jQuery, released in January 2006 at BarCamp NYC by John Resig, it’s a lightweight cross-browser JavaScript library emphasising the interaction between JavaScript and HTML. It’s now used by millions and is used at about 20% of the 10,000 biggest websites. jQuery is the most popular JavaScript library in use today!

Its popularity has been greatly because of its flexibility, and because it is fast and easy to use. Over this past year, there has been tremendous growth in the jQuery community with 100′s of existing plugins available to choose from, all enhancing the users online experience.

We’ve gathered 10 of our favourite jQuery plugins for your enjoyment!

jQuery Cycle

The jQuery Cycle Plugin is a slideshow plugin that supports many different types of transition effects. It supports pause-on-hover, auto-stop, auto-fit, before/after callbacks, click triggers and much more.

jParallax

jParallax turns a selected element into a ‘window’, or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way.

JQZoom

JQZoom is a javascript image magnifier built at the top of the popular jQuery javascript framework. JQzoom is a great and a really easy to use script to magnify what you want.

prettyPhoto

prettyPhoto is a jQuery based lightbox clone. Not only does it support images, it also add support for videos, flash, YouTube, iFrames. It’s a full blown media lightbox. The setup is easy and quick, plus the script is compatible in every major browser.

jQuiry Countdown

(with Background and Overlay)

AnythingSlider

AnythingSlider is an attempt at bringing brings together the functionality of all of those previous sliders and adding new features.

Ajax Fancy Capcha

Ajax Fancy Captcha is a jQuery plugin that helps you protect your web pages from bots and spammers.

JQuery Modal

jqModal is a plugin for jQuery to help you display notices, dialogs, and modal windows in a web browser. It is flexible and tiny, akin to a “Swiss Army Knife”, and makes a great base as a general purpose windowing framework.

Image By: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Choosing the right colour combination for your website is key when communicating with your users and ensuring they perceive your design in the correct way.

So today we have listed 10 of what we consider to be the best, free colour tools that will help you choose the right colour palettes for your designs.

Toucan Color Palettes

Used alone or in conjunction with our other creation tools, Toucan gives you the features you need to inject colour into your creative process.

Pictaculous

Ever wonder what colours to use with an image? Upload your image – get a colour palette.

ColorExplorer

A brand new way of working with digital colours! With the colourful toolbox at ColorExplorer you can easily create, manage, and explore colour palettes for use in web designs, desktop publishing, or any other graphic design process.

Color Scheme Designer

Color Scheme Designer is a brand new interface, as well as the engine, all rewritten from the scratch. Rapidly increased precision and colour space conversions, better preview, enhanced scheme creation system, unique scheme IDs and permanent URL of the scheme.

Kuler

The web-hosted application for generating colour themes that can inspire any project. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with colour variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.

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There are 1000′s of free fonts availabe for web designers to use.

Over the next few months we’re going to be bringing you some of the best free fonts available on the internet to use on your websutes or other design projects.

In this series we have 5 awesome fonts for you…. enjoy! 

Libel Suit

Old Sans Black

Nordic Round

Neighbourhood

Cibreo Regular

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Ok, so you want to build your own website, you’ve purchase a domain name and your web hosting.

(Hopefully from Pixel Internet!)

Now you want some help to make it look that little bit special!

At some point along the line, you will come to hear about Web 2.0

Now some love it, some hate it, regardless to which side of the fence you sit, it’s becoming more and more popular and there’s some clever peeps who have made the whole 2.0 experience that much easier, with Web 2.0 online generators.

Here are our top 10 (in no particular order)

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 1: Online Ribbon Generator

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 2: Loader Generator

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 3: Button Maker

T

op 10 Web 2.0 generators. 4: Web 2.0 Stripes Generator

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 5: Web 2.0 Badges

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 6: Web 2.0Logo Creator

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 7: Fresh Badge Generator

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 8: Tab Generator

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 9: Favicon Generator

Top 10 Web 2.0 generators. 10: Web Button Generator

That’s it, our top 10 Web 2.0 online generators! If you think we have left any out, please feel free to comment below!

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We’ve listed what we think are the best free tools for optimising your website or web page for modern search engines. Here are our top 10.

Top 10 SEO Tool. 1 IWebTool
iWebTool is a website offering a plethora of useful online tools, including a pagerank checker, backlink checker, search engine position checker and keyword suggestion tool to name but a few. Check them out.

Top 10 SEO Tool.2 CopyScape
CopyScape is a search engine dedicated to locating duplicate content on the web. Want to make sure no-one is stealing your content? Simply enter your website/webpage and it will search the internet and report back if it finds any part of your webpage duplicated on another site. A fantastic tool.

Top 10 SEO Tool.3 Google Analytics
Google Analytics makes it easy to improve your results online. Write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting.

Top 10 SEO Tool.4 Google Rank Checker
This is a great free Google Position Checker tool that will automatically query Google’s search engines. It checks if your URL appears in the first 1000 results for your chosen keywords. If the URL is present, it will output what position it occupies.

Top 10 SEO Tool.5 Meta Tag Analyser
Designed by SeoCentro, this Meta Tag analysis tool helps webmasters analyse their website pages. This search engine optimisation tool analyses not only the Meta Tags but also tries to mimic the same spider technology as the search engines spiders them self! Awesome…

Top 10 SEO Tool.6 Free Keyword Suggestion Tool
This is a great free tool that allows you to take a peak at keywords and phrases that are being search for on the web.

Top 10 SEO Tool.7 SEO Tools – Search Engine Optimisation
This is another great website that offers a plethora of free Search Engine Optimisation tools.

Top 10 SEO Tool.8 SEO Check list
The SEO Check list brought to you by webconfs.com. This one is a must budding SEO beginners. With its unique point scoring check list you will be well on the way to producing a search engine friendly website!

Top 10 SEO Tool.9 SEO Tutorial
Another great guide from webconfs.com. This SEO tutorial will guide you through all the important factors needed to optimise your website for the search engines.

Top 10 SEO Tool.10 Free Google site map generator
phpSitemapNG is a free Google Sitemaps generator written in PHP, but also generates RSS-based, txt-based and HTML-based sitemap files. It will spider your website and also your filesystem (of course, as you prefer). You can download and use it for free, the licence is GPL.

NB: Don’t forget though, if you’re a customer of Pixel Internet, you can use our own free Google Sitemap generator supplied with all Pixel Internet web hosting plans!

If you feel we have left something out, or would like your own SEO web developement tool added to this least, please feel free to leave a message below!

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Everyone wants to achieve good website rankings, but how do you get to the top on the major search engines like Google or Yahoo?

We’ll this really the million dollar question and unfortunately there is no definitive answer, however we have listed what we think, are the top 10 SEO tips that you can implement yourself, which will ultimately help your websites visibility on the search engines.

SEO Tips 1. Develop Your Key Phrases
Begin by researching your key words and phrases. What products or services do you offer? Where are you located? What’s your area of operation? Perhaps most importantly; what would you search for? Try to put yourself in the mind of a potential customer.

SEO Tips 2. Optimise Your Page Title
The page title is one of the most powerful elements of your website that you can easily optimise. Ensure you use your important keywords, this will help search engines better understand the content of the webpage. Keep it short and to the point; some search engines (like Google) will only display as little as 66 characters including white spaces

SEO Tips 3. Optimise your Page Description
Description Meta, likely to be one of the first things (second to the page title) that your potential customers will see. Write a maximum 150 character description employing all your important key phrases. But most of all remember your trying to stand out from the rest, so make it clear, punchy and to the point.

SEO Tips 4. Write interesting, helpful and ‘human’ content
Now that you’ve written your page title and added your description and keyword Metas, it’s time to start the most involved process of all – writing your page content.

Quality page content is really a balance between grammatical license and readability – incorporating your target key phrases for use by search engines while still putting across a coherent message to your human audience.

SEO Tips 5. Remember those Alt and Title Tags

Adding Alt and Title Tags
Don’t ignore your Alt and Title tags, they can play a big part in your site optimisation.

The Alt tag is the text you see when you move your mouse over a picture or graphic. For example, move your mouse over this graphic of the Pixel Internet logo:

The Alt tag is very useful to screen reading software used by the visually impaired.

The Title tag is the text that appears when the mouse is moved over a text link such as this link here.

SEO Tips 6. BLOG!
Blogs can be a fantastic marketing tool below are just a few reasons why;

1. Structured content – Blog software such as WordPress, with category features allows the aggregation of content according to themes. This makes it easier to categorise content. If you can make it easier for search engines to understand your content, you have a much better chance of ranking well on those topics.
2. Crawlable URLs – Most blog software offers uncomplicated URL structure, making it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl.
3. Internal links – Blogs that post product or service related information can deep link anchor text to product information or purchase pages deep within the web site. This is very beneficial for ranking on long phrases.
4. Inbound links – One of the biggest benefits, blogs link freely to each other – much more than web sites do. Blogs are also a significant source of many posts to social news and social media web sites. Text, audio and video are all easily supported for syndication by blogs. The more media available, the more likely it will attract incoming links. Additionally, there are many widgets and plugins that make it easy to share blog content, which in turn encourages links and traffic.
5. RSS – Links to RSS feed URL’s that use the blog domain name will assist in building link popularity and when RSS content is syndicated or cited by other blogs, any embedded links will also assist in sending traffic.
6. Fresh content – Both readers and search engines reward fresh content with repeat visits. From a search engine perspective, that means your site can be crawled more frequently, allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly. Fresh content is also indicative of a more authoritative web site.
7. Active community – Comments and trackback features in blog software encourage interaction. An active blog community creates the kinds of citations or signals from other sites (annotated and contextually relevant links) that search engines tend to reward in the rankings. Loyal blog readers can boost a site’s visibility through advocacy on other blogs, in forums offline at conferences as well as on their own blogs and within the comments of your blog.

Look here for a great reason to get your WordPress web hosting with Pixel Internet!

SEO Tips 7. Build up your inbound links
The best place to start any linking strategy is with web directories. The two biggest by far are Yahoo! and the Open Directory (used by Google). Being listed in these is an absolute must as they generate huge amounts of traffic.

There are plenty of other directories you should get listed in too. Global, local and industry-specific directories abound on the Internet. To find them run a search for ‘web directory’ on your favourite search engine. The directories that come up highest in the search rankings will probably generate the most traffic. You can also check these directories of directories:

• Open Directory’s directory of web directories
• Search engine colossus
• Best Free Directories
• Internet search engine database
• Business Directory

SEO Tips 8. Build your website using clean accessible HTML
Here 5 great reasons why you should validate your website;

• Troubleshooting unknown problems – Sometimes, you may be encounter a coding or layout problem and have absolutely no idea what’s going or where the problem lies. Even though W3C’s validator uses advanced language, you can get a pretty good idea on where some of your problem areas are.
• Know what your website will look like – With discrepancies between browsers and Internet Explorer slowly losing its stranglehold on browsers, you should place importance on making sure your website looks identical to the way it does in your preferred browser. Of course, there are exceptions such as browser specific bugs. But do your research on those as well.
• Search Engines like properly formatted HTML – If you decide to open up a <p> or <h1> tag and never close it, that may have been a lost opportunity when a Search Engine spiders your website.
• Encourages Usability – For example, W3C doesn’t let a site pass validation unless all the images in the document have an alt attribute. eg. <img src=”my-goldfish.jpg” alt=”A picture of my goldfish” /> This can only help people with screen readers and search engines.
• Helps you understand coding basics – A validator will let you know if you’re using a CSS or HTML attribute that isn’t capable in some browsers. It will make sure that instead of using &, you’re using & instead.

SEO Tips 9. Be patient!
Getting good rankings on a search engine takes time and a lot of hard work, but most of all a bucket load of patience. There’s no quick fix so beware of companies offering such services. SEO and Internet Marketing can also become very addictive, you’ll find yourself checking the SERP’s (search engine results pages) daily, panicking because your have moved down two places…… WELL DON’T, otherwise before you know it all your hair will fall out and your once thriving social life will have all but disappeared.

SEO Tips 10. We said be patient!

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Firefox and its variety of Web Development extensions makes it the first choice browser for many web designers and developers.

We have picked out 10 of the most useful and most popular web development Firefox plugins to help you build and optimise your website.

Below is our top 10 list of web development plugins for Firefox and a brief description of their features:

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 1. FIREBUG
Edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page, “probably the best Firefox plugin in the world”. (ED)

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 2. WEB DEVELOPER TOOLBAR
Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. I used this add-on for a long time prior to Firefox 2.0. I found its pixel measuring tool to be useful and back when I did table design I used its outlining/bordering tool to help me adjust that flow-based layouts. I’ll have to relearn how to use this sucker for the new methodologies I use for client-end design.

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 3. SEOQUAKE
Seoquake is one of the most powerful tools available for analyzing your websites Search Engine Optimisation results. It will help you determine what your Google PageRank score is, how many pages on your site are indexed, how many external sites link to yours, similar statistics for Yahoo and Live.com, your Alexa ranking, your del.icio.us vote count (for specific pages), and mountains of other data. I’m still finding out more and more about this tool, but I think this is by far and large one of the most powerful extensions available to web developers.

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 4. COLORZILLA
Have you ever seen a really interesting colour on a website and try to find out what it is? ColorZilla gives you the ability to simple use a “colour picker” to mouse over the desired colour and capture it’s hex value. This extension has proved to a real time saver and I’ve used it longer than any of the other extensions or plug-ins on this list (since late 2004).

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 5. IE View
Sooner or later, you’ll need to check your pages in IE. The IE View extension makes this as simple as possible by adding a “view in IE” option to the right-click menu.

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 6. AARDVARK
This has to be the most impressive development plugin for Firefox yet. It’s great for just trimming down pages and isolating portions to print as well.

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 7. MEASUREIT
Draw a ruler across any web page to check the width, height, or alignment of page elements in pixels.

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 8. FIREFTP
FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 9. ACCESSIBILITY EXTENSION
Every company and site owner should ensure their website is accessible to able-bodied and disabled users. The Accessibility Extension is a toolbar that allows non-disabled designers the ability to experience what it’s like to be a disabled web user, as well as giving disabled users a selection of tools to help with their browsing experience.

Top 10 Firefox Plugin 10. DEVBOI
DevBoi is a great sidebar for coders and developers that gives you instant access to all the manuals you could ever need. Simply launch from the Tools menu in Firefox and then double-click on the element you’re interested in to bring up the right manual page.

There you go, thats our top 10, although there are 100′s more fantastic plugins out there! Have we missed your favourite out? If we have we would love to here about it!

Please feel free to add your favourite Firefox Extension to our list.

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