It’s easy to have perfect vision in hindsight, but when designing a website a little planning ahead can give you a perfect vision from the get-go. Many web designers find themselves performing redundant tasks, or creating things with manual effort that could otherwise be automated. Check out these useful web design tools that you’ll be glad you knew about before designing your first website.
1. Affinity Designer
This web design tool serves as an advanced photo editor and workbook all in one. It was built specifically for web design, so you won’t be digging through relevant tools and options while you work. Use Affinity Designer to create your site layout, or just web graphics to add to a premade theme. This application works great on tablet style devices or with the use a stylus.
2. Antetype
Antetype is a great tool to design your website or app’s user interface with. It allows you to create responsive templates or layouts and includes a hefty widget library to save you time. This application has a 30-day free trial, so you can see if it’s a good fit for your web project before spending any money.
3. Macaw
The Macaw application is great for new web designers who don’t want to use any coding. This point and click program allows you to draw your layout with a stylus or mouse, and use drop-down menu options to give your site functionality. Create spliced and web-optimized images for your new website with this indispensable beginner-friendly tool.
4. Google Web Designer
Many designers and first-time site builders aren’t aware that Google has a web design utility. Google Web Designer will enable you to create a full HTML5 website that is fully responsive. You can even use this application to create motion graphics and other design elements. Though knowledge of coding is not required to use this product, you can switch to coding mode at any time while working on your project to learn or edit the underlying code. Projects created with Google Web Designer will work on any web hosting server and its projects are easily replicable, making it a great choice for designers with reseller hosting.
5. Form
Form is a tool for web design that is used for building website prototypes. This is great for designers working with clients or companies. Use Form to create a functional prototype of your website to test or showcase before digging into more serious work hours on your project. Form has advanced features like touch ripples effects and material design components ready for inclusion in your website.
6. Origami
This is the only Mac-specific tool on the list, but deserves mention because of its unique utility and background. This tool was built by the makers of Facebook and Instagram. It allows you to design websites and other projects using layers. You can also export your projects as desktop or mobile prototypes and view them on your computer, iPhone, or Android device.
7. Power Mockup
If you’re designing a business website or will need to use Powerpoint, graphs, charts or other business and presentation utilities then you should review Power Mockup before building your site. This application lets you host powerpoint-style slideshows and presentations on your site through an intuitive, familiar user interface.
8. Fontello
No website would be complete without a great looking font and icon set. Use Fontello to create your own custom icons and fonts and give your site a more individualized appearance. Fontello can be used to generate custom fonts using a large inventory of icons, webdings, and emoticons.
9. Frontify
This is definitely a unique web design tool that you’ll find yourself using again and again. Frontify will help you style your new website by finding matching colors and suggestion schemes for you based on basic color input. Use Frontify before choosing your overall color scheme or background images to make sure your website has seamless stylistic elements.
10. Webflow
This application is great for web designers who aren’t proficient in coding. It contains pre-made elements that you can drag and drop to arrange on your new website layout project. Webflow is a unique web tool that will allow you the same creative control over your site as a vast knowledge of coding and advanced design practices would. Webflow combines the development and design process into one, making your project more unified and streamlined.
Once you get into the work of designing your first website you’ll thank yourself for checking out these invaluable web design tools. If you’re building your first website, and plan to design sites in the future, then you’ll find these tools indispensable. Once you’ve worked with some of them, you can save a workspace environment, get reseller hosting, and begin a full-fledged web design company. They can help automate processes, create cleaner, stronger design elements and save you time and effort.
Originally posted on April 18, 2017 @ 2:27 pm