While every designer is at liberty to try and use any of the available (plenty of them) web design tools, some of them are noteworthy in the web design space. I have put together this list, however not in order of importance and would be different for web developers. So, look through the top 4 tools for web designers, and, hopefully, you’ll find in these the right solution to optimize your digital marketing campaigns.
1. CMS
Whatever their fancy, if they are going to design websites for a lot of clients they will need a CMS of some sort. A CMS or a ‘Content Management System’ quite literally allows the designer or you to control and manage the content within the website. Using this intuitive system, the designer can also show marketers how they can easily add, delete images and edit text in their website on the fly. CMS also allows for an unlimited number of pages on your website and the most popular CMS used by most designers are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.
I prefer WordPress but there are so many out there, the idea is for the designer to know in and out whatever CMS they decide to use. I like WordPress basically because it comes with a lot of plug-ins on the marketplace.
2. Google Fonts
This is Google’s free gift to the design world, especially web. With just one line of code or plug-in, your designer is able to embed any font of your liking to your website design. As you know, fonts play a crucial role in the aesthetics of web design.
To put it simple Google fonts allows web designers and yes web developers as well to create websites, web applications, blogs, etc. with fonts that people really don’t need to have installed on their computers. By just linking to one of Google’s fonts in their library, they’re able to display a beautiful custom font throughout the internet.
3. Adobe Photoshop
Great design ware this is, Adobe Photoshop is probably the most popular software program for creating and modifying images for the web. One positive thing about it is it’s availability on a wide array of platforms ranging from Mac to Windows to UNIX.
Adobe Photoshop has the most intuitive user interface, the most complete set of tools that makes design work much enjoyable thereby helping digital marketers execute their digital campaigns whatsoever ,smoothly. Well, like any image-editing program, Photoshop can be ideal if you want to “alter” images like photos, downloaded icons, or scanned artwork.
Altering an image includes doing such things as changing the colors within an image, modifying the size and scale of an image, or putting one picture “within” another.
But, aside from altering images, Photoshop has a vast array of tools that help you “create” images from scratch. On your website, you will often need to make custom icons, buttons, lines, balls or text art. Photoshop makes all of this excessively easy and fun for you.
4. Firebug
Firebug is one of the best known browser add-ons for Firefox. It offers a wide range of development tools at your fingertips.
It provides your designer the flexibility to ‘’x-ray’’ the design through the web browser and make changes by adjusting CSS. Great tool for designers who start on pre built themes. (Some may not have the time to write a personal theme for every client.) With the Firebug add-on one can edit, debug and monitor CSS, HTML and JavaScript on any web page.
So whatever tool one decides on for a particular project, one of these web design tools will make it much easier to get every web design project started. Remember the right web design tool can really speed up your work time and remove a lot of frustration that can arise from sharing work among your digital marketing team.
Thanks to the built-in communication and cool features found in many of these web design tools. With these you find adding comments can be as easy as pointing and clicking while making and approving changes can be just as straightforward.
5 comments
Avoid using a CMS unless you absolutely have to. Content Management Systems such as WordPress tend to increase server response times, especially if they are not optimised for speed. A slow website can negatively influence your search engine rankings.
Really? avoid using CMS? look around onlne and note prices that international design agencies charge for their solutions. are you going to pay 50k for a custom website created from scratch. pay on going maintence when changes need to be done? if you can create a quality product using a CMS in less time, then go for it. maybe you can give an example of a site you designed and we can compare the pros & cons.
You didn’t have to go anonymous for this one because I am a Web Developer and trust me I can share my work with you and it can never be compared to CMS Web Designs.
As Tongai first commented on the server times and Search Engine delivery, CMS also has high costs of Digital Marketing in comparison to a Website that was Developed from Scratch in Code.
It’s also not about the cost of Development but it’s a numbers game in every business, how many numbers can you bring in with a CMS Designed Website and how many numbers can you bring in with a CMS website? Anyway that’s rhetorical for if your website is just a display tool and not a marketing tool.
For website designers are you aware that there is no longer recognition of SEO by Search Engines including Google? There is now Structured Data or HTML Markups, how would one hope to Achieve the aforementioned on a CMS Designed Website for the aforementioned is the newly accepted SEO?
That’s what then renders your Marketing Budget too expensive and when you calculate your profits in Business things don’t tally more over calculating your ROI (Return On Investment) on your CMS Cheap Website and your Digital Marketing Campaigns would strongly suggest that you were not entirely smart looking for a quick fix of a cheap website.
I guess the question is are you really expecting to get business from a Website and are you hoping to create awareness via your website and would the numbers justify your investment on a Website that has been Designed in comparison to a Website that has been customer coded / programmed / developed?
Let me ask you a rhetorical question again: Why would a Doctor that has been in the field for 25 years charge you $100 for consultation when there are cheaper Doctors that have been in the field for 3 to 5 years that can charge you a simple $40 for consultation?
huh?
Firebug is old school, better to use the Dev tools in Firefox/Chrome