There are lots of excellent resources and tools that can assist you with your website, you just need to know about them, and how to find more when the need arises. Here we’ve listed some of the most useful tools for website owners.

Google Alert – be notified by Google whenever a website or blog mentions your business name online. Register for the alert at www.google.com/alerts/. You’ll then receive notifications by email from Google.

Google Insights for Search – http://www.google.com/insights/search/ – find out what people are searching for online by season, topic categories, and geographic location.

Google Analytics – reports on the visitors to your website. It’s free to use, you just need to add some tracking code to your website. http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google Website Optimizer – www.google.com/websiteoptimizer – allows you to test out different versions of content for a page as an experiment to see which version converts better (you will need the help of a web designer).

Firefox is a popular alternative to the Internet Explorer browser. Firefox has a lot of extras you can download that can extend the browser’s functionality. Download Firefox from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html

Google Page Speed – http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/ – this is an add-on for the Firefox web browser.  It reports on how fast your website is and offers suggestions on how to improve it. You will also need to install Firebug to use Google Page Speed.

Photo editing – www.pixlr.com – upload your photos to Pixlr, crop, resize and touch up, then save back to your computer. You can even import photos from the web or create new images.

Photos – great photos can really make a website, and they don’t have to cost the earth. In fact there are several sites online where you can get free images, and even more sites where you can get photos for only a few dollars each.

Free Image Websites:

• www.sxc.hu
• http://freerangestock.com
• www.everystockphoto.com

Royalty Free Image Websites (paid images)

• http://www.stockxpert.com
• http://www.istockphoto.com
• http://www.gettyimages.com

Icons – looking for the perfect icon for your website? Then visit www.iconfinder.net to search through more than 100,000 icons.

We’ve looked at online image editors in the past and found many of them to be clunky, slow, and difficult to use. But with web clients always needing an easy way to crop and resize their own images, we were keen to find a cost-effective solution for image editing.

We took another look at what was out there for online editing, and stopped when we found Pixlr. It has quite simply blown us away with how good it is. Best of all, it is free. It’s the perfect solution for website owners who need to resize an image or perhaps touch it up a little, but who don’t need (or can’t afford) all of the features that come with software like Photoshop. If you have been a Photoshop user in the past, you will certainly recognise a lot of Pixlr’s image editing functionality.

Pixlr can be used in two different modes – an express service for basic resizing and touch-ups at http://www.pixlr.com/express/ and the more advanced editing at http://www.pixlr.com/editor/. You can create a new image, upload an image for editing, or download an image from the web for editing. We think that’s pretty cool.