12 Free Essential Tools to Enhance your Website

A list of 12 tools, scripts, and services that you can use for free to enhance your website.

ShareThis

What you want for your site is to make it simple and easy for your visitors to share your content across the web. ShareThis makes it enormously simple and easy for you to add to add these options to your website. With one button, you can allow your visitors to share links on your site throughout the web's most popular networking websites. The site also offers a variety of statistics for you to monitor the most popular networks where your content is being shared on. Plus, the new button actually looks pretty cool. Click here to visit the ShareThis website to learn more about the button.

Of course, there are alternatives such as AddThis and the act of adding the specific service buttons yourself. Click here to learn more about adding share options to your website.

reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA is a powerful security captcha system that you can easily implement into different features of your site. The site offers simple instructions on how to set it up where you wish to block spam.

Lightbox 2

Lightbox 2 has taken the internet by storm as a JavaScript-powered image gallery script. It's a highly impressive script that you can use to enhance your website if it could use it. If you haven't noticed, it's the same script that the Firefox Add-ons website uses to preview add-on screenshots. You can download Lightbox 2 on its main web page.

Dropdown Menus

For a website that is very heavy in content, displaying dropdown menus can be an excellent way to simplify site navigation. I've found two amazing dropdown scripts that you can implement in your website for free. The first, is a very slick JavaScript dropdown menu script by Leigeber.com. The second is purely CSS dropdown menu script by PureCSSMenu.com. You should take a look at both and see which one you prefer. The advantage with the second option is that the menu will still work when the visitor has JavaScript turned off, which makes the menu something you can rely on a bit more than usual.

DISQUS Comments

DISQUS Comments is a powerful commenting system that can be easily implemented into your website. What DISQUS allows you to do is provide a simple tool to hold and manage discussions on your website's content and/or blog posts. A plus is also that it provides the tools to allow people to post a comment as a guest, or using their Twitter or Facebook as an id instead. Click here to learn more about this in their website. And if you're looking for an alternative, there is also a similar tool called IntenseDebate.

Google Translate

As part of its translate tools, Google offers a small plug-in for your website that allows your visitors to translate the current page of your website into a user-selected language, powered by Google's translator. The plug-in will also detect a visitor's default language and will ask them if they would like the web page to be translated. It's pretty impressive, and I wrote about a few months ago. You can find and download the plug-in by clicking here.

WordPress

It is no question that WordPress is likely the single most powerful and most popular content management system for blog-style websites. WordPress prefers to call itself a "Blog Tool and Publishing Platform," but it's definitely a great option to consider if you are considering building your website with a CMS.

FanUpdate

If WordPress is more than you need, and you still need a system for managing various site updates or blog posts, then FanUpdate is not a bad option.

Google Apps

If your website is more than just a personal website, than you may want to consider using Google Apps. If it's small enough, if you plan to use less than 50 accounts in Google Apps, then you can use the service for free. Google Apps is a "bundle", in a way, of Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Sites reserved for your domain. This allows you to have a Gmail-powered email address that includes your domain. An example would be this website. Under the domain "icecaves.net" we run Google Apps and my email address <i>haily@icecaves.net</i> is powered by Gmail and protected by Gmail's impressive spam filter. Click here to learn more about Google Apps.

phpBB Forums

Among free forum software, phpBB is my personal favorite and likely one of the most developed. Although free, the software is certainly far from low-quality. Chances are that you have already ran into a forum board powered by phpBB, but if you haven't check out the website to look more into it.

TwitterFeed

TwitterFeed is a powerful website that allows you to post updates from an RSS feed to a Twitter account and/or a Facebook fan page. This is especially helpful if you have no time or interest in spending extra time on sites like Twitter or Facebook. Providing a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page is a great way to get people to stay connected with your updates, which is what can keep them returning to the site. Click here to learn more about TwitterFeed.

Validate!

The HTML Validator by w3.org is an excellent tool in cleaning up any issues with your HTML. The site also offers a CSS Validator, an RSS Feed Validator, and more.

What do you use?

Have you found any web development tools that could be added to this list? If so, post it in the comments!