it generates the necessary files you need to upload to give you that little logo when you go to a website. I don’t think it helps a lot with SEO, but it’s one of those little things that helps your site look more appealing. You can upload whatever you want and basically get a “miniature” photo
- Alternative Favicon Generator – Recommended by Angelica, allows you to create favicon files from files up to 5MB in size from JPG, PNG, GIF files or even a gallery.
Software and Tools
- Fotosizer – This freeware program is what I use for all my photo resizing. Disk space is at a premium on webservers, so 5GB of space would quickly be chomped up if you uploaded full size photos. I tend to resize for two reasons. First, to make my website faster on loading. Second, to prevent people from stealing my photographs and claiming them as their own. I’ve used this software for years and love it, has a lot of cool features, and I plan on upgrading to the Full edition at some point.
- Advanced Renamer – I use this tool for amending filenames. Normally in conjunction with Fotosizer. One of the problems with using Linux webservers is the case of the filename/file extensions. JPG/jpg are considered two different files. For simplicity, I use this program to change everything to lowercase to avoid problems. This program also supports batch conversion
