Useful Websites that actually *do* something - help compile the 'ultimate' list

[driver8]

EMAIL
Gmail (works offline too), Hotmail, Yahoo, Zoho
10minutemail and Mailinator - Free. Disposable. Email.
EmailNameFinder - find any company's email address format
Streak - CRM in your (Gmail) inbox

SOCIAL MEDIA
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+
Tweetdeck - FB & Twitter; HootSuite, TrendsMap, Monitter - Twitter
IFttt - create social media tasks & triggers
MemoLane - simplify & pretty-fy all your social media streams into 1
Topsy - Real-time advanced searching
Bottlenose, Sulia, Alternion, Social Buzz, rt.ly = "real time" - 5 tools to see trends
Twitter - advanced search
Engag.io - All your online conversations in one place
NetVibes - Personal dashboard to monitor apps & feeds.

OFFICE APPS
Google Docs and Google Drive - Document, spreadsheet, presentation, form (questionnaire), drawing, table. Now works offline too for some files (Chrome browser only).
MS Office Web Apps, Zoho Docs, ThinkFree
Dipity - create a timeline
SpiderScribe, Wiggio, Popplet, Bubbl.us, DabbleBoard, Do, Asana, Tracky - visualise & collaborate ideas
Prezi - slick, animated online presentations
Roambi - automatically transform Excel into iPad visualisations
ZamZar - file convertors - OnlineConvert - audio/video files too
Remindeo - calendar & planner for reminders
JoinMe - share your desktop with others (for presentations)
Asana - the shared task-list for your team. The place to plan, organize & stay in sync.
Trello - Organize anything, together.
Create.ly, Cacoo - Flowcharts (like Visio)
Wufoo - build online forms - the database, backend and scripts to collect & understand your data.
PowToons - animated video presentations

Business & Professional Q&A
StackOverflow, Quora, Beepl
Mancx - get paid for your answers

WEB CONTENT SHARING
Pinterest, Storify, Wallwisher

WEB DEVELOPMENT
Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, PyroCMS, Typo3
Verelo (excellent GUI) and Pingdom - website monitoring
KnowEm - social media username check
Vidahost's - domain checker
Bust-a-Name - enter keywords, suggests available domains
modern.IE - official MS resources to test your sites across browsers
Dominder - All your domains at a glance on a single dashboard
Small SEO Tools - collection of quick & easy SEO tools - keywords, links, page ranking, IP, etc.

ONLINE all-in-one WEBSITE CREATORS
OnePager, Weebly, JimDo, WIX, Pen.io - anonymous
Yola, Lifeyo, cif2, webs, ucoz
WebEden, SnapPages
Dunked - create a free portfolio, IM-Creator - new startup

WEB DESIGN
Subtle Patterns - background image 'textures' (good site functionality too); ColourLovers - community
Gradient generator - background colours - ColorZilla - CSS colour gradients
Adobe Kuler - and - ColorSchemeDesigner - colour swatches/palettes/themes
Color Blender - give it any 2 colours, and it will calculate a range of colours between them.
ColorSchemer - find complimentary colours, with a v.useful lighten/darken feature.
Stripe Generator - create stripes !
WooRank - evaluates the SEO-friendliness of websites on the fly.
TypeTester - compare font choices onscreen before changing your site
Spur - apply design principles to your site
Bounce - share comments on a site snapshot
Background Patterns
Vectors Land - background vectors

FONTS, ICONS, GRAPHICS
IconFinder - icon search engine
FontStruct - design & build your own fonts for free
FontSquirrel - free commercial fonts
Fontello - custom icon fonts to look good & save bandwidth
Symbolset - create semantic symbol fonts.
Icon Monstr - free icons for web use
Iconic Font - 220 icons in a single font collection
Typicons
Cufon (similar to Google fonts)
Simple Desktops - minimal wallpapers for PC or any device

WEBSITE & DESIGN COLLABORATION
Cage - looks very slick, and free whilst in beta

ONLINE CODING
PasteBin, TinkerBin, Dabblet, Snippet, JSfiddle, Ideone
Initializr - Handy for quickly generating an HTML5 boilerplate.

WEB MOCKUPS
Balsamiq - create & share mockups of apps & sites.
MockFlow, iPlotz, Lumzy

WEB CONTENT
Cruxbot - summarises website text
JoliPrint - save web pages to PDF

CLOUD STORAGE
Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Box, GE.TT, iCloud
Drop My Site and Drop My Email - backup your entire website or email account (2gb)
PipeBytes - send files to anybody
otixo - link & search all your cloud accounts with 1 login

PHOTO STORAGE
Flickr, 500px, Smugmug, Picasa Albums
DropMocks - online galleries (anonymous or not)

GRAPHICS
Aviary - and - PhotoFunia - photo editing
Gliffy - create network diagrams, floorplans.
VectorMagic - convert JPG to vector (very useful, quite advanced, & free !)
MyScriptFont - turn your own handwriting into a font !
Rasterbator - make maaassssive newspaper style prints from any picture
Vecteezy - create and edit vector files in-browser ! (new 2017)

STUDY
W3 Schools, PHP for beginners, Codecademy
Khan Academy
Learning Space (OU)
edX - MIT/Harvard, TED - ideas worth spreading (video lectures)
OpenCulture - The best free cultural & educational media
BigThink
OWL - online writing lab
Harvard Open Learning, Princeton lectures, Open Yale
Languages - DuoLingo, Memrise, LiveMocha, ielanguages, FSI Language Courses (US Foreign Service)
Coursera - free online teaching platform by top global universities
80 Free Ebooks from Microsoft
Foboko - free ebook self-publishing (& downloads)
Code School

GLOBAL ECONOMY
Peak Prosperity - audio/video course on finance & the economy
nef - The New Economics Foundation is an independent think-and-do tank that inspires and demonstrates real economic well-being.
Positive Money (UK) believes that the root cause of many of our current social, economic and environmental problems lies in the way that we allow money to be created. We campaign for fundamental reform of a system that is fuelling debt, poverty and economic and environmental crisis.

PC
Ninite - install/update multiple apps at once
GRC Shields Up - probe my ports - security scan
Eset and Bitdefender - online antivirus scanners
VirusTotal - online scanner for files or URLs
MakkaMappa - Customised GPS maps
GPU review - Side by side comparisons of GPU cards
Alternative To - software for all platforms

SEARCH ENGINES
Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, WolframAlpha, Yahoo / Altavista, Ask, Gibiru
TagGalaxy - images

WEB MARKETING
Digital Marketing Guides - social media & more
Beginners Guide to SEO - tutorial to make websites more search engine friendly.
Hubspot's Marketing Resources - tools, reports, videos, podcasts, examples.

INFO PORTALS & AGGREGATORS
News Now - news aggregation service.
Google Reader - RSS feeds
InstaPaper - save sites to read later
TechMeme, ScienceDaily

TV
myEpisodes, DigiGuide, myDigiGuide, ZingZing, Sky channel grid, TVcatchup, Vevo
myTVrss - a complete episode guide for every series, with a feed alert when your shows air.

LIFESTYLE
Alcohol Units Calculator
MSE Mortgage Calculators
MSE International Phone Call Price Checker

LEGIT FREE MUSIC
Noupe - Thou Shalt Not Steal: Free Music for Your Videos
Hongkiat : 20+ Websites To Download Creative Commons Music For Free

Originally Posted by Further Reading

PCpro - 10+ free online teaching tools
Top 40 Useful Sites To Learn New Skills
BBC's 'Click'
SEOmoz blog - interesting article on choosing a domain name, plus lots of tools
17 Resources to help you create killer Infographics

25 Useful Online Tools for Designers
45 New Tools and Services for Web Designers and Developers
25+ Cheat Sheet Wallpapers for Web Designers and Developers
DesignYourWay : 51 Resources & Tools for Web Designers
FreeWebsite.us - review & roundup of online web creators

10 Tools to Evaluate Your Web Design
Blog Away: 5 Must-Have Blogging Tools
25 Useful Online Generators For Web Designers
21 Handy Online Tools To Test Your Code Snippets and Preview Your Work Instantly
Alternatives to Wordpress for Blogs and CMS

7 CSS Tools for Better Web Design
The Designers' List
33 Best Typography Tools for Web Designers and Developers
20 Open Source Tools & Apps for Developers
SEO Tools Master List

Image Optimisation Tools - for web photos
10 Excellent Productivity Tools For Bloggers (& everyone else)
10 great Free ICON resources
30 Online Drawing Tools
15 Handy Tools for Easier and Quicker CSS Development

16 Alternative Ways To Download Online Videos - Web services, Browser extensions, Desktop, Mobile
15 Websites To Cartoon Yourself - caricature, avatar, etc
15 Websites To Test Your Codes Online - nice collection of online webdev tools
101 Tweet-Tastic Tools - amazing list for those seriously into their social media !

[driver8]

Inspired by the PCpro article linked above, I've just gone through all my bookmarks to compile this list of useful websites.

Are there any sites you use regularly, or find incredibly useful ? I'm sure there's loads I've forgotten about, and loads more that I've not yet discovered - please suggest away and I'll keep the first post updated. All sites & categories welcome.

[akira9000]

http://kuler.adobe.com/

superb for swatches ( web design but any kind of creative )

[Tempest]

Why no adult content sites?

Is no-one interested in sex/adult content on the internet

[bumfrog]

http://www.ninite.com - for installation of most used free apps. downloads all the latest versions and installs them for you.

cloud storage you may as well add skydrive, google drive and box to them.

[Guest 65726]

Originally Posted by bumfrog

http://www.ninite.com - for installation of most used free apps. downloads all the latest versions and installs them for you.

cloud storage you may as well add skydrive, google drive and box to them.

QFT thanks to this I can do a fresh wipe and rebuild my PC back to the way it was in 45 mins!

[ian turner]

Originally Posted by Tempest

Why no adult content sites?

Is no-one interested in sex/adult content on the internet

Not at Pcpro as they don't need a poor substitute for their ipads
I was going to query the lack of a link to freegoatpron

The list of mail and social websites seems to offer a choice but it seems
they've decided that libre office is not worth suggesting under office apps

[driver8]

Thanks for the sensible suggestions.

Originally Posted by Tempest

Why no adult content sites?

Cos this is supposed to be a list of sites that actually *do* something (other than cause erections), and besides it's against the rules of this forum.

Originally Posted by ian turner

The list of mail and social websites seems to offer a choice but it seems they've decided that libre office is not worth suggesting under office apps

This is not their list, it's mine - the reference to PCpro is where I got a couple of the unusual links, the rest are from my bookmarks and my head. Anyway, Libre Office (& OpenOffice) are replacements to MS Office, in that they are downloaded programs - see the Useful Apps thread. Or do they offer online functionality nowadays ? Google Docs is online, with a "work offline" option.

[ArthurDent]

News website: NewsNow

[gingertom]

web marketing
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/marketing-guides/
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-resources/

[Wooglie]

http://www.myepisodes.com For keeping track of TV episodes.

[richie-t]

Its probably obvious, but tomshardware for pc part reviews and benchmarks etc

[driver8]

Updated with quite a few extras.

Anyone know any sites that offer really unique content, or that perform useful/interesting app-like functions ?

[njc]

Google Reader - RSS feeds in one place

[DJBenson]

www.tvcatchup.com

Let's you watch live streaming TV from the UK (Freeview/FreeSat channels)

www.vevo.com - HD music video's with playlist/shuffle functionality

[driver8]

This looks v.good, not tried it myself - Codecademy is the easiest way to learn how to code. It's interactive, fun, and you can do it with your friends.

[Chris Locke]

Probably not useful to everyone, but http://www.balsamiq.com/ is great for creating mockups of applications, websites, etc.
Recently found http://www.gliffy.com/gliffy/ for network diagrams, floorplans, etc.

Kuler was recommended above. I've used http://colorschemedesigner.com/ before, which not only gives a great interface, but also a website 'preview' which is useful, especially for clients.

[bumfrog]

http://taggalaxy.de/ - browse image search results in a cool solar system way (ok, I'm not selling this very well, just try it! )

http://www.myscriptfont.com/ - turn your handwriting in to a font

http://photofunia.com/ - easy way to turn photos in to fun shots (includes templates so you just upload the pic and press a button)

http://www.codecademy.com - another help with coding website

http://joliprint.com/ - saves web pages to pdf for later

http://www.online-convert.com/ - online file convertor (both audio/visual)

http://arje.net/rasterbator - make maaassssive newspaper style prints from any picture

[richie-t]

Originally Posted by bumfrog

http://taggalaxy.de/ - browse image search results in a cool solar system way (ok, I'm not selling this very well, just try it! )

http://www.myscriptfont.com/ - turn your handwriting in to a font

http://photofunia.com/ - easy way to turn photos in to fun shots (includes templates so you just upload the pic and press a button)

http://www.codecademy.com - another help with coding website

http://joliprint.com/ - saves web pages to pdf for later

http://www.online-convert.com/ - online file convertor (both audio/visual)

http://arje.net/rasterbator - make maaassssive newspaper style prints from any picture

I like the idea of this Rasterbator! Shame the site is a bit of a mess. I'm just trying to work out how it could make a relatively small file big enough for huge prints. That has a lot of potential!

[bumfrog]

Originally Posted by richie-t

I like the idea of this Rasterbator! Shame the site is a bit of a mess. I'm just trying to work out how it could make a relatively small file big enough for huge prints. That has a lot of potential!

it's fab, just try it

I think you can download an offline version as well. Just don't get the sheets mixed up when you print them, can take a while to sort them out if you've 50 odd sheets of dots