Friendly Web Tools Blog

There are billions of fonts out there, which makes it darned difficult to identify one by sight. That’s doubly difficult if someone presents you with a graphic of a font. You can’t exactly look that one up in the font drop-down menu in Word.

Instead, you plug it into What the Font?! In their words, “Upload a scanned image of the font and instantly find the closest matches in our database.”

And it works amazingly well for identifying a mysterious typeface.

It’s a good probability that at least one in 20 people can’t see everything on your website. That’s because a higher number of people than you probably expected are color blind in some way. Some statistics I’ve seen say that as many as 18 percent of people have some kind of visual limitation.

Around 90 percent of the people I tell this fact to are shocked - the rest know it because they’re used to not seeing everything on a website. But what if they’re missing something terribly important, like a news alert or a call for contributions or all your website navigation?

I love the Colorblind Web Page Filter because it makes it easy to see what your website might look like through a color-deficient eyes, those that can’t see red/green or blue/yellow.

For some help choosing the right high-contrast colors for your site, try the Color Laboratory. It’s handy because it “allows you to select colors and see how they appear next to one another, and in various foreground/background combinations. It also allows you to see those colors as they might appear to color-blind users.”

Makes the incredibly important job of picking the right colors easier.

My friend Aaron Spiegel from the Alban Institutes’s Center for Congregations dug up an interesting commentary on the sins of church websites, “10 Easy Ways to Keep Me from Visiting Your Church Because I Visited Your Website,” which he sites here.

The original post was written several years ago, and while some church websites have redeemed themselves, I’ve seen many, many synagogue sites that need serious overhauls. Same goes for any nonprofit.

The important thing to keep in mind is that people make judgments about your organization based on your website. Calendars are extremely useful tools, for instance, but I’d rather see no calendar at all than one that’s outdated by a year. Ignoring your site is worse than having no site at all.

I admit to an obsession: I must know where you’ve been clicking when you go to the Talance.com website. And an excellent service I found today is only fueling my need.

CrazyEgg is a tool that lets you see in different graphical formats where people are clicking on your website, or what are known as hotspots. This isn’t to say the most popular pages, but where people are clicking once they arrive at a particular page.

This is very revealing information. It’ll tell you, for instance the most commonly accessed areas of your site, so you can put premium information there. It also tells you if there’s a disparity between where you’re thinking people are clicking and where they actually are.

And I love that it tells you graphically, for instance in heatmaps:

Or with confetti:

What I like most about CrazyEgg is that it’s free. At least a stripped-down version is. If you want heavy coverage for a big site, you can sign up for a monthly plan.

At first glance, you may think kuler from Adobe Labs is little more than online paint chips. But imagine paint chips in dazzling combinations that have been rated for effectiveness and beauty by a network of people. It’s an excellent tool for choosing colors for web and print projects, and an interesting community to become involved in.

I haven’t tested it, but WebAssist has a plug-in that lets you use kuler with Dreamweaver for on-the-fly color combos.