Mozilla Firefox has become an extremely powerful and useful tool for web developers. Using the right add-ons, it will be developers best dream. Each of these add-ons can make certain things easier and that`s especially important for web-developers, because searching for errors and optimizing your pages can be difficult and time-consuming.

1. Web Developer’s Toolbar

Web Developer`s tool bar probably will become one of the best plugins You`ve ever seen. It comes with his own tool bar that gives many useful tools for analyzing, validating and optimizing web-pages. The great thing about this plugin is that it’s on a few different browsers, so if you switch between them you will be able to use the same plugin on all.

2. HTML Validator

HTML Validator is an extremely powerful tool available to Windows users only. The add-on gives you feedback about errors on the page. It also lets you know where problems need to be addressed. But unless you’re an advanced Web designer, stay away from this tool. It’s very complicated.

3. CSS Validator

CSS Validator adds a right-click option in your browser, sending the CSS to the W3C CSS Validator. It opens the results in a new tab. CSS Validator is a nice tool that will come in handy often.

4. Firebug

Firebug is one of those extensions that you simply can’t be without. It lets you edit, debug, and view CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.

5.. YSlow

YSlow requires FireBug to be installed for it to work, but it’s a great way to find out why your site is running so slowly. It analyzes Web pages and returns issues that are slowing the site down,

6. CSS Viewer

The add-on informs you of all the CSS information you’ll need from a site. Simply click on the page you want, open it in the Tools menu, and it will display CSS information.

7. Greasemonkey

It allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.

8. JSView

All browsers include a “View Source” option, but none of them offer the ability to view the source code of external files. You can use the JSView extension to solve the problem. If the website you are viewing contains any external js/css files, an icon will appear that says “SS”, “JS”, or both. Each individual file can then be viewed by clicking on the filename. The file will be opened in a new window.

9. Color Zilla

If there’s a color on a Web page that you like, ColorZilla will find the precise code for it and allow you to paste it into your coding program. You can also create custom colors with its built-in palette browser. It saves the most-used colors for easy access later on. It’s powerful, it’s simple, it’s a must-have.

10. Font Finder

Font Finder allows you to highlight a font you like on any site, right-click on the selection, and after choosing “Font Finder”, view the full CSS text styling of the selection. You can then paste that into your own Web page.

11. IE Viewer

This add-on lets you preview websites in IE. It helps when checking for cross browser compatibility. You can also set some websites to always open in IE viewer if there are some compatibility issues.

12. Fire FTP

Along with transferring your files quickly and efficiently, FireFTP also includes more advanced features such as: directory comparison, syncing directories while navigating, SFTP, SSL encryption, search/filtering, integrity checks, remote editing, drag & drop, file hashing, and much more!

13. Screen Grab

Screengrab saves entire web pages as images. This tool will allow You to take screenshots of what is currently on your screen – you can even choose the portion of the screen you want to “grab”!

14. Code Tech

Get the feel of Dreamweaver in a Firefox extension. Edit your documents right next to your web pages as you surf.

15. Aardvark

This tool can be used to clean page from unwanted banners and ads, especially prior to printing a page. Pretty useful for web developers for analyzing the structure of a page.

After working with many small businesses and individuals, I have learned that there are numerous misconceptions of social media that needs to mentioned here for any starters who are thinking about getting in. Some of these misconceptions exist among the average web users, where as some exist among the new webmasters. Therefore I have decided to highlight each of them to my knowledge and clarify them, so people can use social media effectively.

1. Social Media is for Younger Generations

Social media is not limited to the younger generation. The community appreciates quality resources from everyone without judging the age. So if a thirteen year old wants to contribute to the network, then they may. Or if a sixty-three year old wants to contribute, they won’t be judged either. Social media networks have all age groups with some more abundant then others, but no community has put an age limit.

2. There are Rules to use Social Media

WRONG! In reality, there is no rule that governs the use of Social Media. You can tweet however you like, and format it in whichever way you see fit. You can digg the story, or bury it as you see it. You can share the links that you think are worthy in a way you think is best.

Now there are etiquette to using social media and if you don’t follow those then you will gain a bad reputation among the community. So careless self-promotion and spamming will get you blocked, but most people are too worried about doing it right. Relax and be yourself. If you like writing about puppets then write one sentence tweets about your puppets and those who are interested will follow you.

3. Its all about Quantity

Some people would like to think that people with more friends get a lot of retweets, or alot of diggs. That is not true. Because there are real estate agents who mass add people to their list on twitter, and not even know a single person. So they end up following 33,000 people who they don’t know, and 33,000 people follow them. But the fact is that they don’t get half the amount of retweets that you can get with just 1000 good followers that actually know you.

It’s never about the quantity instead it is about the quality. Its not about how many stories you submit on digg. Its about how good your stories are. Its not about how many status updates you made on twitter. Instead it is about whether those updates were useful to others. Its always about the quality, and users that provide quality are rewarded by the community not those who prefer the quantity road.

4. You have to be Everywhere

A more common misconception that I see is that you have to be everywhere. It is completely wrong, and as a matter of fact, I can argue that one person cannot be active on all social media networks because there are just too many of them. So take it one step at a time. Try out new things, and stick with the ones that you like best.

Remember, you can be a good community member at two communities and get tons of love and benefits such as visitors to your website, or you can be a member of one hundred communities and not get third of the traffic that you can get the other way.

5. Social Media Campaigns are all about having a Facebook and Twitter Profiles

While Facebook and Twitter are two of biggest social media networks, you cannot just stop by having a profile page on these sites. There are other great sites like Digg, Delicous, Reddit and others that can also get you alot of exposure.

6. Social Media Sites Send Poor Quality Traffic

Social Media Sites actually send one of the best quality traffic because you get only related audience. Popular sites like digg have users that visit the category that they like the best, so you are getting targetted users. On twitter, your tweets will only get retweeted by those who like it, so you are always getting targetted users.

7. Getting a story popular on Social Media requires the help of Power Users

Some people believe that it is true on sites like Digg and even on twitter, but I think it is completely wrong. It doesn’t require power users for your story to hit popular. It requires a quality article and that’s all. You can become a power user yourself as long as you contribute to the community, and the community loves quality. You don’t need power users, all you need is yourself.

8. Social Media is Fast

Ever heard of a saying how social media creates the boom, and it is fast. Well no it is not. It takes time to get popular on Social Media. You can tweet a story on twitter, but in order for it to get popular, it can take weeks and months. You need to structure a base for yourself in the community. Climb the ladder one step at at a time to the top. It takes time to build a good reputation on any social media community.

Sites that are whitelisted in digg are white listed because they have earned that reputation. Same goes with sites that get retweeted alot on twitter. That is because they have earn it.

9. Social Media is Easy

Every once in a while, I get this statement that social media is easy. It has some truth to it, but for the most part it is hard. It is not easy to earn someone’s trust. That is what social media is all about. Trust of the community. You need to work hard and show the community that you are worthy enough to be trusted.

10. You can disguise the community

You can never hide from the community. At least not forever. You might not be caught the first day, the first month, but you will be caught after the first year. There is no use to manipulating the system because playing the fair game is the best way. That’s how it should be done.

Power of advertising your posts individually is often underestimated. I will say this is probably the best way to get more followers to your blog. Almost all followers that you get from advertising your posts individually will stay.

Many bloggers don’t know the right process of how blogs should be advertised. Its not a blatant statement I am making, I came to this conclusion after receiving many direct messages on twitter from people when I follow a them: Check out my blog – http://xxxx.com. I would never check out their blog because they didn’t give me a reason to do so. Instead what you should do is maybe sent a direct message of an individual post which might be useful to that person. And hope that the quality of your content persuades this person to explore more content on your blog and become a loyal user.

During the years that I have been working online, I learn that you can never get loyal users by simply advertising your home page specially when working with Discussion Forums, and Social Media Networks. If used effectively, both of them can bring you insane amount of loyal users for free. But you need to know how to do it the right way.

It might seem like that there is a connection with all top power diggers on digg, or all top users on twitter, but really there is not. They will digg or retweet your post, if it is worthy of it. So making that statement clear, I am telling you that you should not advertise all of your posts individually because not all of them are worthy.

The same way you should not put digg submit buttons, or reddit submit buttons on every article of yours. It hurts your site more than anything because not all your articles are digg worthy. And if your site is submitted on digg specially with an article like Attention Users there will be no post on Balkhis… Then you will probably get banned from social media networks. So refrain from abusing the system.

Now here is how you should do it. Lets take Twitter for example.

You should not just tweet your own articles. Tweet what you think your followers will like. Bring variety to the table. Its all about sharing the love in order to get it back. Contribute to the community and then community will appreciate you and will send its love to you.

So on average if you are tweeting 5 of your own links then tweet 10 of other people links. Now those could be the links that your friend tweeted, or asked you to retweet via DM or others that you found on the web.

Now when other sees that you are sharing useful information, they will begin to retweet your tweets, and next thing you know that your own site is being retweeted by others as well. Now if you simply put check out my site www.wpbeginner.com, most people won’t click it, but if you put check out 21 Mindblowing Premium-Like Free Wordpress Themes then more people are likely to see that article and your website indirectly.

This is killing three birds with one stone. Because you got the user to your website, you advertised the article, indirectly they saw your website as well, and now they are your loyal reader because they liked the article. So quality is a must.

Now when you are in social media networks, it is about making new friends. You can ask the friends to check out this link, and retweet it through a direct message. This way their followers can retweet as well. You can do the same with digg, facebook, and any other social media network.

What I am trying to say is don’t just stop after publishing your post. Instead you should go out and share it with others.

Twitter with an exponential growth has left no choice for businesses but to join. And not just join, have their each department join with a separate account. Which becomes crazy when few people are tweeting for all accounts at the same time. Specially when talking about small businesses and specially website owners. Twitter is not only good for popularity with word of mouth advertising, but it also helps with SEO because it tends to rank high with status updates and the profile page keywords. Which is why I am seeing a trend where webmasters are making separate twitter accounts for each of their websites. Also some people don’t want to relate their personal life with business which is why they make separate twitter accounts. Well if you are one of them and are looking for a feasible solution to manage multiple twitter accounts this article is for you.

The method of logging out each account and logging back in is very inconvenient. Well since I have multiple twitter accounts myself, I have tried out multiple services before I picked the ones that I use. This list has a lot of options, although I will highlight which ones I use.

1. Seesmic Desktop

It has no limitations on how many accounts you can use. Each account will be on a separate column makes it very easy to manage. It is a strong desktop client which is very efficient in running. It can also be integrated with Facebook. I tried this one, but I did not like the look of it, but it has gotten a lot of positive reviews on other websites.

2. HootSuite

HootSuite is a very powerful web based script which allows you to have as many accounts as you like. The best part is, that you can have multiple administrators as well. It works out well if more then one person in the company is working on the twitter accounts. HootSuite also lets you schedule tweets ahead of time which is very convenient because there are sometimes in the day when more people on twitter are active. HootSuite lets you post to ping.fm as well. If you use their url shortener, ow.ly, it also shows you the link stats. I am currently using HootSuite to manage my twitter accounts because it is remote as it is a web based script. It is completely free of charge.

3. CoTweet

Cotweet is a very powerful software which is still in Private Beta. I unfortunately have not tried it, but I saw a lot of good reviews on the web. This is a software that many major companies are using such as Pepsi, Starbucks, Ford, Microsoft, Sprint and others. It adds a strong business layer which means multiple users can use the same account. It prevents duplicate tweets, allows scheduling, allows assigning of tweets to coworkers and users can leave note for each other. Since it is in Private Beta you must apply and hope you get accepted.

4. Twhirl

Twhirl is one of the most famous powerful desktop client that gives Tweetdeck alot of competition. Twhirl stands at #6 in Twitter Client Stats. It allows multiple accounts and cross posting to ping.fm

5. Twibble

Twibble allows users to manage multiple twitter accounts. It also includes viewing options, location awareness, and keyboard shortcuts.

6. Tweetie for Mac

Tweetie for Mac is a very cool software for Mac OS. It also has a version for iphone. Tweetie for Mac does an excellent job managing multiple accounts and keeping the screen less cluttered. The powerful keyboard shortcuts are just what power users love.

7. Nambu

Nambu is great for managing multiple accounts at Twitter, Identi.ca, and Laconi.ca. Nambu account holders get to use tr.im to shorten their urls and pic.im for better quality photos then twitpic. It also includes Twitter trends, saved searches, filters, link aggregation, and groups. Nambu all to all is a great software. It is also free for iPhone.

8. Tweetlater

Tweet Later lets you manage multiple accounts, and have bulk scheduling options. It can also let you set up an automated DM for your new follwers. Remove people who are not following you. And it has more options for professional accounts which is paid.

9. TwittBot

Twittbot allows you to update multiple accounts at the same time. It also allows multiple accounts to update one account. It sets up bots that looks for @replies to be reposted to an account specified. The security levels of these bots can be adjusted. This is perfect for twitter accounts that aggregate stories from multiple places.

10. SplitTweet

This is originally designed for businesses that want to manage multiple accounts. It allows tracking of brand mentions, but this software is not as good as HootSuite or as CoTweet defines themselves. I suggest you try HootSuite instead.

11. Digsby

Digsby is a one in all solution for all your needs. As Digsby combines IM, Email and Social Networking at one place. It allows you to manage multiple twitter accounts, and it can handle your other social profiles as well. It has features that lets you manage your IMs from all different messengers. You can also manage your emails from different service providers as well.

12. Matt

Matt is a fully carsonified version of updating multiple twitter accounts. It is a simple web app that lets you update multiple twitter accounts.

13. Tweet3

An advanced, Web-based Twitter client that supports grouping, Facebook, stats, multiple accounts,
pretty pictures, trending topics, and all sorts of other cool, awesome, and fantastic stuff Thats what I got from their website. Never used this site before, but I heard integrating with Facebook is one of their strong points.

14. TwitterFox

Twitterfox is a firefox extension that lets you add multiple twitter accounts in the bottom right hand corner of your browser. You can browse through them in a single column view as you choose. I have this installed in my firefox. I had it activated, but then I unactivated it because I am a true HootSuite user for the most part, or WEB Directly.

15. Twitterrific

Famous for its superb quality iphone app, they also provide a desktop client for Mac. It is a free app for iphone that lets you manage multiple accounts in a very organized way. It also has advanced search features. Same features are in the Desktop Client for Mac.

If I have missed any software or application here, feel free to let me know in the comment box. Also if you have used any of these, and you have a preference, please share it with others, so they can learn from your experiences.

It is important that we provide our users and audiences a way to contact us which makes our contact pages one of the most important one. On many sites, contact pages are the least cared about. On some it is mis-aligned, or on some it has some other design problems. Well they need to be fixed, and if you want to give it a spectacular look, then I have collected some of the most amazing contact forms on the web that definitely worths a mention in here.

If I missed something, you are welcome to share it in the comments.

1. Created 201 Studios

No doubt this form incorporated in flash is by far one of the best contact forms I have seen on the web.

2. Substrakt

This post card style look of substrakt designers is just a very creative use on a google map background. This really shows creativity at it its best.

3. Qwertcity

Another retro colorful style of postcard design for the contact form. This style is getting more famous as we see more and more retro designs in the trend.

4. Tony Yoo

Tony’s contact form can be best described as well-organized, neat, and simple which makes it very pleasant on the eye.

5. Frexy

Min’s contact page might be very simple, but the color combination around it on the background of the page just makes this contact page to be featured in my list.

6. Alexandru Cohaniuc

People try very hard to make their contact form spectacular, but what they don’t understand is that it must incorporate into the design. Alexandru shows how well you can incorporate the contact form in the design with his grunge style contact form design.

7. Bert Timmermans

Bert’s book style contact form is just fabulous. The neatness of it, creativity of it is just superb.

8. Chemistry Recruitment

This folder style look in the contact form really goes well with chemistry recruitment’s whole design.

9. swFIR

10. Point of Entry

Very effective use of the notepad is being displayed on this website. Usually you see the notepads on the corner of the page as just a placeholder, but in this case it is a contact form. Very creative.

11. Deluge Studios

Another great example using their map in the contact form. Very nicely incorporated contact form.

12. Headscape Web Design Solution

Headscape shows a very creative touch in their footer. They not only just highlight their contact form, but they also put their staff with their phone lines. This is a good way, but if you have a bigger staff, then you will find difficulties.

13. Envero

If you look at this contact form, you wouldn’t find anything special. But the fact that it is so neat and well organized with a good color combination and spacing, this deserves to be in the list to show that simple contact form are great.

14. Bcandullo

Brian likes the artsy touch to his design. He loves to make corrections therefore you see alot of pencil use on his design. His contact form is well incorporated with the design and goes with the flow.

15. Veboo Labs

Use of a cartoon character right next to the contact form always bring life to your contact area. Veboo labs do just the trick. Their cartoon is very eye friendly and make their contact form stand out.

16. Intuitive Designs

Another example of adding a cartoon next to their contact form is displayed here. This technique really works and it can spice a simple form up.

17. BubblesSoc

I love the work that Bubs put out on the website and the contact form is just one of that. This contact forms goes well with other aspects of the design and it is a perfect example of a well incorporated contact form.

18. Kev Adamson

Kev really knows how to highlight small features when presenting creative work. His contact form fits in a compact area. It does the job, and it has a small little captcha button which I find very cool.

19. Sidebar Creative

A simple text next to the contact form is always catchy if you use good fonts and spacing. Sidebar Creative does just that. Their contact form is very simple, but the organization of it is just noteworthy.

20. Five Cent Stand

Five Cent Stand has a very interesting design and a contact form that fits in it is even more interesting. Because I don’t think I could’ve made a contact form to fit in.

These are just some of the jaw dropping examples of beautiful contact page designs on the web. I am sure there are more that I missed. So you are welcome to share them in the comment box. Folks contact forms are important, so add them in your site because it saves alot of trouble to your users. I see some people put an email in the image, or just text which does the job, but contact form is always preferred.