openElement® : A Free Web-Authoring Software as an Alternative to Free Online Website Builder

Building websites on a laptop

openElement® is one of several choices available to use as a web authoring/website builder program when looking for an alternative to offers of free online website builder.

Powered by Chromium, openElement® provides creative professionals with a comprehensive set of standalone web authoring and editing tools that allow flexibility and control, as well as transferability of website content.

Although it is understandably tempting to choose an easy-to-use free online website builder, especially if one has no basic knowledge or expertise. Ease of use though has to be traded off with flexibility in creating and controlling a website since the design, elements, and features will be confined to what the web host offers as pre-built templates.

Now if your lack of confidence and limited skills are stopping you from building a website developed and stylized using your own creativity, consider openElement®.

What to Expect from openElement®

openElement® is a web authoring and web-building software that is intuitive and powerful enough to liberate creative professionals from the built-in features and elements of free online web-building sites. It allows you to develop from scratch based on your own ideas on how you want your website project to look and function, or to use a professionally designed website but still retain control over editing its features.

  • First off, the software is absolutely free to download and use.
  • Secondly, it is software that incorporates some features of a Content Management System (CMS) in a standalone application. The openElement® software has a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) interface that allows users to add, customize and modify conventional elements used in creating web content, thru simple dragging and dropping actions.
  • Elements include the standards, such as documents, Vertical, Horizontal, or Multiline Texts, Table “Link to URL,” etc. as well as other elements for navigation, form, media, container, interactivity, community, animation, statistics, and security configurations.
  • Users are relieved from writing codes because the program automatically writes the appropriate codes that will enable the website to function and display properly.
  • Awesome even is that the openElement® software supports nearly all the latest web building technology such as HTML5. jQuery, CSS3, and the like.
  • The user interface provides a user-friendly approach that enables beginners to acquire skills from learning the ropes of standalone web building. At the same time, the interface presents a faster approach with which professional web builders can carry out repetitive tasks.

After all, the main advantage to building your own website apart from flexibility and control is transferability. Since you will not be using the templates and graphics offered by a free online website builder, you can easily transfer everything to another web host in case there is a need to do so.

EaseUS Todo Backup – The Best Free Disk Cloning Software

Windows Laptop If your PC is acting up and you fear it may slow down at any moment, you should take steps to save all the data stored on your hard drive. Don’t procrastinate, because you can save yourself a lot of trouble by backing up your computer. One possible reason why you may be putting off backing up is that you think the process is long and tedious. But think again, because there is an easier and faster way to do it without losing or leaving out any data.   All you need to do is download and install disk cloning software, and it will take care of the rest once the program is up and running. The program can make an exact copy of everything on your hard drive and store it directly to another hard drive, be it a hybrid (HDD) or solid-state drive, or an external USB. Disk cloning software can copy everything in less time than it would take you to do it manually, with no data loss. The disk cloning action copies all data, applications, the operating system, preferences, and settings. You can even retrieve the cloned data in the cloud, making it possible to access your files using any type of internet-connected device. Disk cloning is a highly recommended method of backing up without losing data. There are several disk cloning software options to choose from, some of which offer free trials. One that immediately caught our attention is “EaseUS Todo Backup,” as it has a free version to offer.

About EaseUS Todo Backup

EaseUS Todo Backup is a backup software that can create a duplicate hard disk, either completely or sectionally. During processing, the software copies everything to an HDD, SSD, or USB, including data, the Windows operating system, applications, current settings, and preferences. Just make sure that the receiving device is larger than the source hard drive.   The EaseUS Todo Backup software allows PC users to backup and recovers a full range with just a few clicks. After downloading the software, users need only click on “Clone” in the menu list, select the original disk as the source, and indicate if the destination disk is HDD, SSD, or an external USB. If the destination disk is an SSD, enable the “Optimize for SSD” feature located under “Advanced options,” as this ensures improved results. Once the backup is complete, you can recover whatever data was stored on your PC’s hard drive in the event the computer breaks down.

Weebly: The Perfect Free Website Builder for Non-Techie Newbies

The Perfect Free Website Builder for Non-Techie Newbies

When simply adding your thoughts, ideas, and photos, as well as liking the posts of other Facebook users, is not enough for your creative talent, create and build your website — for FREE.

You don’t have to worry about not having any technical know-how or expertise because there are free website builders that take care of the technical aspects for you, like security features, domain names, SEO, email, and chat support. All you need to do is to choose from free page builder selections, add and edit your post, upload your images and/or videos, and voila, you can have your website running instantly and free.

One free website builder that stands out from the rest is Weebly. Aside from having a broad selection of themes and Weebly subdomain names you can choose and use free of charge, Weebly makes website building truly easy via the drag-and-drop method. Accessing the tools to use in setting up and creating web pages is a no-brainer. Besides, Weebly gives you all the help you need by way of video tutorials.

Creating and Building a Website the Weebly Way

After signing up, you first have to let Weebly know if you intend to sell online. Since you are looking for a web builder platform that you can use at no cost, you have to select the “Not Now” option. Choosing the “Yes” option will take you to the tools for paid or Premium web-building choices.

Don’t worry about the “Not Now” choice; it does not mean that after a while, Weebly will later force you to upgrade to Premium. It is just a way of letting you know that in case you want to eventually sell online or monetize your website with external ads, you can buy the premium features that will allow you to do so, anytime at your discretion and convenience.

Your next step is to choose a theme, to which Weebly offers a hearty collection, even for free users. You may even get help from Weebly, as the section can churn out suggestions. Preview a selection you like and see how it appears on full screen. That way, you will be completely confident with your choice before hitting the “Start Editing” prompt.

Before you start editing, you have to choose a domain name. As a free user, your choices are limited to those available as Weebly subdomains. This means your website URL will have a dot weebly.com affixed to your choice of the domain name.

Done choosing your free domain name? Now you can Start Editing via the website builder screen. This is the most exciting part as this is where your creative juices flow. Know that Weebly’s website builder is what techies call the “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) kind. All you need to do is click on boxes and edit by dragging and dropping media elements into the page.

The thing that makes Weebly stand out as a free web builder for non-techies is that it allows you to edit headers by adding additional text, videos, social icon buttons, and other such elements available in the Elements Menu.

In fact, if you think adding more than one will make your header as well as your web page stand out from the rest, go ahead. Simply drag and drop multiple Element icons you want to add and then choose from the free choices. If you prefer to use your videos or images, just upload them as Weebly also gives you the option to add your own media.

If you decide that your original choice of website template is not as appealing as you first imagined it to be, Weebly’s excellent platform does not restrict you to your current choice. You can change templates anytime you feel like it.

Need more help in building your website? No problem, because you can always watch any of Weebly’s topic-related tutorials.

Web Scraper Chrome Extension : Making Web Data Collection an Easy Task to Accomplish

Google Chrome

Data has become a big word,  as any type of industry or Internet denizen with established Internet presence, or with browsing imprints, furnish data that are usable to others. In its simplest meaning, data is just the same as information. Data may come from news publications, or be about a web visitor’s personal information regarding location, email address, age, gender, race and other factors that describe the demography of the population to which a visitor belongs. Transactions carried out via online facilities also furnish data that is usable for a particular point of interest.

Although not many are aware that their data are being collected and compiled, a site that gathers and stores information about its visitors has to ask permission before a reader proceeds with site interaction. On the other hand, other entities may scrape data from the pages of a website, which they may use for a number of reasons; such as that of developing marketing strategies, or as components of medical, business, legal, or scientific studies.

However, for scraped data to be useful, it must be analyzed in ways that are relevant to the purpose for which information was gathered.

https://youtu.be/7IUfRVYew-o

About Chrome’s Web Scraper Extension

Web Scraper Chrome Extension is a free tool that allows Chrome users to collect data that can be readily transferred to a Comma Separated Values (CSV) file. This denotes that data scraped or gathered from the worldwide web, can be converted into machine-readable information for a computer software to read and process, usually for comprehensive analysis.

https://youtu.be/1EI5How6JG4

Installing the Web Scraper tool as extension to the Google Chrome browser is already a great help because it allows a user to build a sitemap. That particular feature can be used for planning on how and what to scrape as data from specific pages of a website. This Chrome plugin is capàble of handling pages with JavaScript and Ajax. Although many consider the lack of automation as a downside, this free tool is powerful enough to serve the web scraping purpose for which it was intended.

Understanding Your Website’s Need for a Backlink Audit Tool

Backlinks

Backlinks to your websites can do wonders in pushing your domain to the top hierarchy of Google’s page ranking system. That is very true, but only if the pages carrying the backlinks to your website are placed in related contents published by reliable sources. Know that Google Penguin can analyze if your backlinks are good or bad.

That being the case, monitoring and auditing them as a standard operating procedure will give you a chance to have bad backlinks removed before your domain gets penalized for dubious backlinking activities. The fastest and easiest way to do this is to find yourself a banklink audit application that you can integrate with Google’s engines for Search Console and Analytics.

A backlink audit application can help you sort links in order to identify those that you need to weed out and disassociate from your website. After which, the next important step to do is to request owners of the websites to remove the links, as they can potentially harm your website.

If in case your request is ignored, you can send a notice to Google to express your disavowal of the spammy backlinks. A good backlink audit tool is one that integrates an emailing system and a monitoring tool that can keep track not only of fresh backlinks but also those that were lost over time.

When is a Backlink Good, When is It Bad?

A backlink is good if it appears in a website that is ranked high in terms of Domain Authority, whilst containing contents that are similar, as well as relevant to those found in your site. Still, this may still seem vague to you if you are not clear on what the term Domain Authority means.

Domain Authority (DA) is a ranking system that delineates how your website will rank in terms of search page results. Ranking is on a scale of 1 to 100, to which getting a score near 100 or a full 100, earns your website a high ranking in terms of Domain Authority.

DA basically consists of ranking indicators such as the number of backlinks directed to your website, including multiple backlinks coming from one unique domain, grouped and counted as a single linking root domain. Keep in mind that Domain Authority sizes up the authority on a website level, and not on page ranking level.

The DA metrics is only one of two aspects that makes a backlink good. It must also go hand in hand with the relevancy of a linked domain to your website’s topic niche.

After citing the main qualities of a good backlink, any link therefore that comes from sources with low DA scores, or from a website that in itself has been penalized for carrying spammy backlinks, has the makings of a bad link. Even more damaging are backlinks carried by web pages that are completely irrelevant to your domain.

GIMP : The Best Free Alternative Image Editing Software

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is the most recommended alternative image editing software, mainly because it comes free. The program  has been around as far back as 1998, starting at version 1.0, whilst receiving continuous updates through the years.

The most recent GIMP release is Version 2.10 which comes with a new Dark Theme as default user interface. An image set for editing will appear on a somewhat dim background, in order to direct greater focus on the content.  Actually, the Dark Theme brings the number of user interface to four (4); the three (3) others being the System, the Gray and the Light.

Although Adobe Photoshop also offers a free downloadable software of the latest version, the offer is available only as a free-trial for 7 days. Now if you are looking for an image editing software that is nearly as good as Adobe Photoshop and at the same time free for lifetime, there is always an updated version of GIMP.

A Cursory Look at What GIMP Users Can Do, Free of Charge

GIMP users have expressed great satisfaction for having a graphic editing program that allows them to transform images with excellent results, sans the need to pay for monthly subscriptions. Images for business cards, banners, brochures and web pages have been created using robust tools that allow for dabbling, editing or converting formats of graphic files coming from Windows or Linux.

Similar to the proprietary Photoshop PSD file that enables modifiers to work on individual layers of the image, GIMP also has layer editing features. Version 2.10 now includes a Layer Attributes Dialog box, showing all setting options related to layer-related tasks. Awesome even are the color labels available to use  as tags for layers, channels and paths, which make project organization more efficient.

The great news is that while Version 3.00 is currently in the works, GIMP users do not have to wait long to acquire the newest features and tools. Currently new stuffs, along with bug fixes are released as a series of stable releases every 1 to 2 months.