There has been a flurry of online applications being created lately. One of the areas that has been a little slower taking off is the ability to edit your photos online. My favorite online photo editing site is Snipshot.com.

You can easily upload a photo via the Snipshot website and then do some basic editing including resizing, cropping, rotate, enhance and adjusting the image. Once you have the image done to your satisfaction you can then download the image to your computer as a gif, jpg, pdf, png, psd or tif format. You can also specify a hi res version, but I have never actually tried a hi res version. You can also save the image to either Flickr or Webshots.

One if the features I like best about Snipshots is the Bookmarklet that works in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. After it is installed you can quickly upload an image from the web and edit it.

Here is a sample image of one of our cats. This is the photo before I uploaded it to Snipshot.

After a simple crop, brightening the photo up and sharpening.

I find Snipshots a very useful online application to quickly do some image editing. It has come to the rescue when I have been at clients offices and an image needs to be resized or quickly fixed.

If you are not really interested in all of the technical details behind your website, and you just want to work on creating interesting and compelling content, then a content management system might be just what you need.

The latest content management systems make it easy for anyone to create and maintain a website. Whether it is a new weblog project, a web portal, image gallery, e-commerce website, forum and many other types of websites you can most likely find a content management system to do what you need. Most content management systems offer full web administration, easy content entry and usually the ability to customize the template of the site, either with free layouts or a custom designed layout that you have created by a web designer.

To help you choose the right content management system go and explore OpenSourceCMS. The site exists for one reason, to let you try out open source content management systems. You can try out the content management systems before you install it on your own web host to help you find the right one for your project. You can then focus on creating your content for your website and not worry about all the technical details behind the scenes.

If an image is worth a thousand words then finding the right images for a website is crucial. Not everyone has the resources to buy stock photographs for every website, thankfully there are stock photo resources on the internet that make it easy to find the right image. There are thousands of websites out there with stock photography, unfortunately it can be hard to find good sites that actually offer stock photos for free. Many of the sites advertise the images as royalty free, but to buy the rights to use the image will cost you. Take a look at these stock photo resources when you are looking for that perfect photo.

Stock.XCHNG

A personal favorite for finding great stock photos for web projects. Make sure you check the photos restrictions.

morgueFile

The second stop in finding great photos. If you can’t find the photo you need on Stock.XCHNG it is probably here.
I have had problems creating an account here but you should still be able to download photos.

FreePhotoBank

I just found this one last week. It looks promising upon first impressions.

FreePixels

This site has some very nice photos, but the selection is limited. You have to have a good idea of what you are looking for.

OpenPhoto

The license is a little more restrictive here, so be forewarned. You can’t do everything with the photos that you can at some of the other sites. They do have some great photos though, but perhaps more appropriate for personal projects and blogs.

iStockphoto

The only pay stock photo website on the list. The prices are very reasonable. You can get an image suitable for many web projects starting at $1.00. Great photos that will not empty your wallet.

It happened to me again. I updated a site and did not go and check what it looked like in an older version of Internet Explorer on Windows 98. It does not matter how long you have been doing web updates, and how simple the updates are, somethings just do not work properly in some web browsers, which means you have to test in multiple browsers on multiple operating systems. That is one thing that makes web design challenging at times.

One site that can help you check sites and stop mistakes from happening is browsershots. Although, I did not see any options tonight to take screen shots of Internet Explorer, I know I have used it in the past and had Internet Explorer options.

If you regularly need to check what websites look like on multiple operating systems and web browsers and have the money you also might want to take a look at browsercam. They offer subscription plans from one day to one year and offer screen shots on Windows, Mac and Linux machines. I used them once and they are an excellent service.

So a reminder to check your web designs on those other systems, you never know when something that should be simple will break a page.

It never fails, as soon as you write something you end up finding another tool that you should have included. This color tool is from the undisputed master of graphics, Adobe. Kuler is from Adobe labs and allows people view color combinations that others have created online. You can narrow the combinations down a little by viewing the most popular combinations, the highest rated and the newest submitted.

You can also create your own color combinations. The easiest is to set your base color and then use one of the color rules that they have available. The tool itself is easy to use, although I did find that the base color kept changing slightly as I played with the other colors. You might want to watch that as you use this tool. Overall it is an excellent tool for helping with choosing color combinations.

If you want to save and share the color combinations that you create you will have to create an Adobe account and sign in. You can also download the color combinations as Adobe Swatch Exchange files (.ASE) for use with Adobe Creative Suite, but I could not try that out since I don’t have the suite.

You don’t see to many free tools coming from Adobe, but hopefully this one will stay free for people to use. It will certainly help people choose colors for websites and all their projects.

I have to admit that I always struggle with getting good color combinations for websites. I often will change colors several times before I decide on what color combination I want to stick with. Things have gotten easier the last few years though because of some very cool web tools out there to help people who are color deficient.

Colors on the Web
This site offers so much for those interested in colors, including color theory. Make sure you check out the color wizard. It is the most comprehensive color tool that I have found. Many great features and it will give you complete color schemes you can use. Excellent tool!

Color Schemer
This is a great web tool for finding colors that that work with that one color that you know you want. It offers a quick and easy interface and lots of colors that will match with your one color. I find it will still take some work to find the right colors.

Palette Man
When you need a quick color combination for a website this site fits the bill perfectly. It has several color themes already set. I find it great to just pick a color theme and make it lighter or darker just to get going quickly.

These online tools have made it much easier to help pick colors for your website. Don’t forget to experiment a little though to make your site your own.

I was Stumbling last night and came across this great set of glass styled images at bittbox.com. The images come in many different colours and formats including EPS, Illustrator, JPEG, PNG and SVG. My favourites were the RSS Icons and the Badges. Take a look at the freebie category for all of free images they offer.

Thanks for the great graphics!

Still tweaking with the design of the site. Lots of little things that are getting done. I have tried to keep this light on the graphics so not a lot of flashy stuff here. I used some css that only works with Mozilla based browsers, sorry for those folks using Internet Explorer, but I have banged my head against Internet Explorer design issue enough and personally just don’t care if you don’t see it perfectly. If you want to see this site more the way it was intended then you can get Firefox.