Free Online Content Management and Web Dev Tours
Most of us web workers are familiar with the many free trials for various software applications and services that are available. However, these often require downloads, installation and action to be taken if you choose not to buy a given product. If you’re interested on trying out content management systems, or improving your web development skills, though, there are some good download-free sites you may appreciate.
Open source fans, and anyone interesting in investigating a good content management system, should definitely try OpensourceCMS. This site gives you an adminstrator username and password for full access to building out content on top PHP- and MySQL-based content management systems. You can try everything from Drupal to Joomla, and see in real-time how you can organize and beautify your online content.
OpenSourceCMS provides a demo window that gets refreshed every two hours, so you won’t be able to build out the entire portal you’re dreaming of, but you can get an excellent sense of how many powerful content management systems work. The site is a very good way to identify what pleases you and annoys you as you build out a site.
If you’re involved in any type of web development, look into the interactive lessons on various development topics available at W3Schools. Need to brush up on your CSS? Take a look down the left rail of this site’s tutorial for how much you can learn, and how you can plug in real examples and see what your finished pages will look like. The site also has free tutorials on HTML, XHMTL, JavaScript, PHP, AJAX, .NET, Flash and much more.
The approach at W3Schools is to allow you to input HTML, CSS specifications, and much more, then submit your changes to a miniature version of a web page that shows you what your input will look like when published. To say this works better than learning, say, AJAX out of a book is an understatement.
Do you know of any download-free sites on the web for testing applications or improving skills?
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I’d recommend http://www.psdtuts.com and the new http://www.nettuts.com
For checking on prospective SEO clients, helping new web clients find out who their host and registrar are (some don’t know) etc etc… http://domaintools.com
Domaintools is helpful to a wide variety of web service providers. My personal needs are in the SEO text browser… I can not only evaluate how a site is seen by text readers and search engines, but I can easily show the link to a client and they can see too.
May God continue to bless you as you continue to provide quality and informative substance to your posts. God Bless – Rev. Jim Wilson