Characters

Stroke order:
★ Learnchineseez: learn low to write the 4000 most common Chinese characters.
★ Arch Chinese: animated stroke order with translation and words containing the character.
On the main page you can also find worksheets, flashcards and other learning tools
★ Mandarinstrokes helps you with stroke order. You can search for the characters by number of strokes, pinyin or character.
★ The MDBG dictionary includes stroke order animation.

Typing Chinese online:
★ If you need to type Chinese but cannot use a computer where it is installed, you can use quite a few websites. Most of them use the same software, some examples are: chinesetools, purpleculture, inputking, i2pinyin comes with a virtual keyboard.
★ I like this website because there you can type slightly longer phrases and select the characters afterwards.
★ If you know how the characters looks but have no idea how it is pronounced, then you need a dictionary with a handwriting recognition. Here are some choices, available online: hippodict (for iPhone), pleco (only downloadable).