There are many paid and free web designing tools available in the market which helps website designers or owners to make their tasks hassle-free. The world of web design tools never stands still, it is growing exponentially. Technology keeps on advancing, standards are getting better, and every hour new tools are added to solve our divergent purposes.
Static dummy tools are becoming less useful. As our needs are changing day by day, here we are listing 10 Must Know Tools for Website Designers which will serve most of your purposes for the years to come.
Tools for Website Designer & Owners
Animate.css
CSS has improved with many features which make web development much easier. One of these features is CSS3 animation effects. We are going to introduce you to an awesome library that will make your animation better: Animate.css.
Animate.css is a ready-to-use library collection of CSS3 animation effects. This library has more than 50 libraries that work consistently with almost every browser with CSS3 support.
How to use:
With Animate.css, all you just need to include the appropriate classes with your elements. To start with, first, include the animate.css file into the head. You can download the library from the Github repository page.
If you wish to make a loop of your animation for multiple times, then you can use animation-iteration-count attribute. But make sure to include vendor prefixes like WebKit, Moz, etc in the header file. By adding infinite as a value, you can loop the video animation for infinite times.
Link: https://github.com/daneden/animate.css
Whattheme.com
Whattheme is the most advanced CMS and a free online tool that allows you to easily detect the theme of a site is currently using. If you put a URL or site details in this online tool, it will let you know some details about the site. For example, it will show the theme name, creation date, Author, Vision no, some bit of description, etc. However, currently, Whattheme is working with WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Shopify, Ghost, Blogger, Tumblr, Big Cartel and Magento.
Link: www.whattheme.com
Beyond Compare
Beyond Compare is a utility for comparing files and folders. It is one of the best tools that compare seamlessly almost anything of your web designing needs. It will help you to get the differences in the source code, folders, images, and data. Beyond Compare can even synchronize your folders and validate your copies.
How to use:
Beyond Compare handles a wide variety of comparison tasks. Each comparison task is called a session. Sessions can be individualized, named, and reused. Many settings of Beyond Compare are managed and stored by session rather than as program-wide options for better flexibility.
There are different ways to compare folders and files. Comparison criteria include file timestamps, sizes, attributes, and contents. Once the session is loaded, you can selectively re-compare files by picking Actions > Compare Contents or by opening the files in the file session.
To compare Text on the clipboard click on File > Open Clipboard
A Picture Compare session compares two images side by side and shows the differences between them. Currently, it supports GIF (*.gif), JPEG (*.jpg) and many more popular file types. Pick an Auto Scale > find Rotate> Pick Flip> ignore Unimportant Differences> Click Compare to see the differences of images.
Link: www.scootersoftware.com
fa2png.io
fa2png.io is an awesome free tool to convert icon fonts to PNG. It is very easy to use. You can get your work done just in a few clicks! You can just define the color and size of the icons and download them directly. That’s it!
How it works:
Open the URL fa2png.io> Type a name in the search box > Choose the color of your icon> Then find the background color option> Set the pixel and margin size of the icon> Click on Generate!
Link: http://fa2png.io/
simpleicons.org
Simpleicons.org is the most popular tool to get an SVG icon for free. Icons of Social media, News Channels, Tech Companies are available to download. The specialty of simpleicons.org is that it never breaks when you try to make the image bigger and bigger.
How it works:
There is a search box on the top left corner of the window. You just need to write the brand name in the box. As you are writing, the search engine of the tool will keep you showing the results. Now click on the icon that you want to download. A pop-up window will ask you whether you want to save it. Just click save to use the icon later.
Link: www.simpleicons.org
uptimerobot.com
Uptime Robot is one of the best free uptime monitoring services. Every website owner must be looking for this kind of services to check if anything goes wrong with their websites. Sometimes it is maybe the code, the Server or the network, Uptime Robot is always there to help you to keep your websites up. You can manage up to 50 websites with 5 minutes interval between checks. If the service finds any downtime, then it will alert you through email. You can buy the PRO version if you want to monitor your sites for the lesser time interval. In addition, you can also set multiple email ids to get downtime notifications.
How it works:
Below are the step-by-step guides of Uptime Robot:
- It asks to your websites to get the status codes like “200-ok”, “404-not found”, etc in every 5 minutes (depending on the monitor’s settings)
- If the status code doesn’t find a problem, then you need not to worry.
- If the status code is ‘400’+ and 500+, then the site is not loading.
- In order to confirm whether the site is down or not, Uptime Robot checks several times in the next 30 seconds.
- If the site is still down, it sends an alert message to your email.
Link: www.uptimerobot.com
WakaTime
If you want to monitor programming activity of the developers to increase productivity, then WakaTime is for you. It is a free tool which monitors and calculates time spent on writing codes! WakaTime works with multiple IDEs to give you the whole picture of your coding activity, and there are many other features and integrations available beyond just time tracking. However, it uses Visual Studio plug-ins for automatic time tracking and generates matrices from your programming activity.
It supports Visual Studio versions like 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2017.
How it works:
You have to install a text editor that supports WakaTime, for example, Subline Text3, NotePad++, Atom.
It is also possible to see:
- On which project you spend the most of your time.
- Which file-types are the more used on a daily basis?
- which files have you worked the most?
For instance: as a result, you can see something like this: 30% HTML, 29% Python, 15% Joomla, 6% WordPress and 12% PHP.
Check out the Weekend Freebies Here.
Link: www.wakatime.com
SmoothScroll
SmoothScroll is a free extension that you can use on any websites to scroll smoothly using your mouse and keyboard. It is fast and lightweight and does not have any advertisements. It also has some great features like iOS-like smooth scrolling, Mouse & keyboard support, Arrow keys, PgUp/PgDown, Spacebar, Home/End Customizable step sizes, frames per second and much more. SmoothScroll also Works fine with embedded content (PDF, flash and excluded pages list. You can even use the native MAC app to enjoy smooth scrolling everywhere.
How it works:
This tool is very easy to use. Just you need to download from their official website and install it. It works with almost every browser. However, you will get an extension at the top of the browser that you are using. You just need to unselect Disable for all app option. That’s it! Now enjoy your scrolling like never before. GIF
Link: github.com/cferdinandi/smooth-scroll
Particles.js
You can create beautifully animated particles with this JavaScript (JS) library. There are tons of free animation libraries available in the market. But, the new Particles.js also being a free library goes a totally new direction as the animated particles move in real time all over the page. This is easy to use and open-sourced on Github.
How it works:
To get used to with this script, you should see the live demo on the main page after installing. You can play around with the library features to see how it works actually. On the interactive demo, it will let you adjust particle size, speed, shape, color, and position.
It is such a comprehensive library, so you would require a good understanding of Frontend coding and JavaScript to see it working.
Finally, if you are familiar with exporting these graphics, you can save the images directly from the web app demo page. You can now export a raw PNG or even save all your custom settings into a JSON file which then imports directly into the Particles.js script.
Link: github.com/VincentGarreau/particles.js/
Test My Site
Test My Site is a free online tool by Google to determine how well a website performs on the desktop and mobile device. This new testing tool is very simple and easy to use. By the way, you don’t need to have any technical knowledge! You can check the usability of your website just by typing the URL of your site in the given box. Then the tool will do the rest and will show the score of your site. In addition, it will give you a detailed report that includes suggestions on things you need to fix.
How does it work?
As Test My Site is an online testing tool, you don’t need to install anything on your computer. As I mentioned, just type the website address (URL) in the given box and press enter. Now it will automatically perform a few steps like Testing the Site on a Standard Connection, Analyzing Data and much more. After a few seconds, it will show you scores as Good (in green), Fair (in Yellow) and Poor (in red).
However, you would not get an exhaustive report from this free tool. You should also remember that it is not a replacement for usability testing. But as far as a free tool is a concern, it mostly solves your general purposes.
Link: testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com
Web Developing and Designing task can be a lot easier by using some of these great tools. The best web tools can allow you to create websites more interesting, impressive and attractive. We just shared our own experience and latest findings. The tools that we have recommended would be useful in your daily projects.
So which extensions do you prefer for your websites?
Choosing A Web Design Provider
Website owners need to hire a web design provider to help design their website, making it more appealing, faster, and intuitive for excellent user experience. Hiring professional web design services is a good idea because specialists are highly knowledgeable about web design trends, helping you avoid web design mistakes that can ruin your success.
Check the following tips when choosing a web design provider:
- Determine The Type Of Web Design You Need: You probably need a business-to-business or B2B web design to promote your product to other businesses.
- Ask The Right Questions: Finding the best web hosting company is the most important decision you can make for your online business. However, there are many questions you need to ask when you start looking around.
Essentially, your questions should tackle the experience and portfolio of the web design agency. Don’t forget to inquire about the budget required in designing your website.
Choosing A Web Host
A web host helps website owners host their website. But what are the things you need to keep in mind when choosing a web host?
- Know The Features You Need: If you’re a professional who’s looking to host a company website, you want to find a web host that provides hosting with plenty of features, such as e-mail services, an unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, unlimited email storage space, and unlimited webspace.
- Consider The Plan: When it comes to choosing a web host, it’s important to know if the hosting plan has unlimited disk space or not. The average host will provide unlimited disk space to their customers. This is important since running out of disk space means losing your data, which can be a real problem if you’re running your own online business.
- Consider The Backup Software: Make sure that the web host you’re considering offers backup software to help you restore your files should your computer crash. You may also want to find out about how often the company backs up its information to ensure that you won’t lose everything by accident.
Conclusion
You’ve just learned the must-know tools for web designers and web owners. If you use the right tools, you’ll attain your website goals faster and with positive outcomes.
When you know how to choose a website provider and a web host, the rest will come easy. It’ll also make your online business a lot easier to manage and even more enjoyable.
