Resources
WordPress Website Design Resources
Resources for
Web Design.
Web design involves a wide range of skills and techniques as does looking after, maintaining, and updating your website once it is complete. In order to help make this process as efficient as possible for you, we have collected together a selection of our favourite tools which we often use to help us create and expand websites. We have listed them here to help you.
The Peace of Mind that you Deserve
If you would rather not spend the time updating or changing your website we offer a range of maintenance packages to help you optimize your time.
Design Tools
Design tools can help you with everything from image resizing, image compressing, and changing file formats.
Gimp is our go-to image editing software, it is absolutely fantastic with everything it offers and extra to that it is opensource and free. There are updates and modifications to it from the community and it is constantly improving and gaining features.
A useful alternative to photoshop which allows you to use PSD templates.
They offer a wide variety of useful tools but our favorite is the image compressor. A very useful tool that enables you to reduce your file size of any image whilst maintaining the quality. You can then upload this to your site. This not only saves server storage space but will also help to speed up your website.
You can discover more about how to compress and optimise your images in our article on – WordPress image optimization and compression.
Font Converter is a useful tool when you only have certain font files and require others for the various other devices that are likely to visit your site. If you do not have the correct font file then the correct font may not be displayed for all devices.
Subtle Patterns is a useful site with a large variety of good looking patterns to add to a website to give it some variation.
Remove Backgrounds is a very useful tool that allows you to easily remove backgrounds in seconds. Simply upload the image and it will remove what it believes is the background.
Icon Libraries
A great selection of icons to use on your website and it also has a converter tool to make your own icon sets.
Font Awesome is… awesome and has a large selection of icons available to use. Perhaps the name is a little misleading though.
Flat Icon has a great range of useful and professional icons and you can use a few for free although it can be a little restrictive it is still a useful resource. They offer you free use of their free icon selections.
Social Media
Later is a fantastic way to plan out your Instagram feed and it will auto-post the preplanned posts. It is compliant with the Instagram API so you are safe to use it without risking a ban.
Screen Capture
A free and open-source program that allows you to record your screen and save it or broadcast live. It is a very useful tool that we use when making client videos and guides.
Loom is a fantastic tool for website revisions and support. You can take a screen recording and send it via a rule rather than uploading a video file. The free version is good enough for most use cases.
ScreenCast is a fantastic screenshot tool. Similar to Loom but this is aimed at screenshots rather than videos.
Fonts
1001 Fonts offers a wide range of fonts that you can use as you desire for projects both personal and commercial. This is extremely useful as many font sites restrict you to personal use and need for a license to be purchased for commercial use.
They have a wide selection of free fonts but often restrict and charge for commercial use. Be sure to check beforehand to ensure you are within the licensing of your chosen font.
Stock Images
A free and open-source program that allows you to record your screen and save it or broadcast live. It is a very useful tool that we use when making client videos and guides.
Loom is a fantastic tool for website revisions and support. You can take a screen recording and send it via a rule rather than uploading a video file. The free version is good enough for most use cases.
Pixabay has a great selection of stock photography and even has vectors and drawings to use for free.
Web Development Resources
W3 Schools is an excellent resource for help with HTML and CSS code. They have almost everything you can think of.
An excellent place to learn code or to advance your skills… for free!
When creating websites we base them around the Content Management System (CMS) that is used by around 60% of websites on the internet. This CMS is WordPress. Whilst we use WordPress as the basis of the website build we often use custom code to edit and manipulate the sections and styles that we need to. For the custom coding, we often use Atom as it is a great code editor.
Website Analytics
Google Analytics is the industry standard for analytics as they hold the majority of the data and send the vast proportion of search engine driven website traffic.
Analytify is an easy and user-friendly analytics addon in WordPress. It essentially pulls all the information you need to see from Google Analytics and shows it nicely on your WordPress Dashboard.
Spelling & Grammar
Even if your spelling is grammar is good, it can nearly always be better. We often use Grammarly to double-check the spelling and grammar of our content and to make sure we are expressing what we want to say in the best way we can.
Website Testing
Pingdom is a very useful way to see and check your website speed. You can view it in the waterfall chart to find any bottlenecks and issues that slow the site down.
GTMetrix is a great speed tool as it allows you to check for a range of issues and allows you to fix them and test again to see the progress and changes to your site.
Google Page Speed is a fantastic free tool that gives you everything you need to help resolve your speed issues in the eyes of Google.
Security
Our hands-down favorite password manager is Master Password. This is free and open-source. The idea behind it is not to store any data on a server or locally as with other password managers as this can be compromised and hacked. Master Password relies on cryptography to generate your passwords on the fly and can be used on multiple devices to generate the same passwords without the devices ever having been connected.
iThemes is a fantastic security plugin that can help to stop a wide variety of attacks, you can configure two-factor authentication, and also it will let you know if you have any vulnerable plugins or themes installed.
Not a typical program or thing that can used but it provides an extra layer of defence against bots and spam. This is incredibly useful on all websites. There are several versions of this V2 and V3. You will most likely be familiar with V2 – click all the traffic lights, click all the trucks, click all the bicycles, etc.
Content Management Systems
WordPress is our favourite Content Management System or CMS. It is open-source and allows for an incredible amount of customisation and changes to be made all whilst being easy to use and understandable for the end-user. WordPress is used on about 60% of the websites created worldwide wide which gives it a huge userbase.
Plugins
A fantastic WordPress plugin that allows you to create sites of varying complexity. They can be as easy or as complex as you’d like.
A great set of addons for Elementor that increase the functionality and design features.
HappyFiles is a fantastic way to arrange your media gallery, pages, and posts.
Updraft is an excellent plugin that allows for the safe backup of your website. Backups are extremely important and make this plugin invaluable. We offer a service that will set automatic backups for you to ensure your site is always backed up.
A solid security plugin that gives you many good ways to help protect your site. You can add and configure as many options as you need. Make sure you have a backup of your site before configuring.
Themes
Hello Elementor is created by the Elementor team and can only be used with Elementor Pro. It is a fantastic theme that has no excess and is a simple framework for building sites.
Astra is an excellent theme that is well coded, fast, and compatible with most page builders. It is a solid choice to start a website and allows lots of room for development and adaptions. The free version is great but the added features and options from the paid version make it worth the cost.
WPDesigns Custom Theme
The WPDesigns Custom Theme is created for each client and project. It allows each site to be custom made and designed exactly as the client needs.
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