New web tools appear daily. Often I don’t even manage to bookmark them all, let alone try them. Nonetheless I try as many Internet tools as I can, I’m just a serial early adopter. I can’t stop it. These are mostly 30+ free tools which are either web tools or tools for the web I discovered just recently in 2008.

I tested most of these tools and I use some of them regularly as a web professional. Most of these social media, web design & development, search, SEO and analytics, e-commerce, blogging and Internet tools are not yet widely known main stream tools. The average webmaster will hopefully find them useful. I selected the 30 most useful tools from the hundreds available out there.

Social Media

• Social Median is a unique combination of a Mixx-like social news site and Ning-like community functionality
• Browzmi is a real time social browsing and chatting tool, it’s like a more social StumbleUpon
• Social Browse is very similar to Browzmi according to NetHackz, invitation only as of now
• Hooeey is half social browsing if you want it to, half a web based browser history that renders bookmarking obsolete according to the site
• Second Brain is often mistakenly referred to as a lifestreaming tool like the popular FriendFeed, but its focus is to collect and organize “all your content” available online
• Muxtape is a very simple kind of music community which allows to listen to predefined user “generated” playlists
• Twitbuzz is a Digg-like interface showing the most popular links on Twitter

Web Design & Development

• Cushy CMS makes any static site a CMS site, it’s so easy I’ll recommend it to my mother who already uses Jimdo
• Pokform is a Jimdo-like Flash online CMS that allows you to create smooth websites with ease, currently it’s a nono for SEO though so you should only use it for an artists or photographers page
• Pingdom allows you to test whether your site is up and how fast it is
• Splashup is the real web based Photoshop, the Adobe online app can’t match
• BricaBox allows you to create your own social site, be it a map mashup site, a wiki, or a voting site. They compare it to Wordpress and Ning to underline the ease of use of creation of a site but it appears to be even easier than WordPress

Search

• Cuil is a new search engine which claims to have more pages indexed than any other, for me its results are as good as Google’s
• Grooveshark Lite is a music search engine that lets you listen to what you find
• Muxtape Stumbler is a music search engine for the Muxtape community
• Picitup is a very advanced visual search engine for images which also allows you to find Creative Commons licensed images you can use for free
• Google GEO Search Tool allows you to see Google results from other locations as Google localizes your results based on your IP usually

SEO and Analytics

• Trifecta by SEOMoz is an updated blog/website worth measuring tool
• Rank Checker by SEOBook, been around for several months now but after more traditional ranking checker software has been crippled recently by Google a very good alternative
• Ranksense is a an advanced SEO software by Hamlet Batista for all those who do go beyond ranking checking, it’s out of beta for a few months now
• Raven SEO Tools, this a a whole web based SEO tool suite which will also track your rankings over time among others
• Woopra is an advanced web analytics suite which can compete with Google Analytics and in some cases offers better and more timely data
• Google Insights for Search is THE new keyword research tool for every webmaster or website owner, it’s Google Trends “on steroids”

E-Commerce

• Shopify is a very simple online shop application virtually anybody can set up a shop now, it’s been around since 2005 and nobody told me!
• PPCalc is a “PayPal fee calculator”. As you know PayPal is very widely used but rather expensive and also not the most reliable solution. I’d recommend Moneybookers as alternative
• ChipIn is a PayPal connected tool that facilitates so called crowdfunding. It’s like crowdsourcing but with money. You ask many people to fund your project

Blogging & Internet

• Feed Compare lets you view and compare the subscriber numbers of blogs using Feedburner for their RSS feeds over time
• BuySellAds does exactly that buy and sell banner ads taking 25% commission, it’s easy to use ideal for bloggers and worked fine for me
• Proxify “is a web-based anonymous proxy service which allows anyone to surf the Web privately and securely.”
• xrl.us by Metamark is the better TinyURL, I use it daily
• issuu is a YouTube like website for magazines and other print publications, you can upload them and allow people to read them only suing a sleek Flash interface

Bonus

• MagMyPic – You always wanted to get famous and end up on the cover of a magazine? Now you can! ;-)

You might know some of these web tools, especially if you’re a SEO expert you probably will know the SEO tools. I made sure that the list contains both the best tools currently available and those which not everybody outside a certain industry knows yet. Also these 30 tools can be used by anybody. You don’t need to be a full fledged web professional for most of these.

Tags: internet tools, tools, web tools
Posted in blogging, seo, social media, website analytics |