Brighton Web Design by Code 7

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The browser wars!

You can see worldwide internet browser statistics at w3schools, these are updated regularly and important to be aware of as web sites will display differently in different browsers and different versions, Code 7 test your site in all the listed browsers.

Which browser should I use?

Most PC users utilise Internet Explorer as it is bundled with Windows, Internet Explorer 7 has been available for some time now, you can check your version by going to 'Help' and then 'About Internet Explorer'.

There are different options however, our (and many others now) favourite being Mozilla Firefox, a fantastic and free standards compliant, open source browser, available for mac and pc, fast, secure and customisable.

Opera is another good option for PC or Mac users, (also the Nintendo Wii's choice of browser!).

Camino is are available for the Mac only with Safari, the long standing Mac browser now also available for Windows.

Support for Netscape products has now officially ended.

Email client

Mozilla Thunderbird is good choice as an alternative to applications such as Microsoft Outlook, a free email client with hundreds of useful add-ons available.

Complete Office Alternatives

A complete alternative Microsoft Office solution, is available at Open Office, open source and primarily sponsored by Sun Microsystems, this is multi platform / language and compatible with Microsoft Office file types.

Another option is available at Think Free, this software is used online and is the future for many applications!

Virus Checkers

AVG provide a free virus checker, for home and non-commercial use it protects your system against viruses, worms and trojans.

They also have free versions of Anti-Spyware, protects you against spyware, adware and identity-theft.

Finally they also provide a free Anti Rootkit, rootkits are used to hide the presence of a malicious object like trojans or keyloggers on your computer.

If you don't have any anti-virus software you should download these asap!

Internet Statistics

1.3 billion people use the internet worldwide, see the stats for worldwide internet users and population stats at Internet World Stats.

What is the trend in browser usage, display colours and screen resolution? The current trend is that more and more computers are using a screen size of 1024x768 pixels or more but many users still use 800x600 and is usually the preferred size for web sites, if you know your users are going to have higher resolutions, your site can be made to this spec, see w3Schools for the latest stats.

The global top 500 website's as provided by Alexa, the web information company. Popularity is ranked by the number of hits, so with regard to search engines, although yahoo and MSN can appear higher, they have popular mail services etc, Google is the most widely used search engine in the world at present.

More stats, this time from the UK government, how many households in the UK with internet access, and how many use broadband? Thousands of other UK stats are available here if you like that sort of thing..

Photo & image manipulation

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of open source software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages and is a free alternative to software such as Photoshop.

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

What is open source?

Open source is a set of principles and practices on how to write software, the most important of which is that the source code is openly available.

The Open Source Definition, which was created by Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond and is currently maintained by the Open Source Initiative, adds additional meaning to the term: one should not only get the source code but also have the right to use it.

Tools & utilities

For more tools and utilities try The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities, there are also other useful links on this page regarding speeding up your PC.

HTML character codes HTML decimal codes, character entities and hex codes.

W3C Markup Validation Service: XHTML Validator

W3C CSS Validation Service: CSS Validator

XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start.

FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. Get Filezilla Client.

Instant Eyedropper is a free software tool for webmasters that will identify and automatically paste to the clipboard the HTML color code of any pixel on the screen with just a single mouse click.

This is where you can download the MySQL GUI Tools Bundle for 5.0. It includes the following products which are also supported for MySQL 5.1.

• MySQL Administrator 1.2
• MySQL Query Browser 1.2
• MySQL Migration Toolkit 1.1