Tools for webmasters

These freeware tools have been tested and found to be useful for school webmasters; stars indicate our ranking of the usefulness of the tool.

• EZ Java — This program makes it easy for someone with no knowledge of JavaScript to customize and install any of dozens of scripts ranging from the useful to the very annoying! Some of this stuff is quite useless but it is fun and could be helpful to anyone learning JavaScript. There is no install program; you simply unzip it and copy it to a folder such as c:\Program Files\EZJava. (Download)

• Eye Dropper — A simple but handy little app that sits in your system tray and can be activated at any time. When active, a small window follows your cursor around and allows you to view the color code of any pixel on the screen. This is very handy for creating color schemes for your web pages. You can copy codes from other websites or from any image or window visible on your desktop. Recommended for intermediate to advanced users. No install program; unzip and copy to a folder and it's ready to be launched. (Download)

• Hot Potatoes — A very cool and useful application suite for creating interactive Web-based teaching exercises. You can point-and-click your way to fully interactive quizzes, crossword puzzles, and more. This tool is free for educational use as long as the exercises are posted to the Web for anyone to use. You must register it to make full use of the features but registration is free. Be sure to follow the licensing rules. (Download)

• TopStyle Lite — This is the freeware version of the popular style sheet editor. Whether you are interested in learning about style sheets (CSS) or are already a CSS pro, this program can help. (Download)

• IrfanView — One of the all-time best freeware apps. This handy little program is a blazingly fast image viewer which allows you to quickly find and preview images on your hard drive or removable media. Quickly browse through a folder of images and select, resize, flip, change color depth and much more — or casually view your images in slideshow mode. Even launch your image editor with the selected image loaded. (Download)

• PhotoPlus — For webmasters wanting to go beyond Image Composer and Paint, don't spend hundreds of dollars for high-end graphics editors, get PhotoPlus! PhotoPlus is a fully featured free graphics editor that offers you all the basic functions and more. PhotoPlus is the most complete free graphics editor that will exceed your editing needs. Requires free registration. (Download)