For the last five months I’ve been doing a lot of SEO work for the Glasgow storage company Aabsolute Self Storage (www.aabsoluteselfstorage.co.uk), and recently came across a pretty neat little tool. Website Grader (http://www.websitegrader.com/) is one of those many tools that attempts to give you rough data on your site and provide feedback on your pages. There are quite a lot of similar tools out there which do this current statistical judging but the Website Graders interface, speed and even feedback such as Digg submissions and del.icou.us book mark info is rather cool. Also while I’m writing up about SEO I just finished reading the book “The Truth About Search Engine Optimization” by Rebecca Lieb, (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Truth-About-Search-Engine-Optimization/dp/0789738317) and can highly recommend. It doesn’t go into technical detail on web page coding at all, but does provide some very good information on the marketing side of things as well as how the search systems work. Definitely worth £11.99 to anyone who is planning on doing search optimizing.

Recently Aabsolute Self Storage was after a way of modifying and adding to pages or “tweaking” as they put it. As I had already created the pages I wasn’t at all sure of the best way to go around creating an editor for them. I was told members of staff were quite IT savvy but I still wanted to stay away from HTML editing or plain phpBB code insertion. Again suggested by Craig (http://undefinedbehavior.co.uk/), without a shadow of a doubt I can recommend TinyMCE as an excellent text editing tool. Anyone familiar with WordPress or even Microsoft Word will straight away feel at home with the look and layout of this tool. Obviously there is bit more work needed than just adding it to a site if you are wanting to be able to save/edit/overwrite text, but it does offer great help as you know whoever will be assigned to editing will have no problem orientating their selves around the GUI. TinyMCE can be found at http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/.

Here’s a small useful web developing tool I was linked to the other day by Craig over at http://undefinedbehavior.co.uk/ (his site is currently under development but try writing beakable into his sites console interface, pretty nifty). It’s a JavaScript colour scheme designer http://colorschemedesigner.com/ which like many similar tools matches up adequate colours for your primary choice. What makes this colour scheme creator tool more intuitive though is the fact it offers a “Light Page Example” and “Dark Page Example” meaning you can instantly get a rough idea on how the colour scheme would look within a visual template example.