These past weeks I have worked on a couple of web pages. In the course of it I came across some helpful sites that I want to share with you.
Flash files (from good to awesomely mindblowing)
Flash Den is a relatively new site, offering mainly Flash files. They have all from small pre-loaders to full webpages. And most of them of an exceptional quality.
In addition they also have royalty free music loops, some video files and graphics on offer. Plus a few fonts. But their main business is Flash.
Stock Photos (affordable)
iStockPhotos offers royalty free photographs for all kinds of usages. You can chose the size of the picture you buy, and a photo can cost just above $1. They have gained both size and quality, but unfortunately have increased the prices, while lowering the pay-out for the original photographers.
Still, you can easily browse for hours in their exhaustive library, searching for subjects, themes, emotions, colors, even whitespaces. Additionally, iStockPhoto also offers graphics, good vectors, cheap videos and lower quality flash files. One nice feature is that you can save interesting photos in your own lightboxes, leaving them for purchase at a later point. Or you can share your lightbox with a client.
If you have some good photos rotating away on your harddisk, you can start selling those pictures at iStockPhoto. Hey, you even can get some of my photos there.
Ajaxising (without knowing Ajax)
For the portfolio section of our new webpage I used a donation-ware component by Kevin Miller, called LightWindow. Besides adding that Ajax feel to your website (opening links without having to re-load), it also enables you to play back pretty much any media format around. Lots of options.
And if you use it, send some PayPal love to Kevin, so that he can get his well deserved Power Book Pro.
Shopping Cart (open source)
If you need a cart system for your website and you want to avoid having to pay hundreds of dollars in royalty payments (and probably some monthly fees), Zen Cart is definitely worth a look. Though it has a somewhat messy admin interface, it leaves you space for many tweakings. There are numerous extensions available, such as plug-ins, language packs, buttons and a couple of free templates.
See it live on our company’s brand new (and Norwegian language) shopping site.
Content management (minus the pain)
Now 1 1/2 years old, this blog has always run on WordPress. Though I’ve had some Windows like experiences, by and large I am impressed by this powerfool — and free — tool. So impressed, that I have used it as the CMS for our new webpage.
With the new version of WordPress, I can even be lax with using links. A page that is really located at, say, www.abitofmagic.no/english/services/eng-crew can also be reached by www.abitofmagic.no/eng. The magic happens without me having to do anything.
Of the many good plug-ins around, the one I want to mention today is WordPress automated plug-in, which takes the pain out of upgrading your blog. Which is especially nice when the frequency of those updates increases, and exponentially higher when you have more than one copy of WP running. I’ve used it on most of the 5+ WordPress sites that I maintain, without a single glitch.
Graphic Freebies (quality, not quantity)
One of my favourite blogs on graphic design, BitBox, regularly offers high quality freebies, be it web 2.0 buttons, high res photoshop brushes or vector graphics.
Photoblogging (free)
Pixelpost is to photos what wordpress is to writing. One great software to easily, yet 
beautifully, churn your digital photos into an on-going on-line publication. Lots of followers, translating to many exciting add-ons. Recently they also took the important step of easing the process of upgrading to new versions.
For fun, I am occasionally posting pictures on my pblog over at visualnary.com
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