Having your website go down is not only frustrating to you, it can also be an inconvenience for your visitors and customers. Most of us aren’t on our sites all day long in order to know when it is down and how often it happens. Fortunately there are a number of tools and online services to accomplish this task for you. There are some basic free tools that will get the job done for most of us who simply want to know the status of our website. However, there are also much more advanced services for larger companies that may want to track downtime for all of their systems. We’ll take a look at several of the options.

When starting a new website there are a number of decisions that you will make that can have a huge impact on the long-term success of the site. Many times these decisions don’t seem as important as just getting the site up and running and as a result they don’t get the attention they deserve. Here are 8 decisions that can cripple your chances of building an effective website.

An article from Vandelay Designs about setting up websites to be easier to maintain and re-design. The comments section also has a good addition that was missed.

article that lists 10 tools that can help to monitor a variety of aspects of your website.

Web developer Roger Obando signed the mortgage papers for his new house, then walked into his boss’ office at to give notice that he was quitting to work freelance. Sounds crazy, but his employer (Blitz Digital Studios, a leading Flash development firm) understood and even became his first client. Since then, he’s done web development for some huge clients including Fox, Yahoo, CBS and Sony. In fact, his work on Sony’s site scored him a Webby award for Best Home/Welcome Page.

PHP RSS feed finder is a PHP class that finds all the URLs for all RSS feeds that appear on a given Web page. It will convert any relative links that are found into absolute links. The only required input is the URL of the Web page to be scanned for RSS links.

An article from Freelance Swicth about freelancing.