Cheap and Free Web Design Software Pick of the Week

As a web designer you will find that you often build sites and pages the same way every time. Many people make themselves more efficent by creating templates of their base sites, but deploy* goes one step further and creates the files themselves for you. You can change options like what version of HTML to use (XHTML or not - no HTML 5), CSS with or without resets (or no CSS), jQuery library with plugins or not, and some other miscellaneous options. You can even name your deploy* solution and bookmark the results page to deploy the same options again later.

This generator creates an interesting background image for your website. You input between two and four color values (hex) and it will generate a tiling image that uses gradually changing dots on a gradient background. I created one image based on the colors of my blog, and then tried it out using the random option. It was fun playing around with this generator to see how the different colors interacted to create whole new designs. Once you've found a background you like you can just save the background image.

Here is a neat tool that will help you set the default font size so that you can use ems and still have a good idea of how big the font will display on the screen. Ems don't have an absolute size, but are rather based on the value of the font size in the browser or parent elment. So determining how big an em is can be difficult. But the Em Calculator will help you choose ems that are based on a default size that you set. You put in the size in pixels you want, and the em calculator will tell you how many ems that is (based on a standard text size of 16px).

Choosing a good font for a Web page can be challenging. There is the fact that not everyone has the same fonts on their machine as you do, so creating a good font stack is critical. And using fonts that are standard on Windows and Macintosh is a good idea. But you also need to know what the font will look like with your text and how different fonts render the same text differently. This is especially important with font stacks, as I may have Verdana but not Arial and you may have Arial but not Verdana, and when you view my page, with the same settings, your text will appear more compact than mine. Both Verdana and Arial are sans-serif fonts, but Arial is tighter and results in smaller text blocks. With Font Tester, you can see that immediately. You can even use the text that would appear on your web page to get a really good idea, side-by-side, of what the different fonts in your font stack will look like.