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If you’re not an advanced Web designer, and you don’t want to pay a company to create a Web site for you, there are services across the Web that can help you create the site you want. All of the tools listed below are designed specifically for beginners. If that’s you, give them a whirl.

Get your design on

Color Wizard: Having trouble finding the right color for a portion of your site? Color Wizard will help you determine which color works with your current color scheme.

When you get to Color Wizard’s site, just input the color you want to match. From there, the service will spit out several colors that match well with your base color. If you’re unhappy with all the colors on your site, you can also use the site’s sliders to create a color you desire. It then gives you a color tag that you can place in your site’s HTML. It’s a simple, neat tool that I use quite often.

Color Wizard helps you match colors or create your own.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

CSS Typeset: If you’re looking to quickly edit portions of CSS from your site, CSS Typeset is one of my favorite tools to do just that.

The premise of CSS Typeset is simple: take some CSS from your site, modify it with the drop-down lists featured at the bottom of the page, and CSS Typeset generates the CSS code you can paste back into your site. You can change the font type, its color, alignment, and more. If you need a little help with CSS, CSS Typeset is the service for you.

CSS Typeset will help you change your site up.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Dotemplate: Dotemplate provides several free templates that you can customize right from the company’s Web page. From there, you can download the template and place it into your site.

When you get to Dotemplate, you can choose between a bunch of free templates. You can change the color of the navigation bar, input text into different sections of the site, and more. You can even change the colors of all the different headers across the site. Dotemplate allows you to use your template anywhere on the Web as long as you provide a link to the service. You can also donate $10 if you don’t want to link to it.

Dotemplate lets you change templates quickly and easily.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Favicon Generator Tool: Every site needs its own unique Favicon, that little image you find next to a URL in your address bar and on the tabs in your browser. But creating one might not be easy for novices. That’s where the Favicon Generator Tool comes in.

The Favicon Generator Tool is about as simple as they come: upload an image that you want to make tiny. From there, click “upload” and the service will convert the image into a Favicon. Simply download the image, upload it to your site, and you’re all set. It’s that easy.

Favicon Generator Tool is simple and easy to use.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Flickrslidr: If you’re having trouble adding a slideshow to your site, make it easy with the help of Flickrslidr.

The premise is simple: input the link to a Flickr album you want to add to your site. From there, you can name it and input tags. Flickrslidr then spits out HTML code, allowing you to quickly and easily input the slideshow into your site.

Add a Flickr slideshow from Flickrslidr.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Roxer: If you want to create a quick site that doesn’t feature all the Web 2.0 features that have become so commonplace on the Web, Roxer might be a good place to start.

Roxer allows you to drag and drop different elements of a site onto your homepage. You can add images, drag-and-drop YouTube videos, change the header of your page, and more. You can also create content to make it a little more useful to visitors. I should note that Roxer is GeoCities-esque in that your site is free to build and features a Roxer domain. Regardless, it’s a great way to quickly build a site for simple purposes.

Roxer makes it quick and easy to create a simple Web page.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Web 2.0 Button Generator: If you want to add a Web 2.0 feel to your site, you’ll want to consider using Web 2.0 Button Generator. The site allows you to create a Web 2.0-like button for your site.

When you start using Web 2.0 Button Generator, you’ll find that you can choose from three button designs. From there, you can choose a color, modify the text in the button, and decide if you want to add logos to sites across the Web, including YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and others. Creating the button takes just a few seconds. Once complete, you can download it as an image, place it where you want on your site, and you’re all set.

Web 2.0 button generator is free and easy to use.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Wordpress Theme Generator: If you’re unhappy with the themes other Wordpress users have created, you can create your own with the help of the Wordpress Theme Generator.

Wordpress Theme Generator allows you to create a two-column or three-column Wordpress theme. To the left of the design page is a listing of all the elements you can change, including font type, text color, tag clouds, and more. To the right of the site is a look at what your site looks like. It will change as you modify the site’s many elements. When I used the service, I was quite happy with what it offered. Granted, it won’t allow you to change everything, but if you want to create a basic, but unique theme, I think Wordpress Theme Generator is a worthwhile tool.

Wordpress Theme Generator features simple Wordress-theme creation.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

My top three

1. CSS Typeset: If you want to quickly modify a site’s design, CSS Typeset is the place to go.

2. Color Wizard: Find the right color with Color Wizard.

3. Wordpress Theme Generator: It’s not advanced, but if you want a simple, unique Wordpress theme, Wordpress Theme Generator is worth trying out.

Excerpt from:
Online Web-design tools for the beginner

Travel discount site Hotwire announced on Wednesday that it has partnered with travel itinerary service TripIt to help its users organize and share their travel plans.

According to the company, users booking a trip through Hotwire will now be able to click an “Add to TripIt” button after completing their travel plans. Upon doing so, those plans are added to a TripIt itinerary.

TripIt, which is a main competitor to the recently acquired Dopplr, will also bring its premium “pro” package to the service. The feature, which costs $69 per year, monitors itineraries and sends mobile alerts when delays occur. It also finds alternate flight options.

Hotwire joins what is becoming a growing list of TripIt partners that are utilizing the company’s “open itinerary platform.” Currently, Virgin America, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and several other services are using TripIt’s itinerary tool.

“Our strategy of building an open itinerary platform is becoming a reality with a growing number of travel users and new partnerships,” a company representative said in an e-mailed statement. “There are now over 250 developers signed up for the TripIt Developer Program and we’re offering commissions to partners who sell our TripIt Pro premium service.”

It’s that last element that TripIt hopes will help it increase sales. According to the company, it will now share with partners the revenue generated from sites that offer its TripIt Pro version. The company wouldn’t divulge any more details on the sharing agreement. But since it’s offering access to TripIt Pro, Hotwire stands to gain from its partnership with TripIt.

Related story: TripIt aggregates your travel info

See the rest here:
Hotwire teams up with TripIt

Facebook announced on Thursday that it has open-sourced recently acquired FriendFeed’s real-time technology. Dubbed Tornado, the company’s real-time, nonblocking framework is written in Python.

“Tornado is…designed to handle thousands of simultaneous connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services,” Facebook’s David Recordon wrote in a blog post. “While Tornado is similar to existing Web frameworks in Python (Django, Google’s Webapp, Webpy), it focuses on speed and handling large amounts of simultaneous traffic.”

FriendFeed co-founder and new Facebook Director of Products Bret Taylor said in a blog post of his own that Facebook’s decision to open-source Friendfeed’s real-time feature was rooted in its desire to see “others building real-time Web services.” It’s a part of Facebook’s open-source initiative.

Taylor went on to explain the story behind Tornado. He said that before FriendFeed developed the framework, it analyzed other Python frameworks to see if they matched FriendFeed’s needs. According to Taylor, “our performance and feature requirements consistently diverged from these mainstream frameworks.” FriendFeed needed “support for a large number of standing connections afforded by the nonblocking (input-output) programming style and epoll” that it couldn’t find in existing Python frameworks.

Taylor’s team decided to write its “own Web server and framework after looking at existing servers and tools” that couldn’t quite match the company’s requirements.

According to Taylor, “Tornado looks a bit like Webpy or Google’s Webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the nonblocking Web server and tools.”

Tornado features several key components that Facebook hopes will make it easy for developers to create real-time environments. It offers design templates, signed cookies, user authentication, forgery protection, and third-party authentication for services like Facebook Connect, Twitter, and FriendFeed. The framework also supports “large numbers of concurrent connections” to keep data fresh.

Taylor said his team ran some baseline throughput calculations to determine how well Tornado matched up against other Python frameworks. According to his figures, Tornado’s throughput was more than “four times higher than the other frameworks.”

Tornado's Web server requests compared to the competition.

(Credit: Bret Taylor)

FriendFeed will live on

Before you think this is the end of FriendFeed as we know it, think again.

Buried in the Facebook announcement, David Recordon wrote that “Tornado is a core piece of infrastructure that powers FriendFeed’s real-time functionality, which we plan to actively maintain.”

Since Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed, the social network has stayed silent on its plans for FriendFeed. If his statement is to be believed, FriendFeed will be maintained and improved upon, going forward. When the acquisition was announced, FriendFeed’s founders said the long-term plans for FriendFeed were still being worked out with Facebook, but at the very least, it wouldn’t be shut down.

“Anything that we would do would be more of a transition, not shutting down,” Taylor told CNET News. “I think our users have invested in our product by putting their data in it, sharing it with their friends…We absolutely wouldn’t shut (FriendFeed) down.”

Tornado is available now as a free download. Facebook said it hopes that developers will try it out and start developing Web services that take advantage of FriendFeed’s real-time technology. Whether or not that will happen remains to be seen, but if you want to a see a demo of Tornado in action to see if it matches your goals as a developer, click here.

See original here:
Facebook open-sources real-time FriendFeed facet

PayPal, eBay’s well established but aging mechanism for online payments, is trying to rebuild itself for a new generation of online commerce possibilities.

At an event for press and developers on Thursday, PayPal and its partners described several new programming interfaces that are part of the company’s upcoming Adaptive Payments Service and showed what developers can do with them.

For example, Microsoft will use the interface to enable payments within its forthcoming Azure cloud-computing service. And LiveOps‘ on-demand outsourcing service will use it to automatically handle fluctuating payment amounts and changes to who’s being paid. Finally, the interface takes PayPal beyond the browser, opening it up for use on mobile phones, set-top boxes, and other increasingly smart devices.

“It’s truly disruptive,” said PayPal CEO Scott Thompson at the event. “It puts developers in the driver’s seat by allowing you to do what you want to do and (choose) how you want to get paid.”

The new service will be available to 300 PayPal partners starting Thursday, with a public beta this November–just in time for PayPal X Innovate 2009, its first developer conference.

PayPal is pitching the Adaptive Payments platform to developers as a way to more easily build PayPal-powered payment options into their applications. It’s also a more streamlined version of PayPal’s existing program for letting businesses manage transactions between several different parties.

The new payments service is a key part in PayPal’s plan to double its revenues within the next three years. Back in March, PayPal’s president Scott Thompson promised as much, saying that by 2011, the company should be doing somewhere between $100-120 billion in annual payments. PayPal has also had a fire lit underneath it since Amazon rolled out its own online payments service around this time last year. It let users make online purchases using billing information that was stored on Amazon.com

PayPal isn’t just central to eBay’s future. It will eclipse the company’s auction and commerce operations, the company says.

“PayPal is a business that will be bigger than eBay,” eBay Chief Executive John Donahoe said Thursday at the Fortune Brainstorm conference.

PayPal is a force to be reckoned with. On average, more than $2,000 goes through PayPal every second of each day. It has 75 million active accounts, and it’s available in 190 markets and 19 different currencies.

Beta testing

Before the announcement, PayPal had been working with a handful of companies to test the new APIs (application programming interfaces). One of those companies is Microsoft, which is tapping PayPal for online payments in the Web applications built for the company’s upcoming Azure platform.

At the unveiling, Yousef Khalidi, a Microsoft distinguished engineer, demonstrated an application that integrated PayPal’s payment and billing functionality. It took only two days to integrate it into the existing product, Khalidi said.

Khalidi said that Microsoft plans to offer a simple way to build PayPal’s mechanism into hosted applications as part of Azure’s full release later this year.

Microsoft probably had an easier time choosing PayPal for its payment service than some of the alternatives: Amazon Flexible Payment Services and Google Checkout both come from companies in direct competition with Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing service.

Michael Ivey, CEO and co-founder of TwitPay, also took the stage to show his company’s use of the new PayPal API–specifically to let people pay multiple people at once.

“In one transaction, I’m paying four different people,” he said. Before the new APIs, the service would require users to make each payment as its own transaction.

Sites already using the new API include: Webassist, GroupCard, Lottay, Rainfall of Envelopes, and MedPayOnline.com

“PayPal will help you get paid for your innovations–your business will become our business,” Thompson told the developers. “We view you as our third set of customers.”

New features

The new payment service has a handful of new features designed to make it easier for developers to make money with their applications and services.

Thompson said that even if developers were acting as an intermediary between the person sending the money and the recipient, they would now be able to take their cut of that transaction–just as PayPal does.

Part of getting that to happen involves a new API that lets developers create peer-to-peer and business-to-business money-sharing applications. They can now also split up payments into several transactions and let users authorize a payment after the transaction’s been made. Those two mechanisms can speed purchasing, regardless of whether the buyer is ready to pay the full amount at the outset.

As part of the new platform, PayPal also is changing the way fees are charged. Application developers can choose to have the sender of the money, not just the recipient, pay the fee.

In addition, the fee rates can be changed based on the type of purchase, which should ease the chore of handling both high-value transactions and micropayments (transactions below $12) within the same application. As it stands today, PayPal currently requires sellers to have two different accounts open, one for bigger payments and another for micropayments–and each has different rates.

People use PayPal today through a Web interface, but a new API will bring PayPal to nontraditional computing platforms including mobile phones, set-top boxes, and gaming consoles. That’s important, given that those devices increasingly are networked and have their own ecosystems of applications. And moving to a browser can be disruptive to a user who just wants to make a quick payment.

Using PayPal that way also means that a developer must build the necessary user interface, though. PayPal didn’t provide specifics on that element of the new payments system.

Overall, Thompson said the new payment system will help PayPal keep pace with changes in technology and business.

“The pace of innovation is just staggering,” he said. “And the next wave of innovation is poised to move that much faster. ”

CNET News reporter Ina Fried contributed to this report.

The rest is here:
PayPal tries rewiring e-commerce with new interface

With the housing market in such rough shape, sellers are pressed to make their home as functional and inviting as possible.

For everything from quick fixes and complete remodels, do-it-yourselfers are increasingly looking online for design guidance. These tools will help you create the designs you’ve always wanted (or at least the ones that will help you move to your next home).

Home design tools

Armstrong makes it easy to pick your flooring.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Armstrong Design Tools Armstrong’s Design Tools lets you pick any room in an imaginary home, and mix and match potential wall colors, flooring, trim, and countertops. Once you change everything in the room to fit your desire, you can save the room’s design and share it with friends.

Color-a-Room Better Homes and Gardens’ Color-a-Room tool lets you change the paint schemes of any room in the house. Once you pick the room, you can choose the color you like for your walls. From there, you can find window treatments and save the room for future viewing. If you want to work on the outside of your home, you can pick the paint colors for your roof, siding, shutters, or window trim. As with the Armstrong tool, you won’t be looking at a representation of your home, per se, but it will give you a better idea of what might work in your space.

Deck Designer If you’re planning on adding a deck to your house, Deck Designer is a great place to start. The tool lets you choose the size, shape, and color of your deck. You can decide where to put it, add stairs and railings, and save as many designs as you want. When complete, you can print out a full listing of the materials you need, as well as tips on how to install it.

Design Basics gives you the blueprints of homes.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Design Basics Design Basics is a fine resource to consult when you start building a new home or add on to an existing structure. You can search for floor plans based on the number of bedrooms you’re looking for, how many levels you want, and much more. Once you find the house you like, you can buy both the blueprint and the 3D design. But beware that the charges are quite high–some blueprints cost as much as $1,000, while 3D design fees can be even higher.

Google SketchUp Pro 7 Google SketchUp Pro 7 is designed for those who want to create 3D models. It’s also a handy tool when you want to design an addition to your home. The app asks you to input the area of your structure to ensure that all measurements are precise. It also applies colors and textures (of your choosing) to help you create a 3D representation of what you want to build. It’s a well-designed tool, but it costs $495. There is a free version available, but it’s not as capable as the paid version.

HGTV.com Whether you want to redesign a bathroom, remodel your kitchen, or add a new room to your home, HGTV.com will give you all the resources you need to do it. The site is filled with how-to videos and tools that show you different color themes for rooms throughout your house. One of its best features is its message board, which is filled with active discussions on topics ranging from buying real estate to remodeling.

Paint Designer The Paint Designer tool helps you determine what color paint you want in rooms throughout the house. Once you pick the place you want to paint, the tool’s palette feature lets you flip through different shades of your desired color. When you find what you like, you can estimate the cost of your project with the built-in calculator.

PointclickHome PointClickHome, associated with the magazines Elle Decor and Metropolitan Home, boasts some outstanding resources for redecorating or remodeling your home. The site’s remodeling guide gives you loads of information on topics ranging from flooring to cabinets for any room in the house. PointClickHome’s “Room Finder” tool lets you sift through photos of classic, modern, and contemporary styles for any room.

Create your own room with See My Design.

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)

SeeMyDesign SeeMyDesign lets you create a room from scratch. You can arrange furniture, decide where to put doors, and even erect walls. If you want to paint a pre-existing room, you can input its dimensions and estimate the total cost of your project with the app’s built-in calculator. It’s a simple tool, but it’s worth trying out.

The top 3

Want the best tools to help you redesign your home? Here you go:

1. Armstrong Design Tools

2. Paint Designer

3. HGTV.com

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Online tools that help you redesign your home