Tools to Create Your Next Project for Free
There’s something ✨magical✨ about the freedom of the open web. Anyone can create and place their content anywhere, without worry of developer’s licenses and proprietary workflows. There are now more free services than ever to help designer’s and developers accomplish their goals — and even create services of their own.
Since creating uxtools.co I’ve paid special attention to these services that offer free experiences, and I’ve picked up some nifty tips and tricks along the way. Most importantly, I completely run and maintain the site for only $9.88 per year (the cost of my domain). Finding your way around the industry can help you cut costs and save big bucks.
Here are my suggested tools:
Design
If you don’t have the budget for the industry standards like Sketch or Adobe Illustrator, there are a few awesome tools still in Beta that you can snag for free like Adobe XD and Figma. You can also create free accounts with web apps like Marvel, Proto.io, and UX Pin. The communities aren’t as strong around these tools, and you might miss some features like desktop fonts, but they can still deliver huge value when you’re on a budget.
Prototyping
The are a ton of free prototyping apps available. A quick look at uxtools.co/tools shows at least 12 tools available for free use right now. Invision is one of the more popular apps, offering three free projects. Marvel and Proto.io are both very feature robust and also have free plans.
Fonts
Pay close attention to whether the fonts you’re designing with are available as web fonts or not. A simple solution to the costly issue of fonts is to build your designs with Google Fonts. These are extremely simple to add to you website (just one “link” tag and you’re set) and not hard to download and use in your designs.
Development
I use Sublime Text 3 for my coding purposes. This is a great text editor built with code in mind. I refuse to write code in any other tool (though I’ve heard Atom is pretty nice). My site is written in Jade, Sass, and Angular. Sublime Text is free forever (though it will occasionally prompt you to purchase it).
Sitemap
Ever tried to make a flowchart in Illustrator? It’s awful. Lucidchart is a free, online diagramming tool that does one thing best: flowcharts. They have a sitemap library that makes it easy to diagram navigation flows and information architectures. The free account allows you to create 3 projects.
Domain
Disclaimer: this is the only part that costs me money. Finding the right domain name is a hassle (especially if you have a name as generic as mine). Find the right name, though, and you can find crazy cheap deals like the $0.88 domains on Namecheap.com. There are a few free domain providers if you’re okay with with random letters, but I’ve had good results with Namecheap.
Hosting
Your website is worthless if you can’t put it online. I paid $9.99/year for hosting with Domain.com until I realized that GitHub offers free hosting through GitHub Pages. If your website is already on GitHub, simply create a branch called “gh-pages” and that branch will be given its own URL. Take it a step further by routing it through a custom domain and you have a fully functional, custom website! I’ve done this for multiple projects and never looked back.
Backend
Firebase has a very generous pay-for-what-you-use pricing plan, and the free plan is more than enough to kickstart your project. It also integrates wells into most Javascript frameworks, making it easy to ramp up.
Blog
The fact that you’re reading this means you know about Medium. I’ve rerouted the blog so that it forwards to blog.uxtools.co instead of the normal Medium URL. This looks classier when I’m sharing the link, and also helps people learn about my main site. Medium is completely free and has a thriving tech community. Their statistics also provide good insights into how and why your articles might be trending.
User Testing
It can hard to set up true, unbiased user testing on your own, especially on a budget. Typical user testing solutions can be pricey. Fortunately Loop11 allows for 3 sessions completely free when you signup. I’ve run quick remote tests like these on personal and professional projects with insightful results.
Analytics
Google Analytics is free and easy. With this I’m able to analyze my referrers (and measure social impact), while studying trends in my traffic. There’s no point in creating a website if you don’t know how popular it is. (Fun fact: when uxtools.co got featured on Product Hunt, my traffic went from ~100 users to 15,000!)
Monitoring
Analytics are invaluable, but they don’t provide much context about why certain things are happening. Several cool tools like Fullstory and Hotjar have hit the market that allow designers and product teams to observe user behavior on a website. I’m currently running Inspectlet on uxtools.co and I get 5 free sessions per day, which is more than enough for my purposes. This way, I’m able to see any bugs or errors my users encounter, and able to observe the most active parts of my site.
Newsletters
Mailchimp is free up to 2,000 subscribers, and provides powerful reporting tools on opening and click rates. Their form embedded easily into my own website, and I was live and gathering subscribers within minutes of signing up.
ESPs like Mailchimp frown on sending campaigns from Gmail addresses, as these personal accounts tend to look unprofessional. Usually, the hosting provider for your website will also provide a mechanism for creating email addresses under that domain. Because I host through GitHub pages for free, however, I also needed a free business email provider! I found that very thing with Zoho. I used IMAP to forward the messages to my normal mail client, so nothing feels out of the ordinary.
The market has never been better for a designer/developer on a budget! Don’t let money stop you from creating the side project of your dreams. With online courses and resources, and a slew of available free resources, the barrier to entry into the industry has never been lower.
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