Great Tools and Resources that Designers and Design Teams Should Start Using

Web designers face a peculiar set of circumstances with respect to technology. New tools, resources, and techniques make their work easier. They also provide opportunities to create improved products.

At the same time, changing technology can present challenges. One of them being the need to keep up with changing times if one is to keep up with or stay ahead of the competition.

As one example, let’s take graphics. It has almost replaced text as the preferred method of presenting information on the web. Team collaboration is another example. Here, interactive prototyping, video, and live chat have taken over. They have replaced phone calls, email, and in some cases, meetings and business trips.

Keeping up with the times can be easy and even fun when you have the proper tools and resources at your disposal, like any of the following.

1. Mason

Mason promotes project collaboration, adaptability, and agility. Its pre-packaged solutions of common digital product requirements address today’s most comment digital product requirements.

One of the areas where Mason differs from the rest of the pack is the ability of team members and even clients to make changes to Mason modules during the design/development phase or after deployment. Registration and login features give you total control over who is authorized to make these changes.

These features enable you to streamline your collaboration activities by allowing changes in requirements to be handled by others.When designers, developers, clients, marketing organizations, and others are authorized to build, ship, and edit a Mason feature, it eliminates the necessity of requiring repetitive deployment cycles to keep a digital product up to date.

The modular content (pre-coded blocks of content) helps to speed up project workflow by simplifying page management for every page you build. You’ll be able to get your deliverables to your clients more quickly and your clients will be able to get their products in front of their customers as well.

2. Mobirise

Small customer projects like small websites, portfolios, landing pages and the like shouldn’t require having to use a variety of tools and resources for successful completion. The end products must still adhere to high design and development standards, but that is not an excuse for having less than total control over your projects from start to finish.

Mobirise offers an easy way to create small projects such as these. It features 1200+ templates and blocks and a huge library of images, fonts, and icons. It’s offline and has everything you need to work with on a single platform.

You can host your products wherever you want, since it’s so way to work with it’s a great tool for non-techies, and its an ideal choice for those who prefer to take a visual approach to design. Best of all, Mobirise is free for both commercial and personal use.

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3. Elementor

When more than 900,000 users jump on board during a WordPress plugin’s first two years on the market, you know there must be a good reason for it. Elementor, currently the #1 WordPress page builder, not only has all the website-building features and functions you’ll need, but it won’t cost you a dime.

This free, open source frontend builder is destined to become even more popular, thanks to a host of new features being introduced incrementally throughout 2018 as part of the latest version, Elementor 2.0. Since you’ll have all the freedom and creativity you want, you won’t feel limited by the way a theme is designed. The goal of Elementor’s authors was to make website building painless and effortless, and that is precisely what they achieved.

Elementor comes with a host of beautiful templates, 800+ Google fonts, 400+ icons and plenty of color options.

4. A2’s Fully Managed WordPress Hosting

A2’s fully managed hosting service is well known for easy site staging and fast, super-reliable and scalable hosting expertise and capacities. A2 Hosting can claim up to 20 times faster page loading speeds than most of its competitors.

This service’s prices are quite affordable, and in most cases, A2 can move you over from your existing host at no charge.

5. Goodiewebsite

Goodiewebsite is a software development service offering cost-effective coding at competitive prices. This service specializes in small to medium-size (1 to 10 page) websites; a size common to many small businesses and creative agencies.

Prices start at $999 for which you can expect reliable service and top-quality deliverables.

6. monday.com

Whether your team consists of yourself and one other guy, or is huge and dispersed around the globe, monday.com is a team management tool that should fit your project needs like a hand in a glove.

Your team needn’t be particularly tech-oriented to use it, and it will relieve you of the burdens often associated with managing multiple Excel files, doing your project planning on whiteboards, and attending one overly-long meeting after another.

7. The Hanger

You don’t often hear the terms “modern” and “classic” used to describe the same thing, but The Hanger manages to answer to both descriptions. Since this WooCommerce theme is almost ridiculously easy to set up, you can have a customized eCommerce WordPress site that perfectly aligns with a client’s brand up and ready in a very short time.

8. LayerSlider

The LayerSlider plugin serves as a platform on which awesome sliders, image galleries, attention-getting slideshows, animated page blocks, and even complete websites can be created.

Its features include a visual drag and drop editor, versatile layout options, and handcrafted slider templates covering everything from personal to corporate needs. LayerSlider is responsive, retina and high-resolution ready, and SEO friendly.

9. Uncode – Creative Multiuse WordPress Theme

Uncode is a powerful, user-friendly theme that has all the functionality needed to build an outstanding portfolio to showcase your work in a very few hours. New features like the powerful Gallery Manager, Slides Scroll, and Shape Dividers have created even more design options that are guaranteed to give your products a professional and uniquely creative look.

Visit Uncode’s user showcase for ideas and inspiration. Be prepared to be impressed!

10. Houzez

Houzez is a WordPress-based real estate and property management system that provides realtors with the functionality needed to administrate a real estate marketplace, coordinate their agents and accept submissions.

Features include advanced search filters and options, listings options, a custom search composer, and a custom fields builder that gives you the ability to add custom fields to display whatever information your business model requires. You will also be impressed by Houzez’s customer support!

11. Fluid UI

Fluid UI is a web and app prototyping tool you can apply to significantly speed up your design workflow by sharing wireframes, mockups, and prototypes with team members and other project stakeholders. Information sharing and feedback can be accomplished via interactive video presentations and live chat. Fluid UI features extensive libraries of web, desktop, iOS and Android design components.

12. Pixpa

Creatives look for tools that will enable them to showcase their work in the best possible manner. Pixpa’s all-in-one platform is more than up to the task. Not only is it a top portfolio website builder with drag and drop design tools, but it offers so much more- integrated e-commerce store, blog, and even client proofing.

With Pixpa you’ll save time and money by not having to bounce back and forth among several tools to get the results you want. Get started for free with the 15-day trial.

13. wpDataTables

wpDataTables is far and away the premier WordPress plugin for creating tables and charts. It is so good at managing huge amounts of complex data in minutes if not seconds to create beautiful, responsive, interactive, and maintainable charts that many of its users switched over to WordPress simply for the opportunity to use it.

wpDataTables accepts data in most formats and from many different sources, including massive MySQL tables.

14. WhatFontis.com

Thousands of designers access WhatFontis.com’s database every day to locate fonts they wish to use but don’t know the name of, or are looking to find the closest possible match. Although the WhatFontis.com directory is huge (450,000 commercial and free fonts at last count), an automatic artificial intelligence system takes your image and identifies the font by name quickly and efficiently.

Unless you enjoy looking for needles in haystacks, you’ll appreciate the time you’ll save using this powerful resource.

15. FFonts.net

FFonts.net is far and away the best source of free fonts on the market. This online directory places thousands of fonts at your fingertips. The fonts have been assigned to 87 smartly-defined categories, enabling you to quickly zero in on a specific font or browse through several fonts that have a similar style.

Once you find a candidate, you can create a string of text with it to see how it will appear in actual practice.

Conclusion

What are your thoughts on this collection of tools and resources? Here, you should be able to find one or more that will speed up your workflow. Some of them can provide optimum hosting for your needs. Others are focused on helping to improve the quality of your deliverables.

You might be looking for a multi-purpose theme, a specialty theme, or a team management tool. Whatever it is, you’ll find it here. You can be confident that whatever you select, it will be the best of the best of its type.

The post Great Tools and Resources that Designers and Design Teams Should Start Using appeared first on Speckyboy Web Design Magazine.