5 Handy Tools To Use When Designing & Developing Websites
Yes, another list! We love these lists. Medium soaks and bathes daily in the lists of online creators, sharing their valuable insights into apps and services they use daily. I love lists. You love lists. We all love lists.
So without further-ado, here are 5 of my favourite apps & services I use when designing a website.
1. Coolers.co — A Colour Palette Generator (and some)
Holy cow, I’ll eat my own hat if this isn’t the best palette generator on the interwebz. Just look at it…
Along with being able to choose a colour palette from over 10 different generation methods, you can export palettes in multiple formats, generate gradients, check contrast between colours and so much more — FREE. They do offer a pro version for a very modest £2.42/mo which unlocks more than 10 million colours and allows creation of more than 5 colours in your palette. It also removes the (very unobtrusive) ads.
2. Canva — An all-in-one design tool
I’ve been using Canva now for me and my team for about a year or so, at first it was just an easier way to edit an image or throw together something for social media, without having to get stuck into the Adobe Suite. It quickly became our go-to tool for creating social media content for multiple social platforms across many of our own projects.
Some of my favourite features using Canva are being able to share easily and collab with my team and the ability to schedule your content at any time in the next two years. Wow.
3. Envato Elements — Stock anything. Video, Audio, Content.
Envato Elements has saved my bacon on more occasions than I’ll admit. When I’ve needed a stock video, a stock illustration, a stock image, audio, etc. But where it’s helped me most of all, is WordPress & Elementor. Choose from thousands of UGC templates for Elementor and plugins for WordPress that you’d have to pay a premium for outside of the subscription.
Trello — Think KanBan boards on steroids.
The thing about Trello is that it’s unbelievably cheap. It’s priced at a humble £0 for using their individual plan, so if you’re just setting up your own project, working on your own, freelancing, etc. it’s extremely beneficial to help you organise your workflow without many limitations.
Once you start paying for the service with Trello Premium, you’ll unlock thousands of board integrations that help you automate every aspect of your project management.
Working with your team within a Workspace is as easy as inviting them to a board. You can then assign them cards and they’ll receive notifications when the cards they’re assigned to are updated and if you join the card with them, so will you. It’s a great way to help manage and keep on top of things to do, see what’s being worked on and what has been completed. Once a task is done, simply drag and drop the card into another category.
Unsplash/Pexels/Pixabay — Free stock images.
Stock photography used to be an expensive business. Remember having to pay £7 for a random image at Shutterstock? Well no longer do you have to worry about obscene prices for imagery. Unsplash, Pexels & Pixabay are some of my favourite places to get 100% free stock photos. Of course, you have to credit the creator of the image, but who wouldn’t do that anyway? Being a photographer myself, I understand the passion that goes into producing images that are worthy of being used in high end website publications. So credit where it’s due.
By the way, if you’re developing WordPress websites like we do, Instant Images is a great plugin that combines these 3 image sites via API, and let’s you pull in images on-the-fly, for free. It works great.
I hope this article has helped you discover some useful services you can use when designing websites or on projects. If it has helped you, as always, leave a comment or catch me on Twitter where we can have a chat!
