NVU Website Authoring System
A freeware alternative to Frontpage, Dreamweaver and other HTML development tools. NVU comes from the Mozilla stable under a GNU licence. Version 1 was released in 06/05 and will, hopefully mature into a more sophisticated product. Runs on Windows, Macintosh & Linux.

Homepage & download

Inforapid Search & Replace
Got a lot of pages and find you need to change a detail on each page? Search & Replace will find every instance of an item and replace it - not only on the page - but every page in the directory. Updating can be fun! Windows only.

Homepage & download

OpenOffice PDF Maker
Want to publish MS Word or Text documents on your website without having to code them into HTML? Create PDF documents quickly, easily and for free with OpenOffice. Anybody using a browser with Adobe Acrobat can read them instantly with all the original formatting & images intact. This is a freeware competitor to Microsoft Office which reads many different formats and can export them to PDF. Runs on Windows, Macintosh & Linux.

Homepage & download

Freefind Search Box
Put a searchbox on your website - just like at the top of this page! Freefind will index your whole site to give fast and accurate searches. You can use your own templates so the search results appear to be a part of your site. No more worries about installing scripts onto your own server.

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Babel Fish - Making your site multilingual
As specified in the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy using BabelFish will allow any passing French, Spanish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese ... to read your site in their own language. Of course the dictionary based translation might cause some amusement amongst your foreign readers - but at least the gist of your information should get across.

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GoogleMap & Satellite Images
At last we are freed from having to pay crown copyright fees to the Ordnance Survey. You can use Google to map your local community or take a view from space. The API is a bit tricky but you can copy across the sample code to get started. You will need to know your latitude & longitude. You can see an example working <here>

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phpBB Forum Script
Want to add a forum to your website? phpBB is the world's most popular product and completely free. The complexity may be daunting but there is an amazingly active support forum at phpbb.com. Not for the faint of heart. You can see it working at the Sydenham, Forest Hill & Downham websites. Requires a server running PHP & MySQL.

Homepage & download

phpList Mailing Manager
Want to add a mailing list to your website? phpList is an alternative to MajorDomo. Not the easiest software to integrate into a website but has very powerful functionlity. Requires a server running PHP & MySQL.

Homepage & download

Portland Free Hosting
Can't use the free webspace usually provided by their Internet Service Provider (ISP)? Portland's free option is very basic, not entirely reliable and limited to low volume websites. But Portland is the only free webspace provider we know that doesn't annoy your users with adverts, popups and worse ...

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Firefox Browser
Testing your website with Microsoft Internet Explorer is no longer sufficient. Firefox already accounts for over 10% of page accesses so you should test your website with this browser. You will probably be surprised to find it beats old IE in speed and functionality. Runs on Windows, Macintosh & Linux. The third most popular browser is probably Opera which also runs on most types of computer. You can download a free version of Opera <here>

Homepage & download

Dead-Links.com Online Broken Link Checker
Nobody's perfect and a '404 page not found' is a great way to annoy people. Sometimes it is because it just went wrong in development or transfer to your server, sometimes it is because the people you link to just go away. We run this site passed a couple of checkers every month. Dead-Links is the simplest or you might prefer the one at 2Bone <here>

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EasyMonitor Website Check & Alert
Worried about your website failing? EasyMonitor will email you an alert. Combine this with an email to SMS service (free with Orange or about 3p with vmsmail.com) and you will be the first to know about the problem - and when it has been fixed.

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DNS Report
Moving your website to another server or trying to find out why it has disappeared? DNS Report will check your website domain's DNS (Domain Name Server) entry and highlight possible problems. Also a good way to begin understanding how DNS works.

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GoogleRanking Report
Got a great website but no visitors? Use GoogleRanking to discover how far down the search rankings your site is on Google, MSN & Yahoo. Watch them rise as you apply their tips. Requires an API code which you can get free on the site.

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Wayback Machine
Want to see how your website looked back in the twentieth century or to find a page that has disappeared from the Lewisham Council website? Wayback Machine is an archive of old websites stretching back from last year to around 1996. Invaluable and sometimes embarrassing!

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