8 Top Tools for a Web Editor

Being an online editor, blogger or writer shares many skills with someone who writes or edits for print only. There are, of course, skills and knowledge which you need for online editing and writing such as understanding SEO, HTML and content management systems to be successful.

When you are editing and running a website which has news, features, product reviews or blog posts being regularly published, there's one thing you need to use really well, and that is time. Online publishing allows you to publish quickly and regularly, but you also need to learn to use your time efficiently so you can concentrate on producing high quality content, whether that's editing it, writing or commissioning it.

Here are some of the tools I either use daily or weekly to help me work more productively: 

1. MarkDownPad

Online publishing means you are going to have to be pretty good at using content management systems (CMS), such as WordPress, from which to publish content to your website.

Not all CMS work in the same way and one problem can be that publishing content which you have written in Microsoft Word and then paste into your CMS sometimes adds hidden code into your content which makes the formatting come out different online to how you expect.

It can sometimes take ages to reformat the content and paste it back into the CMS so it is published correctly.

To be more consistent and save time, I use MarkDownPad which allows you write your blog post or article, format it (e.g. with headers and hyperlinks) and copy it as HTML into your CMS without any hidden code.

MarkDownPad has a free version and a 'Pro' version which has more features including being able to create tables. I use the Pro version and use it every single day to make sure I only have to publish once and cut out wasted time with unwanted formatting.

2. iPiccy

It's more than likely that you will need to edit images for your online articles, either compressing them, crop them, enhancing them or even creating web banners. If you have a designer to do this, then great. However, if you don't have one and don't want to spend money on buying PhotoShop, then iPiccy is an excellent, free online photo editing tool.

I use it to enhance, photos, create collages and make web banners and buttons. It's very easy to use and easy to learn. I use iPiccy everyday and it saves me lots of time. When my designer is too busy to make me a small button or banner ad, I create them using iPiccy.

3. Dropbox

Storing documents, images, videos or photos is essential as an editor. When you are sent press releases, storing them on a network server is OK, but really painful when you are out and about gathering content.

Using DropBox is free (you get a free amount of storage which I have not yet exceeded in the time I have been using it) and is accessible anywhere you can get internet access. When I am writing articles, I store them all on DropBox and share the folders with my team mates.

DropBox is something I just cannot do without as an editor.

4. Wikimedia Commons 

You may sometimes find that you need an image for your article or web page quickly. Or, you might not have any budget left to buy photos from one of the many online services. 

This is where Wikimedia Commons becomes so useful. WikiMedia is the photography version of Wikipedia. There are tons of images you can use for free as long as you provide attribution to the person who uploaded and shared it. 

5. Shrink-o-Matic 

There's nothing quite so annoying as visiting a website where it takes ages to load the images. Web pages which load slowly are bad for your search engine optimisation. You will lose visitors if the images on your site are too big.

But, compressing them to a suitable size and dimension can take ages.

This is where the free Adobe AIR app, Shrink-o-Matic is brilliant. You simply drag a photo from a folder onto Shrink-o-Matic and it automatically compresses it for you and saves back into the original folder. You can adjust the settings so you always get the images in a certain width or height, for example. You can compress a complete folder in action.

Shrink-o-Matic save so much time.

6 . Word HTML Cleaner

Sometimes you may get Word files which have been saved a HTML documents. The code from these files is awful and can really mess up your article when you publish it in your CMS.

The free online tool, Word HTML Cleaner, is a simple app which strips out all the bad code from the document and provides you nice clean HTML.

7. Evernote 

Collecting stories and snippets of information from around the web is an essential part of a writer or bloggers daily life. Storing it can be a pain and keeping it in order can be even more difficult.

This is why Evernote is so good. Another free app into which you can snip and collate articles, documents, photos, tweets and all manner of content types into one easily managed location. You can use Evernote on your web browser, iPad or smartphone and keep it all synchronised.
- collecting potential articles

8. Excel or Spreadsheet

Finally, keeping my publishing schedule together is one of the most important daily activities I do, plotting out when I am going to publish articles, features or competitions.

The easiest way to keep it all together is using Microsoft Excel, or another spreadsheet tool (all saved on DropBox). It's easy to use and I could not work without it.