10+Web Design Resources Worth Developers’ Attention
To make an amazing web developer portfolio is not easy, and here are the top 10+ best web design resources for you to make your work productive (How about diving right in? Check out this article for freelancers).
A lot of web design tools are available for use on the internet. Some of them can also be used for developers purposes. The designers have a lot of web design software to create great quality web designs. There are many different tools and free resources that help in creating web apps being introduced in the market.
I have curated a list of the most popular and easy to use tools for web designing.
ClickHelp
ClickHelp is a flexible, online help authoring solution that offers an impressive number of features, from context-sensitive help to built-in metrics, content reuse, PDF export, full-text search, password protection, full review cycles, readability analysis, and more.
ClickHelp offers all the features you’d expect to find in the online help:
- robust sidebar navigation,
- search,
- custom branding, and more.
It also can help you with single-sourcing and content re-use on par with what technical writers typically need. With ClickHelp, any topic can either be a separate topic. You also can reuse this platform inside other topics. For example, suppose you have a common section used in multiple topics. You would create that common section as a topic and then just drag it into the other topics where you want to re-use it. In the following example, “Rights of Usage” is another topic that has been re-used inside this New Topic.
ClickHelp provides built-in metrics and analytics about the content. You can generate more than a dozen different reports, such as:
- reports listing doc status (draft, reviewed, published, etc.),
- content ownership,
- custom reports based on other metadata (e.g., topics without updates or revision, and so on).
You can even generate readability scores and analyses of your content.
If you’re interested in SEO, ClickHelp is what you need. ClickHelp supports the Webmaster Tools integration that grants you control over your documentation portal indexing, allows sitemaps submitting, gives you access to various stats regarding your search ranks, etc. You can submit your portal link to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster, and make your documentation visible for many people. Moreover, you can specify your Meta Description and Meta Keywords which also improve SEO.
Overall, ClickHelp provides most of the features technical writers look for when estimating technical documentation platforms. Their platform-agnostic, SaaS-based approach allows ClickHelp to develop and release new features continuously. Their web-based platform and output give you a lot of flexibility and control to brand and deliver world-class looking help.
ONE Web Design Membership
The ONE is a subscription service, using which you will be able to download a large collection of:
- website templates,
- plugins,
- add-ons,
- extensions,
- illustrations,
- presentations,
- company identity templates,
- graphic mockups for social media accounts.
This is a subscription service for web designers, developers, bloggers and entrepreneurs. It includes more than 8,500 digital items for creating any website:
- 4000+ WordPress, Joomla, HTML and e-commerce templates,
- 400+ Powerpoint templates,
- 40+ powerful plugins,
- more than 3000 PSD illustrations,
- logo templates,
- cool graphics for boosting your social media pages and more.
You’ll have an opportunity to choose the templates among 700+ WordPress themes, 100+ WooCommerce themes, 100+ Elementor templates. In addition to WordPress themes and plugins, you will also have access to E-commerce templates for such CMS as:
- Magento,
- OpenCart,
- PrestaShop,
- Shopify,
- VirtueMart,
- WooCommerce Themes,
- Joomla templates.
It also includes PSD templates for more than 8000+ topics, flyers for holidays, Instagram post and stories templates, Facebook covers and other mockups, Youtube channel art, Certificate designs, business cards, logo templates and other illustrations for the corporate identity packages. The One subscription service gives you a chance to create as many web projects as you wish all the year-round.
You will get the updates for all core products for free every month, so you were confident that all digital items are compatible, up-to-date and ready for use.
Novi Builder
Today, Novi Builder is the best drag-and-drop editor for HTML. To put it briefly, the builder furthers the working process and makes it simple for users of any skill level. Working with Novi Builder, you can quickly design new online pages using various pre-designed content blocks.
What’s more, it also allows you to edit website content live. This step is very important for any beginner because that is how you can avoid making common mistakes when creating your designs.
Novi Builder provides its users with the ace and thoroughly featured HTML templates. They are pre-designed and can be used by people of any skill levels. However, the themes are fully editable and come with open source code. So, by taking the subscription, you get access to:
- a rich collection of different website templates,
- plugins,
- and other content elements.
Needless to say, some more UI components are coming. Novi Builder receives regular updates. It means that you will always have some trendy features to choose from.
Novi Builder is focused on coding to customize your website, so HTML knowledge is a must to make the most of it. An interesting take on coding for website builders is that Novi Builder lets you choose an HTML template before getting started. That type of template is great because its code is a lot cleaner, which means it’s much easier to edit them and rank high on Google. They’re beautiful and responsive on mobile, too.
When it comes to such business niches as web design or web development, Novi Builder is a real must-see. Just imagine how many online projects you can run for your customers using the editor. Another thing you should know about Novi Builder is that it is a B2B/B2C online platform.
Crocoblock Freebies: Tools and Templates
Are you looking for an accomplished set of website development tools? With Crocoblock pack of plugins, templates, widgets, and popups, you can speed up your workflow. Crockblock lets you create a website using the powerful WYSIWYG functionality of the open source Elementor Builder.
With Crocoblock, you get all the must-have tool for working with a website creator like a pro. Inside this toolkit, you’ll find:
- Jet Plugins — These 16 plugins extend the functionality of your Elementor, delivering you more editing capabilities and a library of professional design presets for multiple purposes.
- Templates — Get access to 46 attractive WordPress and WooCommerce to help you faster bootstrap and launch your web projects.
- Widgets — It’s super-nice to have a toolkit of 150 most-wanted widgets. The set of widgets includes basic design and content widgets, WooCommerce, Slider, Dynamic and Forms widgets, Menu and Search widgets and much more.
- Popups — Creating popups is no more tedious task with 64 pre-made designs for Subscribe, Discount, Countdown, Cookie Policy, Yes/No and other popup types.
As mentioned earlier, Crocoblock is built around the popular open source Elementor content editor. With Crockblock and Jet plugins, you’ll discover the new shade to this editor. Now, you’ll have tons of pre-made block and page presets at your disposal. That’s why you’ll create a website quicker. And you won’t write code on a regular basis anymore.
Crocoblock website development tools facilitate your workflow in the following ways:
- Work Faster With Dynamic Content with JetEngine— Create dynamic page templates with awesome widgets using custom post types, taxonomies, and meta-fields.
- Build Professional E-commerce Websites — Thanks to JetWooBuilder plugin, you’ll get a chance to customize all the WooCommerce pages of your website with Elementor. You also get a number of pre-made store and single product pages and dynamic layouts.
- Excel at Web Page Design — Create unique and highly usable pages with pre-made blocks and layouts in visual mode. Add eye-catchy widgets, Parallax, and cool content animation presets.
- Create Modern Blogs — Crocoblock includes a full package of blogging and lead generation tools. Various social integration options are also included.
- Create Popup in 5 Minutes — Create a popup for every purpose below 5 minutes with the animated pre-styles popup design included to Crocoblock.
Draftium
Draftium is a platform for website prototyping and collaboration that allows you to create a website prototype (wireframe) and collect feedback from other project participants. It will be useful for designers, copywriters, and marketers, working on a website or landing page.
Draftium has a block structure, so when creating a site, you do not need to drag its elements one by one; just select a block (from more than 250) and enable/disable its elements. According to the developers, the time you now need to create a prototype site in Draftium is 15–40 minutes.
The way it works is that you pick and choose components from their library, and customize them for your needs. The process of doing so is very well executed, and fast. You could create a responsive wireframe, share it with the world, and collect feedback in five minutes, which is awesome.
The tool allows a great deal of customization of the components. Things like paddings, background images, and colours can all be set to one’s preferences. And it might affect stakeholder buy-in much easier, considering you can apply the appropriate branding, graphics, etc. to the prototype itself.
Draftium stands on these 3 principles:
- Visualize fast. Pick a template and customize it with our powerful editor by adding or removing pages, blocks, and elements.
- Review and collaborate. Get real-time feedback right on your prototype online. Make changes on the fly and get approval without delay.
- Approve and proceed to production. Win clients by showing the website vision in minutes. Streamline ideation and communication.
Draftium is a great app if you don’t care to re-do in other apps like XD, Sketch or Figma (As I did), but one thing is sure, creating a full prototype is faster than using any of these tools.
Draftss
Draftss is a service in the unlimited graphic design space. What really sets Draftss apart from the vast majority of the other unlimited graphic design companies is that they offer their clients a variety of additional services including; web development for their UI/UX designs.
Every business owner can benefit from Draftss since it offers various services including:
- social media graphics,
- postcards,
- banner ads,
- icons,
- flyers,
- and posters.
It also helps in the creation of company logos, web UI, illustrations as well as mobile app UI. Once you sign up with Draftss, you get to work with skilled designers that understand your needs and who work to help you fulfil them. You must be specific and give details on all the relevant information so that they can understand your requirements clearly. Communication with the project manager is done via mail.
Once you have submitted your brief, the project manager will estimate the delivery time and then inform you of the time-frame. The duration depends on how complex the design is — meaning the delivery time of one design task can be different from another.
Then you just need to give them time to work on your design and they will get back to you once they are done. Sometimes, you have a big design project and you can’t order only one design task.
Draftss delivers their finished assignments in several different file formats including:
- Source files — Sketch, Illustrator, CorelDraw, Photoshop, Adobe XD, EPS
- Image files — JPG, PNG, SVG, PDF
- Code files — HTML, CSS, JS (check out this article about The difference between CSS units).
You can use Draftss when you need to get high-quality designs and art at an affordable rate as well as coding to transform your web UI/UX designs into fully-functional landing pages with cleanly written HTML/CSS/JS code.
Codepen
CodePen.io is an in-browser coding environment designed for both learning to code and to quickly prototype ideas with minimal hassle.
CodePen provides something called a pen, which comprises three different windows for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, plus a preview pane that updates in real-time as you type.
While it is frequently used for web developers to showcase ideas for websites, it is also a great place to learn the basics of front-end web development. Here are the most notable features you need to know when using CodePen.
CodePen is an excellent tool for web developers, and the field is growing. JavaScript is a great language to learn for a future in web development.
If you are learning web development and want to try out different preprocessors, CodePen allows you to switch preprocessors on the fly, and see the code it compiles down to in real time.
Alongside native support for preprocessors, CodePen supports external scripts. This makes it the perfect place to get hands-on experience with libraries for your personal projects or to brush up on popular web app libraries like React. Also, there are already a wealth of great tools for programmers, but CodePen’s approach is simple and intuitive.
With CodePen’s collections of Design Patterns, it’s so easy to find inspiration. Each category is a collection of example codes provided by users for specific tasks.
WebFlow
Launched in 2013 as a graduate of Y Combinator’s startup accelerator, Webflow is a drag-and-drop tool for creating performant, responsive websites without the use of code. It attempts to fill the space between DIY software like Wix and Squarespace, traditional content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, and actual front-end web development. And it’s designed to surpass them all in terms of ease-of-use, flexibility, and performance — and in this regard, it’s largely successful.
The components used in Webflow development play a huge role in how a website stands above the crowd. More importantly, they are what keep people coming back to your website. These components include:
- forms,
- Responsive navigation,
- Tab,
- Dropdown menu,
- Site search,
- HTML embed,
- HTML sliders,
- background videos,
- Interactive Google maps,
- Light boxes,
- Simple sharing options on social media.
Because all websites are coded in basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you’re not locked into a certain platform or theme. Just download your site files and deploy to hosting provider you’d prefer.
The platform also provides a simple solution for managing complex functions like defining shipping regions, calculating taxes, and managing inventory and fulfilment.
Standing far apart from the glut of low-quality DIY design software currently on the market, Webflow provides a powerful solution that is suited to most professional web design and development needs. Such features as the Webflow Designer, CMS, and Ecommerce allow users to easily create full-featured, performant websites — without needing to learn code or contract with developers. The platform does have its drawbacks, which include a less-than-intuitive animations interface and limited Ecommerce functionality.
Uigradients
Product designer and front end developer Indrashish Ghosh has created a useful online tool called uiGradients — a free collection of over 260 linear gradients that you can use for design and code. You can browse gradients by colour, copy their CSS codes, and even download a .JPG version of each one.
As a web designer and developer, you will find this website quite useful resource, with a massive selection of ready-made gradients (and CSS code for those). You can use as content backdrops in any part of your website. Easy copy CSS3 cross-browser code and use it in a moment.
It presents:
- 300 colour gradients indexed in 10 color families,
- “Digital Water,”
- “Orange Fun,”
- “Purple Bliss,”
- “What Lies Beyond”
“Digital Water,” “Orange Fun,” “Purple Bliss,” and “What Lies Beyond” are just a small sampling of soothing backgrounds. Each is available for download and there is even a button to rotate the gradients 90, 180 and 270 degrees. This means that in 30 seconds you can create and set a custom wallpaper, screensaver or background.
uiGradients has apps beyond simple screensavers. First off, each gradient comes with the corresponding hex codes of the colors. This means two things. First, you can use uiGradients as a sort of custom color picker and work in Google Drawings, Photoshop, Illustrator or any other design program. Second, you can edit them more precisely there, toggling linear/radial orientation, dialling in the angle and tweaking transparency. You can even change the code to further customize the look.
Getskeleton
Making browser-based apps work on both desktop computers and mobile devices (and everything in-between) is important because business users rely on a wide range of devices to perform work. However, it’s not just a matter of getting the application to work, but also a matter of making it look nice on every device. In addition, the application must present a compatible appearance across all devices so that an organization won’t incur additional training costs.
The main purpose of Skeleton is to provide several controls and other display elements that look and work similarly across all devices. It consists of a number of pre-coded items that you plug into your application to carry out specific tasks.
Skeleton is a small collection of CSS & JS files that can help you rapidly develop sites that look beautiful at any size, be it a 17″ laptop screen or an iPhone. With only 400 lines of code, Skeleton is light as a feather.
It features:
- a responsive CSS grid system,
- fonts,
- forms,
- media queries… all you need for building a quality site in no time.
Skeleton uses a 960-pixel wide grid layout with built-in buttons and tabs. The responsive layout will adjust for iPad and Mobile devices and the framework is lightweight.
You can combine Skeleton with other software to create an interesting and usable interface for any browser-based application. For example, if your framework lacks a grid system, Skeleton can help you add one to your application. Grids make it a lot easier to create apps that scale to different display sizes.
It more likely that you’ll use Skeleton’s other features: use it to control typography, add buttons and forms, and perform media queries.
The media query feature is the most important. It does a great job of telling you the ability of the host device so that you can modify your application appearance as needed.
Designed as a starting point for your projects, Skeleton only includes styles a handful of HTML elements and provides a simple but efficient grid system. It doesn’t require compiling or installing, this lightweight framework makes it easy to create any type of responsive design.
Cuttlebelle
Cuttlebelle is a static site generator that uses React for layouts. Syndicode found a new way to separate content and code. Manage your layouts as easy as content blocks!
This React static site generator separates editing and code concerns. Cuttlebelle makes each section of your page a markdown file with front-matter. The content can be written in YAML or markdown. A layout is nominated per partial.
Each page is divided into components that have their own layouts. Think of it like little Lego blocks that make up your site. With that, you can build a completely new page layouts by assembling them from your smaller partials without having to touch code.
Keeping your content free of any code empowers more users to change the content of your site. And because we chunk it all up into partials, content authors can build completely new layouts all by them-self without ever touching more complex code. Cuttlebelle uses JSX as the templating language. This makes it very convenient to build simple layouts all the way to super complex ones that fetch data from online APIs.
Also, it lets you use one layout per page-partial and cleanly separates content from code. You can extend Cuttlebelle with React components, which opens many options.
Basically, you can create a layout for every part of the page, and then compose them together to create a static page. Create templates with JSX, compose a layout, fetch data from 3rd party APIs, test with Jest and deploy anywhere.
Pixelbuddha
PixelBuddha offers a wide range of free products than the websites described so far. The site releases new free content every month with direct download buttons. No requirements, no waiting, just great unique freebies at the click of a button.
Here you will find:
- HTML templates,
- seamless patterns,
- font styles,
- mockups.
Even though there are only 40 mockups available, a relatively small amount, it is well worth your while to browse around as this website offers some real gems. No need for references with free products download, which you can use for personal and commercial purposes.
No matter what your interests are or what project you are working on right now, you’re gonna be stuck with the richness and variety of design resources in this huge box. All with an extended license, by the way.
All of the freebies on Pixel Buddha are completely free for commercial use, which is amazing because they are all very impressive and original. Included in the list of free resources are:
- icons,
- UI kits,
- effects,
- animation,
- templates,
- and mockups.
PixelBuddha is also open for users if you want to share your own freebie(s) with the creative community. Note that access to a product on PixelBuddha involves a subscription to the newsletter.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are quite a few factors to consider when choosing the easy web design resources. To make an excellent design, only inspiration or talent is not enough. A useful design tool is a must to help you faster and better make the work done.
If you are looking for a combination of functionality and ease-of-use, these web design tools are a good choice.
And don’t hesitate to chime in below in the comments section to report your experience with a site development service or praise one that’s not included.