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links for you on-the-fly. It highlights working links in green and broken ones<br />
in red. Simple, but very effective.<br />
HTML Validator (http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/). Lets you check<br />
whether your pages are valid HTML without having to type all their URLs into<br />
an online validity checker. Takes a lot of the pain out of code validation,<br />
which makes you more likely to actually bother to do it!<br />
SearchStatus (http://quirk.co.za/searchstatus/). When you're trying to<br />
monitor your site's position in search engines, this extension is indispensible.<br />
It shows you the Google PageRank and Alexa ranking for your site, giving you<br />
an idea of both the link popularity and traffic the site gets. It also lets you<br />
check who links to your site, and whether the search engines have added it<br />
to their index yet.<br />
Chapter 28: Designing Tools<br />
An Introduction to Paint Shop Pro.<br />
Paint Shop Pro is one of the most popular image editors out there. Even<br />
though it's increasingly geared towards digital photography, you'd be<br />
surprised just how useful it can be to web designers.<br />
Features.<br />
So what features does Paint Shop Pro have? Well, for a start, it supports just<br />
about every image format there has ever been. It can 'smart fix' photos, to<br />
sort out any brightness and color issues, but you can still adjust everything<br />
about your images manually if you want to. You get 'picture tubes', tiny little<br />
pieces of stock photography that can spice up your designs.<br />
You also get all sorts of 'arty' effects that can make your images look like they<br />
were drawn in oils or chalk, and you can even create authentic looking black<br />
and white pictures. The selection tools are second to none, letting you select<br />
areas freehand, by shape, or using other factors like color and brightness.<br />
PSP is especially good at removing foreground elements from their<br />
backgrounds, and letting you combine one image with another using layers.<br />
Finally, of course, all the basics are there – resize, crop, rotate, blur, and so<br />
The Web Design Guide for Newbies |87
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