SlickPlan doesn’t really differentiate between creating a web site plan or a flowchart, which can be a little confusing at first. But once you realize that it uses the same tool for both, you can quickly start adding items to a chart. The tool is fairly simple: You click the “Add a New Page” to add a bubble (whether it represents a page on a web site or an item on your chart) and select the page or item under which it will be located.” You also have a side bar listing each element and allowing you to move, edit or delete individual pieces. There aren’t a lot of fancy bells and whistles — but you won’t miss them. Instead, SlickPlan does one thing particularly well, allowing you to create a chart in no time flat. Even better, any project you put together with SlickPlan is clean and attractive enough to send out to clients comfortably.

Once you’ve got a chart or site map put together, SlickPlan offers you a few different options on what you can do with it. Most importantly, you can save it and work on it later. You can also save multiple versions of a project. By opening up individual projects, you can access an HTML embed code that allows you to add your chart to other sites, export your project as a PDF and send a link to anyone you need to look at your chart. You can save an unlimited number of projects to your SlickPlan account at this point.

There are a few places where SlickPlan could use a little bit of polish. The application itself is easy enough to use, but the way certain buttons are labeled can make it seem like you can only create site plans, rather than use it for flowcharts and other options — uses that are specifically mentioned on the application’s web site. The application was developed by Atomic Interactive, a web development studio. SlickPlan was not created for a client, however; instead, it’s more of an internal tool meant to eliminate the frustration of trying to build site maps in Illustrator or InDesign. The resulting application makes knocking out a fast chart easy.

You may find that SlickPlan is not quite so useful if you want to add notes about individual elements or need to make more elaborate charts. In such scenarios, you may want to consider a more robust tool. Otherwise, it’s a useful tool at the right price. SlickPlan’s developers intend to keep it free, as well, relying on ads and donations to cover the site’s costs.

What tools do you use to create flowcharts?

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In this post, I’ll cover an excellent book about Blender, available for free online. Blender is a robust 3D graphics and animation application that can help you create eye-popping graphics for web sites, blogs and documents.

If you’re unfamiliar with Blender, take a look at the gallery posted here for the quality of graphics you can produce with this free application (available in Windows, Mac and Linux flavors). It’s actually been used to produce respected full-length 3D movies but is also more than capable of helping you give a web site, a blog or documents a distinctive, eye-catching look with still 3D graphics. The screenshot above was created by a member of the Blender community, and it’s a drawing, not a photo.

Learning to use Blender is a lot of fun and adds a useful tool to your graphics repertoire. “Blender Basics, Second Edition” is an exhaustive, free online book, downloadable as a 120-page PDF here. It takes you through 2D and 3D graphics creation, how to add lighting effects, and much more. The animation aspects of the book won’t necessarily be of interest to all web workers, but still might be fun to try out.

On OStatic, we also recently covered Linuxtopia, a site that houses a huge number of tutorials. Don’t let the name fool you if you’re not a Linux user. The site includes very complete guides on many free, non-Linux applications and platforms.

For example, you can find thorough guides on virtualization (useful for running dual operating systems), beginning Java programming, the GIMP (a powerful open-source graphics application), web development tools, and much more. Look down the left rail of Linuxtopia for the many free online guides that are available.

Share your Blender tips and tricks in the comments.

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Everyone, especially computer people, love lists of resources. I do as well, and I decided it’s time to share many of the resources that have helped me in my career. All of these resources (except for the print books) are either freeware, open source, or the application offers a free version.

Firefox

• Firebug – Essential tool for CSS/JavaScript debugging.
• YSlow – Firebug add-on to help determine performance bottlenecks.
• Web Developer Toolbar – Provides tools to compliment Firebug.
• Fireftp – The best FTP client and in a browser no less!
• Dust-Me Selectors – Scans the page against your current style sheet to determine extraneous styles.
• Server Spy – See the server technology for current page.
• Colorzilla – Awesome color picker.
• HTML Validator – Validate pages and clean them with this tool.
• IE Tab – View pages in IE inside Firefox.
• Selenium IDE – Record and playback end-user testing.
• X-Ray – Bookmarklet to examine elements in DOM.

Web Worker Applications

• Box.net – Backup your files with this tremendous tool.
• Harvest – Time tracking utility.
• Jott – Record messages from your phone and add them to various applications.
• Gliffy – MS Visio replacement for diagramming.
• Yugma – Free video conferencing.
• 101 Essential Freelancing Resources – Need more than we’ve got here?

Print Books

• Designing with Web Standards – A great introduction to web standards design by Jeffrey Zeldman.
• CSS: A Definitive Guide – Eric Meyer’s magnum opus on CSS.
• Don’t Make Me Think! – The acclaimed introduction to usability.
• Codin’ For the Web – Great book to teach application development to designers.
• Web Design in a Nutshell – Invaluable desktop reference.

Online Books

• Version Control with Subversion – Introduction to the precepts of Subversion.
• Getting Real – 37 Signals famous work on design.
• O’Reilly Library – Various O’Reilly books you can read online.
• The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web

Tutorials

• W3Schools.com – XHTML, CSS, PHP, SQL, XML, etc.
• Good Tutorials – Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator, PHP, HTML, etc.
• PHP for the Absolute Beginner
• ASP.NET 2.0 Quickstart Tutorial
• Learn CSS Positioning in 10 Easy Steps

Editors

• CSS Vista = Neat CSS editor.
• PSPad – Simple, fast editor that I used for a long time.
• Aptana – Editor built on Eclipse that, I think, is the best out there.
• Microsoft Visual Web Developer – Free MS editor to create ASP.NET applications.
• SQLYog – GUI interface to MySQL.
• SQL Server Management Studio Express – The free edition of the GUI to SQL Server.

Templates

• Open Source Web Design
• Themebot – Themes for Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, and phpBB among others.
• Open Web Design
• The Open Design Community
• The CSS Tinderbox – CSS layouts.
• Little Boxes – CSS layouts.

Project Management/Version Control

• Assembla – Free TRAC/Subversion workspaces.
• TRAC – Slim, extensible SDLC tool.
• Subversion – The great open source source control.
• TortoiseSVN – GUI interface into Subversion via Windows shell.
• AnkhSVN – Browse Subversion repositories inside Visual Studio.

Testing/Validators

• UITest.com
• The Scrutinizer – SEO validators and analysis.
• Test Everything!
• Web Site Tools
• WAMP - Apache, MySQL, and PHP on Windows

Application Comparison

• Wiki Matrix – Compare wiki applications.
• Forum Matrix – Compare forum applications.
• WebBlog Matrix – Compare blog applications.
• The CMS Matrix – Compare CMS applications.
• OpenSourceCMS – Demo various CMS’.

Web Designer Blogs/News Aggregation

• Design Float – Digg style site for designers.
• Web Developer’s Handbook – More resources then you could ever need.
• CSS Juice – CSS tips and utilities.
• Smashing Magazine – The best resource for resources.
• .net Develop – Cutting-edge articles on web technology best practices.

Chris Poteet is a web application developer under his company name, Siolon.

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