Category Archives: Design

A Guide to Little-Known Image Collections with Millions of Free, Hi-Res Images

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I’m often asked where to go to find high-quality and hi-resolution still images for reuse so I’ve put together this guide.  There have been several new image collections that have opened up to the public just within the past year that not many people are aware of yet, but they offer access to thousands, or in some cases millions of outstanding photographs that can be downloaded for free.  Here’s a quick guide to finding those collections.

 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Last month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art made over 400,000 images available for free download for non-commercial use as a part of its Open Access for Scholarly Content initiative.  These beautiful images include the treasures owned and displayed by the Met such as famous paintings, armor, statues, art objects, and more.  All images can be found on this website and are identified with the acronym OASC.

Wellcome Library

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In January, The Wellcome Library in London made 100,000 art and medicine images available online for open use.  This collection is where to look for offbeat, bizarre photos including medical art of all types including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements.  The images here are absolutely fantastic.  The images may be used for commercial or personal purposes, with an acknowledgement of the original source (Wellcome Library, London).

 

Getty Open Content Images

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Last summer, the J. Paul Getty Trust announced that they will be “making roughly 4,600 high-resolution images of the Museum’s collection free to use, modify, and publish for any purpose.” There are now 87,000+ images in that collection.  Images include paintings, manuscripts, drawings, photographs, and more and feature works by masters Rembrandt, Van Gough, David, and more. Open content images are identified with a “Download” link which can be found by clicking into the “Primary Title” link to access the full record.

 

LIFE Photo Archive

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Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.  Images include famous personalities such as Marilyn Monroe, Charles Lindbergh, etc. as well as photos of American history and Americana.  You can browse the collection from here or add “source:life” to any Google image search and search only the LIFE photo archive. For example: computer source:life.  These are for personal, non-commercial use only.

 

Museum of New Zealand

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The Museum of New Zealand has recently made over 30,000 images available for download and re-use in high resolution as a part of its Collections Online library.  It’s best to search this page after first checking the “with downloadable images” check box so that you only get results that are free for download.  Each image specifies its license, many of which are remixable and have no copyright associated with them at all.

 

NOAA Photo Library

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration makes thousands of stunning high resolution images available for download for free.  The photo library is organized into collections such as the National Weather Service Collection containing over 4,000 weather-related images, the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) Collection, the Fisheries Collection, and many more, see the full list of collections here.  The photos can be viewed by browsing the galleries or the catalogs for each collection.  It’s better to view the catalogs in all cases since not all images are included in the galleries.  Most NOAA photos and slides are in the public domain and CANNOT be copyrighted while a few photos are known to have copyright restrictions are so noted. Credit MUST be given to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce.

 

NARA

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The National Archives and Records Administration offers a fantastic library of photographic images including photos of Churchill and Roosevelt, Nixon and Elvis, JFK and Jackie, World War II photos, and many many more historical photos.  You can find many of them through the above-linked online exhibits page, while others are available on their Flickr page,  and thousands more can be found within their Online Catalog.  All of the U.S. National Archives’ images that are part of The Flickr Commons are marked “no known copyright restrictions.” As for the rest of the site; “generally, materials produced by Federal agencies are in the public domain and may be reproduced without permission.”

 

Read the full post A Guide to Little-Known Image Collections with Millions of Free, Hi-Res Images on OEDB.org.

How to Conduct Library Website Usability Studies for Free

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cardsortWe’re currently redesigning our website at The New York Law Institute library and we our goal has been to create a user-centered design with lots of input from our actual members and users. We started out by conducting a complete heuristic evaluation of our website interface and structure to identify problems and pain points. We also performed a content audit in which we created and analyzed a complete content inventory of our site. See below for some helpful how-to guides to get started with these types of exercises. These were great starting points because we were able to identify and analyze what we currently had to offer as far as our website experience. A redesign doesn’t mean that you throw everything out and start from scratch, so we wanted to leverage what we had that was working but also think about new ways to provide a better user experience. We decided to re-write quite a bit of our content before even starting to build the new redesign and that was an easy and manageable first step.

Guides to Conducting Heuristic Evaluations

 

Guides to Conducting Content Audits

 

After we analyzed our current website structure and content, we came up with a strategy for how we wanted to improve it. We came up with improvements such as making our design responsive so that it would adapt to any size screen for our mobile users, drop-down menus for navigation, a site-wide search that would also allow for catalog and federated search options, an improved events calendar, etc. Next we wanted to use language and navigation that our members would find the most natural. To this end we conducted card sorts, both online and live, face-to-face.

Card Sorting is a method or technique for discovering how website users categorize information so that you can design your information structure in a way which is navigable and findable by your users. The method involves asking participants to sort sets of cards which have items, names, pages, or sections of your website printed on them into groups that make sense to them, and sometimes to assign labels to those groups. This type of usability study can be conducted in person and/or completely online. I have a workshop with step-by-step instructions for implementing a card sort available here. This workshop will also walk you through how to analyze the data you collect from your sort. And please see below for some free online card sorting tools.

 

Free Online Card Sorting Software

The results of the card sort usability tests that we ran were invaluable. We not only gained insight into how our members would prefer our navigational structure to be designed, but we also found out that our members weren’t understanding the way that we worded the names of certain pages. This gave us a chance to rename several parts of our website and see if those page names did any better in the following studies. Card sorts are also a great way to test out a page name that one person on the staff may want, but others disagree on it – it eliminates internal arguments because the results of what users want speak for themselves!

 

Read the full post How to Conduct Library Website Usability Studies for Free on OEDB.org.

How to Create Library (or any other) Floor Plans

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One of my most recent projects in my library involves managing contractors to completely re-wire our floor with network cables. In order to make this easier we attempted to locate a floor plan of the library’s main floor to use for marking up where we wanted the cable to go. But we could only find a poster-sized building plan with little detail. So I decided to create one myself to have on hand, and I can see many other uses for it beyond this such as when we’re moving stacks, to plan renovations, etc.

The best software program I know for creating floor plans is Microsoft Visio. Although I didn’t have it installed, I was able to download a free 60-day trial, and I understand that libraries, educational institutions, and non-profits can get a full license for a fraction of the list cost. Visio allows you to drag and drop shapes onto a canvas to create maps, floor plans, and many other diagrams used in information architecture, network planning, etc.

visio

I hadn’t used the software to design floor plans for years, but the features haven’t changed and it was quite easy to pick up again. I successfully had a floor plan made within an hour before the contractor came to do the walk-through! A resource that helped me was a workshop that I actually designed back in 2005 on how to create maps and floor plans with Microsoft Visio and make them interactive. Although the course is old, the Visio features remain the same. If anyone would like to learn how to create floor plans, they are welcome to download the course. I’ve put all the materials in a shared folder on box.net here: https://app.box.com/shared/9pbrhfprjb

And the accompanying Visio drawings may be downloaded here: http://ellyssakroski.com//Visio_diagrams.zip

Read the full post How to Create Library (or any other) Floor Plans on OEDB.org.

LegalTech: Bolstering KM Through User Experience Design

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The Advanced IT track at the LegalTech New York 2014 conference discussed the use of UX (user experience) design in law firms.

The panel included Andrew Baker, Director of Legal Technology Innovations Office at Seyfarth Shaw LLP, Tom Baldwin, Chief Knowledge Officer at Reed Smith LLP, Patrick DiDomenico, Director of Knowledge Management at  Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, P.C., and Kate Simpson at Tangledom Inc.

Kate Simpson set the tone by discussing UX as a profession, a practice, and a process, explaining that it’s about people, not devices.  She mentioned Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” which is one of my favorites in this arena.

Tom Baldwin discussed “Driving Adoption Through UI and Gamification” and talked about what new initiatives they’ve been developing at Reed Smith. The most interesting was the matter profiling app they designed which uses leaderboards spotlighting the top profilers as incentive.  They also improved upon their last app by illustrating that the user need only go through a 2-step process in order to successfully complete the matter profile.  By using this new reward system, they’ve seen an increase to 300 matters profiled per month over the 130 with the old app.  They’ve used leaderboards in their other custom applications as well as transforming their firm directory into a LinkedIn-like interface, and switched their display of financial reporting to using data visualizations for easier digestion.

Read the full post LegalTech: Bolstering KM Through User Experience Design on OEDB.org.

An All-in-One Guide to the Maker Culture and 3D Printing

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The maker culture is a thriving movement amongst all types of people who want to create and design their own objects, crafts, or computer code.  This DIY community is using state-of-the-art technology such as 3D printers to design and craft their own 3D objects.  This introductory guide will give you an overview of today’s maker movement, resources for getting started, 3D printer reviews, links to actual project designs and instructions, maker publications, events, and directories, videos about 3D printing and maker culture, and an article list of resources about libraries and makerspaces.

 

    What is the Maker Movement?

  1. The Maker Movement
    This is an excellent article from Raising Geeks about the beginnings and evolution of the Maker movement.  It provides a wealth of links to articles, videos, resources, and community locations of makerspaces.  It’s a must-read for anyone looking into the maker culture.
  2. Maker culture
    This Wikipedia article gives a great overview of the Maker movement and provides plenty of links to similar subcultures such as hackerspaces, DIY culture, etc.
  3. Is the ‘Maker Movement’ the next Industrial Revolution?
    ZDNet writers provide a great article on the maker culture with this piece which describes the movement as a “social revolution”.
  4. What Is the Maker Movement and Why Should You Care?
    The Huffington Post’s Tech blog has an exellent article discussing the maker culture, here’s just a snippet: “Craft nights are replacing book clubs. Libraries and museums are being turned into “Makerspaces,” physical locations where people can come together to make. The sale of sewing kits in Walmart stores has recently gone up 30 percent. And just last year, someone created Christmas cookies using a 3D printer.”

    5.  

    make_3d

    Getting Started Guides

  5. Make: Ultimate Guide to 3D Printing
    Make magazine has some excellent guides to getting started with 3D printing including their special issue, The Ultimate Guide to 3D Printing which is available online.
  6. 3D Printing for Beginners
    This website provides many guides for getting started.  Newbies will be taught the ins and outs of 3D modeling software, what materials to use for 3D printing, and much more.
  7. How to Get Started with 3D Printing (Without Spending a Fortune)
    The folks at Lifehacker have put together this great guide to getting started with 3D printing.  They provide videos, ideas inspiration, and 3D printer reviews.
  8. Introduction to 3D Printing
    This is a great guide from Instructables that will set you on your way to 3D printing bliss.  It discusses technologies, printers, materials, Online communities and services, designing and printing, and examples.

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    Check out the full post An All-in-One Guide to the Maker Culture and 3D Printing on iLibrarian.

10 Futuristic Libraries

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I’ve been fortunate enough to visit many different types of libraries around the world and I really enjoy the architecture and design of today’s modern libraries. Many libraries today are striving to be innovative and cutting-edge though the design of their buildings as well as their services and resources. Here are ten libraries that look as if they have been transported back from the future.

1) Vennesla Library and Culture House

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Located in Vennesla, Norway, the Vennesla Library and Culture House looks like something out of a futuristic sci-fi movie. This unusual space contains a library, a café, meeting spaces, administrative areas, and links to an existing community house and learning centre. More coverage here.

 

2 ) University of Chicago Mansueto Library

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The Library at the University of Chicago has been designed to maximize the physical space in the library sporting an 8,000-square-foot main reading room under a glass paneled dome. But keeping scholars in mind, the library has a massive underground storage facility holding 3.5 million volumes which are retrieved by by robotic systems. More coverage here.

 

3) Stuttgart City Library

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The Stuttgart City Library is a stunning new media center located with a five-story atrium and an all-white interior. This futuristic-looking library is located in Stuttgart, Germany. More coverage here.

 

4) Matadero Theater and Library

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Dark walls and flooring in the interior of the Matadero Theater and Library are illuminated by bright lights set in contrast for a dramatic effect. This incandescent library is located in Madrid, Spain. More coverage here.

 

5) Philological Library of the Free University

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Located on the campus of the Free University of Berlin in Germany, the Philological Library was designed in the shape of a human brain by architect Norman Foster. The library’s collection is over 700,000 volumes. More coverage here.

 

6) Kanazawa Umimirai Library

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Located in Kanazawa, Japan, this stunning library building is perforated with 6,000 holes in its concrete exterior which are filled with glass to provide natural light to its 12 metre-high reading room. More coverage here.

 

7) Seattle Central Library

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Seattle Public Library’s Central Library branch is a stunning 11-story, glass and steel information mecca. With over 1.5 million books in its 4-story “Books Spiral”, 400 public access computers, automatic book sorting and conveyance, and self-checkout for patrons, Seattle Central embodies the idea of the modern library. I had a chance to visit this library last month while attending the AALL Annual Conference and it was absolutely breathtaking. More coverage here.

 

8) Dalian Public Library

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Located in Dalian, China, this modern library was designed to weave itself into the surrounding ground area in order to root itself and create a series of courtyards and topographic undulations, drawing visitors in to its unique environment. More coverage here.

 

9) The Royal Danish Library (The Black Diamond)

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An extension of the Royal Danish Library, the largest library in the Nordic countries, the Black Diamond sits on the waterfront of Copenhagen. The black granite exterior reflects the water of the harbor and it absolutely stunning. I was lucky enough to visit this library when I was in Copenhagen, and it’s a sight to see! More coverage here.

 

10) Nam June Paik Library

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Made up of cubes of transparent blocks, the Nam June Paik Library in the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yong-In, South Korea holds 3,000 books and exhibition catalogues as well as periodicals and audio video materials. This unusual space houses reading areas, computer stations, video screens and book shelves, all of which are incorporated into the library’s transparent blocked walls. More coverage here.

The post 10 Futuristic Libraries appeared first on OEDB.org.

The Ultimate, Mega, Essential Website Design Guide – 115 Tools and Resources

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Whether you’re building your first website or re-designing an existing one for your organization, this all-in-one guide will get you started with tools and resources for creating today’s modern websites.

    Website Tools – Content Management Systems

    There are many tools available to today’s website designers ranging from simple html to robust content management systems. These CMS systems all have the ability to create, store, and display large quantities of information as well as syndicate content throughout the your website and beyond.

    Articles & Resources

  1. Top 12 Free Content Management Systems
  2. Top 10 Most Usable Content Management Systems
  3. Examples of Libraries Using Content Management Systems

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    Tools

  4. Drupal – This popular application is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.
  5. WordPress – This free open-source content management system and blogging platform has become one of the most used software products for designing websites with over 60 million installations.  Both the iLibrarian blog and my professional website are powered by WordPress.
  6. Joomla – This is also a free and very popular open source content management system with over 35 million dowloads to date.
  7. Expression Engine – This Content Delivery Platform,has been around for over a decade and this popular content management system powers sites such as Disney, Apple, and Adobe.  It’s built on an open source PHP framework.

    8.  

    Information Design & Navigation

    Web users spend an average of 8–10 seconds and three clicks on your Web site looking for what they need before they get frustrated and click away. Whether you are developing a new Web site or redesigning an existing one, it is imperative to determine an intuitive and usable navigational structure and taxonomy for your user community.  These articles and tools will help you do just that.

    Articles & Resources

  8. Guide to Website Navigation Design Patterns
  9. Do You Make These 7 Website Navigation Design Mistakes
  10. 50+ Gorgeous Navigation Menus
  11. 21 Examples of Excellent Navigation Menus in Web Design

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    Tools – Boilerplates

  12. HTML5 Boilerplate – A boilerplate template for HTML5 apps or sites.  Comes with optimized Google Analytics snippet; placeholder touch-device icons; and docs covering dozens of extra tips and tricks as well as jQuery and Modernizr libraries.
  13. 960 Grid – The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem.
  14. Bootstrap – A sleek, intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development. Includes responsive CSS as well.
  15. Less Framework 4 – A CSS grid system for designing adaptive web­sites. It contains 4 layouts and 3 sets of typography presets, all based on a single grid.
  16. Foundation – The most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world – and it’s free!

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    Graphic Design

    Graphic designers need to think about things like color theory and usage, optimal image placement, layout design and much more.  These articles and tools on graphic design theory will help you get a handle on how you can best design an aesthetically pleasing website.

    Articles & Resources

  17. 50 Totally Free Lessons in Graphic Design Theory
  18. Graphic Design Theory: 50 Resources and Articles
  19. 20 Vital Techniques & Best Practices For Effective Web Design

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    Tools

  20. Adobe Photoshop – One of the most popular graphics editing software programs on the market, Adobe Photoshop enables you to do just about anything with images and has a vast array of tools for creating graphics.
  21. Gimp – (GNU Image Manipulation Program) – This is a free open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop.  Similar to Photoshop, it has tools for image editing and creating original graphics.
  22. Adobe Kuler – upload, create, and edit color schemes
  23. Pixel Dropr – create sets of icons, illustrations, photos, buttons etc. that you can drag and drop into any photoshop image.
  24. PLTTS – easily create and find color palettes based on hex #’s
  25. Pictaculous – Upload an image and it will produce a color palette instantly.
  26. Dribble – Get graphic design inspiration and search by color.

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    CSS

    CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a language that’s used to describe the presentation of a Web page.  It includes elements such as fonts, layout, and colors and allows designers to specify very granular rules about formatting and presentation for each.  Here are some resources to get you started creating your own CSS style sheets.

    Articles & Resources

  27. 30 CSS Best Practices for Beginners – Net Tuts
  28. CSS Tutorial – W3Schools.com
  29. A List Apart – Articles specifically on CSS.
  30. CSS-Tricks – Forums, articles, videos, and tutorials on CSS

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    Tools

  31. CSS Beautifier – Type or paste in unformatted CSS and have it beautified automatically so that it’s consistent and easy to read.
  32. Reset CSS
  33. CSS3 Click Chart – This is a fantastic reference tool for CSS3 attributes with code examples, descriptions, links, tutorials, polyfills, tools, and browser support info for all new CSS3 features.
  34. Patternizer – An easy to use online tool which enables you to generate CSS3 stripes in an online interface, allowing you to customize the space in between each stripe and then provides the code.
  35. Sprite Box – A WYSIWYG tool to help Web designers quickly and easily create CSS classes and ID’s from a single sprite image.
  36. Primer – Paste in your HTML and Primer will pull out all of your classes and id’s and placing them into a starter stylesheet
  37. Mincss – Clears the junk out of your CSS by comparing each and every selector in the CSS to find out which ones aren’t being used.
  38. CSSCSS – CSSCSS will parse any CSS files you give it and let you know which rulesets have duplicated declarations.

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    Social Media Integration

    Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter are used by millions of people worldwide which is why it’s essential to strive to incorporate those sites’ functionality into your own.  Here are some articles and tools to help you best leverage the power of social media sites within your own website.

    Articles & Resources

  39. 3 Ways to Integrate Social Media into Your Website – Web Ascender
  40. How to easily integrate Social Media into your website – 1st Web Designer
  41. 9 Tips for Integrating Social Media on Your Website -  Social Media Examiner

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    Tools

  42. Add This – Easily create “Share This” and “Follow” buttons for over 300+ social media services (Facebook, Twitter and more)
  43. ShareThis -  Quickly create “Share” buttons for your website with this easy-to-use tool.
  44. Facebook Comments Box – The Comments box is a social plugin that enables people to comment on your site. Features include moderation tools and distribution.
  45. Facebook Like Button – The Like button is a simple plugin that lets people quickly share content on Facebook.
  46. Gigya Activity Feed – The Activity Feed plugin allows users to see the latest actions on a site, according to who performed the actions.

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    Coding Tools

    There are a lot of excellent tools and resources available to assist website designers in creating and editing their sites as well as adding new functionality.  Here are a few to get you going:

    Articles & Resources

  47. Best Free HTML Editors    Gizmo’s Freeware
  48. HTML TOOLBOX: 30+ HTML Tools and Tutorials – Mashable
  49. SuperheroJs – A collection of the best articles, videos and presentations on the topic of creating, testing and maintaining a large JavaScript code base.

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    Tools – jQuery & JavaScript

  50. JQuery Mention Input – This plugin will give your website the ability to mention out to friends by tagging them with @.
  51. Chardin.js – Add overlay instructions to your apps with this jQuery plugin.
  52. JSFiddle – This web-based editor allows you to create JavaScript, HTML, and CSS and see the results in real-time.
  53. FitText.js – A jQuery plugin for inflating web type and also making font-sizes flexible and responsive.
  54. JSLint – Created by Douglas Crockford, JSLint checks JavaScript code against best coding conventions for quality assurance.

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    Tools -HTML Editors

  55. Adobe Dreamweaver – This is my preferred HTML editor.  It has a streamlined user interface, connected tools, and new visual CSS editing tools that let you code efficiently and intuitively.
  56. Adobe Brackets – Brackets is an open-source editor for web design and development built on top of web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
  57. CodePen – An HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code editor right in your browser with instant previews of the code you see and write.

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    Tools -Misc

  58. Site Validator – This service lets you validate HTML5 and CSS3 on your whole site with a single click.

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    Responsive Website Design

    Responsive Web Design (RWD) is, in a nutshell, all about designing your website so that it can be optimally viewed on a wide range of devices such as tablets, smartphones, laptops, etc. The idea is to design and maintain one website that can be viewed on all.  Here are tools and resources to help you do just that:

    Articles & Resources

  59. 85 Top Responsive Web Design Tools
  60. 16 Top Tools for Responsive Web Design
  61. 50 Useful Responsive Web Design Tools For Designers

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    Tools

  62. Responsive Nav – A tiny JavaScript plugin which helps you to create a toggled navigation for small screens.
  63. Gridset – Enables Web designers to design and build responsive grid-based layouts and offers a selection of presets.
  64. Respond.js – A javascript snippet of code which allows media queries to be compatible with older versions of browsers that lack support for them.
  65. Responsive Tables – A simple JS/CSS combo that will let your tables adapt to small device screens “without everything going to hell”.
  66. Adaptive Images – Detect your visitor’s screen size then automatically creates, caches and delivers device-appropriate re-scaled versions of your HTML images.

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    UX/Usability

    Usability tests, card sorts, focus groups, and more are all used by website designers in an effort to create user-driven designs and deliver an engaging user experience to their visitors. Learn how to use these inexpensive techniques to understand how your users think about your Web site and its content.

    Articles & Resources

  67. Best books on usability and web interface design
  68. UX Magazine
  69. Usability 101: Introduction to Usability -Jakob Nielsen
  70. Smashing Magazine – UX Category
  71. Card Sorting from A–Z – iLibrarian Series
  72. 18 Usability Resources for Librarians – iLibrarian

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    Tools- Wireframing & Mockups

  73. Microsoft Visio Professional – This is my favorite wire-framing tool, Visio is a powerful diagramming platform with a rich set of built-in stencils that lets you create wireframes, maps, and many other types of charts and diagrams.
  74. Mockingbird – an online tool that makes it easy for you to create, link together, preview, and share mockups of your website or application.
  75. Mockup Builder – A prototyping application that helps you design software or websites by making it easy to create mockups of the finished project.
  76. Balsamiq Mockups – Online wireframing tool with 75 built-in user interface components and 187 icons.
  77. Moqups – a nifty HTML5 App used to create wireframes, mockups or UI concepts, and prototypes.
  78. Mockflow is a super-easy wireframing tool that enables you to design and collaborate on user interface concepts for your software and websites.

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    Tools – Usability Testing

  79. Websort – Card sorting application
  80. OptimalSort – Card sorting application
  81. Feedback Army – Set up usability tests in as little as 2 minutes for $20.
  82. UserTesting.com – Set up a usability test and submit it for review from a user base of over 1 million participants.
  83. Silverback 2.0 – Guerrilla usability testing software for designers and developers.

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    SEO

    SEO or search engine optimization is all about improving or “optimizing” your ranking in search engine results in an effort to increase traffic to your website.  Techniques for accomplishing this vary according to individual search engine.  Here are some helpful resources to improve your website’s rank.

    Articles & Resources

  84. What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization? – SearchEngineLand
  85. Search Engine Optimization Guide – Google
  86. The Beginner’s Guide to SEO – Moz
  87. Advanced Guide to SEO – QuickSprout/ Neil Patel
  88. SEO Book’s Search Engine Optimization Tools Directory

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    Tools

  89. Google Rich Snippets – Customize and preview the way your website will display in Google search results.  Rich snippets offer  markup help to enhance your search results listings.
  90. GetListed – Claim your local U.S. business listings on Google+ Local, Bing Local, Yelp, and other prominent local search engines.
  91. Google Website Optimizer – Website testing and optimization tool that allows you to increase the value of your existing websites and traffic without spending a cent -  now a part of Google Analytics.
  92. Meta Tag Generator – Instantly create meta tags that can be pasted into your site by entering the page title and description with this quick tool.
  93. Spider Test Tool – This is a search engine indexing simulator tool that shows the source code of a page, all outbound links on the page, and common words and phrases found in the page copy.
  94. Google AdWords Keyword Tool – This is a great way to get keyword ideas and find the best text for your audience. Identify what words or phrases will drive the most traffic to your site.

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    Accessibility

    Designing an accessible website includes accomodating visually impaired visitors, visitors that utilize voice reading devices, and visitors that turn off images.  Here are some excellent resources to help you design an accessible website.

    Articles & Resources

  95. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0
  96. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Overview – Web Accessibility Initiative
  97. Section 508 Standards
  98. State Accessibility Laws, Policies, Standards and Other Resources (U.S.)
  99. Improve Your Website’s Accessibility With the W3C’s ‘Guide to Using ARIA’ – Webmonkey

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    Tools

  100. Browser Emulator – See what your site looks like on many ancient browsers.
  101. 38 Mobile Browser Emulators
  102. IE Tester – Browser Compatibility Check for Internet Explorer Versions from 5.5 to 10
  103. Colorblind Web Page Filter -  See what your website looks like for the colorblind.
  104. Wave Accessibility Evaluation Tool
  105. HiSoftware CynthiaSays™ Portal – A joint education and outreach project of HiSoftware, ICDRI, and the Internet Society Disability and Special Needs Chapter. Cynthia Says educates users in the concepts behind website accessibility.
  106. Accessibility Evaluation Toolbar 1.5.7.1 for Firefox- Supports web developers in testing web resources for accessibility features.
  107. Fangs Screen Reader Emulator 1.0.8 for Firefox – Fangs renders a text version of a web page similar to how a screen reader would read it. The ambition is to help developers understand how an assistive device would present a website and thereby increase chances of finding accessibility issues early.

    108.  

    Analytics

    Analytics tools are an invaluable way to show the ROI of marketing campaigns, popularity and usability of website content, value of blog posts, social media influence, and much more.

    Articles & Resources

  108. Web analytics -  Wikipedia
  109. Web Analytics Tools – SEOBook
  110. Web Analytics Category – Mashable
  111. 4 Analytics Tools Librarians Should Know About -  iLibrarian
  112. Google Analytics for Libraries by Joe Morgan – 50 page book on using GAnalytics in Libraries.

    113.  

    Tools

  113. Google Analytics – Free tool that lets you access robust reports indicating the total number of visitors to your website, their demographic, browser, and engagement information.
  114. SiteMeter – Similar to Google Analytics, this free tool provides a quick snapshot of traffic to your website.
  115. Open Web Analytics – An open source web analytics software that you can use to track and analyze how people use your websites and applications.

 

 

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