FTP Client: The best choice here is Filezilla. Filezilla has now been around for many years and has the benefit of being free, and is continually being updated. I have used Filezilla personally for around 6 years and it has performed flawlessly for me. This is one great piece of software that happens to not only be free, but also open source.

Graphics Software: For graphics I would recommend Paint.net. Another really nice free program that is always being updated and refined. Paint.net has grown from a quite simple “paint” replacement into a powerful graphics tool. It is a light and fast program for simple image creation or editing photos. Paint.net also supports plugins that can enhance the functionality even more.

Text and HTML editor: A really nice simple text and HTML editor I would use Notepad2. For a simple no-nonsense editor that is miles ahead of the standard notepad.exe, notepad2 is a great choice for starting out with simple HTML and web-editing. It is one of those pieces of software that is installed right away on any new computer I use. Once installed, just be sure to active the line numbers feature.

Web Browser: Add a few great extensions to the Firefox browser, and you have an awesome browser and webmaster assistant all in one. So along with the basic Firefox install, this short list of extensions are ones that I use daily to assist in web design development and programming. (Just to note I use quite a few more, but those are great for getting started)

1. The Web Developer Toolbar
2. Search Status
3. Live HTTP headers

Smush_it update: Smush_it is now a Yahoo tool and can be found here: www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/

Smush_It will smush a few extra bytes out of your images to make them smaller. In my experience it  shaves a little bit off each image, but if you add up  a few “k” off each image, it could add up to 20k in size. This could increase your page download speed by just enough seconds to improve your site. The way I see it is that every little thing you can do to speed up your website will benefit the site.

The best way to use smush_it, is with the firefox plugin. This makes it a snap to use, simple go to your page, click the smush_it icon and it will bring up the smush_it page and start fixing up your images.

You can see the results from this site, shaved 13k off the download size without changing any image quality or removing anything from the site. It’s like getting something for free! Note that sometimes it will change your GIF files to PNG, so you might have to change a few file references in your html.

And yes, it’s very addicting!!

Smush_it is by

http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2008/09/30/new-tool-easy-image-optimization-with-smush-it/

and

http://www.phpied.com/smushit-is-a-smash-hit/

But not ALL websites. Sometimes you don’t mind if someone hotlinks from a forum or a review about your product, etc. However there are those that you DO want to block.

You can use the code below and place it into your htaccess file.

I placed the code in the .htaccess file inside my images folder, to just protect that folder, and to keep things straight forward.

If you wish to send a differnt image to the offending website, change the last line to an image that is outside your domain, or in a folder a level above where your .htaccess file is located.

Example: If I placed the code in the .htaccess file inside http://example.com/images, then my “nohotlink.jpg” image should be located http://example.com/nohotlink.jpg (otherwise it will blocked by it’s own rule).

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?ebay\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?ebay\.ca/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?abc\.net/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|gif|bmp|png)$ http://example.com/nohotlink.jpg [L]

Using a rank checking tool is a real time saver. Rather than try to dig through results to find your site, this will give you the data in just a few seconds. The best way would be to export the data each time and name each file with the date it was run. This way you can track your ranking changes over time.

Google did a nice thing for webmasters by creating a handy tool to help track sites and also to upload your newly created sitemaps.

Visit Google Webmaster Tools and sign up account, or use an existing Google account if you have one.

Since then a few of the other major search engines jumped on board the wagon, and now it is supported by Yahoo and Microsoft too.