Four Free Yahoo! Time Saving Web Tools

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Web developers know better than anyone that time is money, so when a set of tools comes along that can make projects easier, they’re worth checking out. Especially when they’re free.

Here are four free internet marketing tools from the Yahoo! Developer Network that you need to know about.

Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit

It’s common for the work of a web developer to overlap with design work. With its Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit, Yahoo! has pulled together a kit that makes working with common design elements far easier. The kit can be downloaded in a variety of formats including OmniGraffle, Viso (XML), PDF, PNG and others.

The elements are optimized to be used in popular design programs like Fireworks and InDesign. Commonly used elements in categories like layout, navigation, selection and social interaction are included. They have the added benefit of corresponding to code components within the YUI Library so you know the final output will be true to the design.

YUI Compressor

Every day more users are on their smartphones browsing the web. Also, Yahoo! says that about half of its users have an empty cache experience and 20% of all pages are viewed on an empty cache. Add all of this up and it really puts a premium on crunching your code down as much as you can. The YUI Compressor has been shown to save over 20% compared to JSMin.

The tool minifies both JavaScript and CSS with the goal of preserving the operation of the code while reducing its overall size. The application is open source and it removes excess white space and makes safe substitutions whenever it can to save additional space. The mobile market is big. Check out this tool.

YSlow

You know those dreams where someone is chasing you and you’re running in slow motion? You don’t want your website to recreate that feeling in your visitors. YSlow is a tool to analyze your web pages and make suggestions to speed up their performance.

It’s available for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and as a bookmarklet for mobile devices. YSlow summarizes page components, gives you page statistics, makes suggestions to improve page performance, grades the web pages based on various rulesets and provides tools to analyze performance, including JSLint and Smush.it.

Yahoo! Hosted CSS

Yahoo! offers a variety of CSS components that you can draw on to improve the cross-browser compatibility of your website. Individually, the components include Reset, Fonts and Grids packages but there is also a minified, concatenated aggregate file you can use.

Utilizing the “reset-fonts-grids.css” file will improve page load performance versus using each file separately. The system supports user-driven font size changes in the browser and provides for consistent font sizing and line height along with cross operating system font family degradation paths.

A wealth of information on these tools, including some great video tutorials, is available on the Yahoo! Developer Network.

Lin Edwards is a content and technical writer at SmallBusiness-Domain.com, an online resource for web hosting, domain names and e-commerce offers and promo codes, such as Yahoo store coupons. Follow Small Business Domain: http://twitter.com/#!/sbdomain

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