Design your way

Those in the tech industry naturally find constant changes and improvements exciting. After all, that’s how many of them earn their living. Web designers also find new design trends and improved design tools exciting. Yet, at the same time, they can find it challenging to keep pace.

The bumper crops of digital tools that appears over the horizon can be more than a little annoying. This is given the time it can take to browse through them to find which to check out, which to keep, and which to ignore.

We’ve assembled a collection of some of the best website building tools, apps, and resources. Some are quite new; most have been around for a while but have undergone improvement. A few have new features that, if not unique, would be difficult to find elsewhere.

Elementor

Elementor’s quick and powerful drag and drop editor makes it easy to rapidly build professional-quality websites and landing pages without having to resort to code. What makes Elementor stand out from other page builders however, is its ability to work with any theme and any plugin, and provide complete design freedom.

In fact, Elementor is packed with so many features and other design aids, it will

usually be the only plugin you’ll need as a designer, marketer or a developer. You can start a page from scratch and rely on the widgets and other Elementor features to help you build a perfect page or website. If you’re pressed for time, you can choose from more than 100 templates to work from. Either way, you’ll experience a significant improvement in your design workflow in terms of efficiency, time and overall quality.

Exciting new features like the Pop-Up builder, Advanced Forms, and Hover and Scroll animations have contributed to Elementor’s popularity and its more than 2 million installs.

AND CO from Fiverr

Having to manage multiple invoices can be a good sign that your business is doing well. But the downside is that the time spent on manually invoicing is time you could better spend on continuing to grow your business.

AND CO from Fiverr is a freelancing software that helps automate your invoicing process. By integrating with your time-tracking, proposals and contracts, all run out of the one platform, it allows you to automatically generate invoices so you can create and send them in less than a minute.

AND CO’s invoicing tool also sends you alerts when your clients views or pays your invoice, so you can stay on top of your follow up and cashflow. For long-running projects or clients working on a retainer basis, you can create recurring invoices—so they get sent each month without you needing to lift a finger.

Adding an online payment method increases chanced to be paid on time by around 22%, and you can create your own PayMe page within AND CO’s software to accept online payments from your clients directly via your invoices.

AND CO from Fiverr helps you save time on running your business so you can get back to being your business.

Houzez

Houzez places the full power of the Elementor page builder and the WPBakery editor in your hands; allowing you to create a site any realtor’s or real estate agency’s competitors will envy.

This specialized WordPress theme has acquired a long-time popular following thanks to its property listings options, advanced property search capabilities, property management system, and other features realtors want and need.

Just when it was beginning to look like all the features a realtor could ask for had already been invented, the Houzez team came up with a host of important new features.

Among other impressive features you’ll find a Custom Fields Builder with a Logo option, features listings including luxury home showing scheduling, listings sorting options, property status, and much more.

If you’re already a Houzez user, you can easily update to the latest new version via FTP, with the Envato WordPress Toolkit, or via WordPress itself.

Amelia

A manual appointment booking and managing system can not only be a time and energy hog, but it’s also often error-prone as well. Clients and customers are either restricted to business hours or are forced to wait to see if their appointments are confirmed.

Amelia fully automates the process, including matching customers to available time slots to employees and managing online payments. Amelia integrates with Google Calendar, PayPal, and Stripe, and currently enjoys a 4.8+ user rating.

Uncode

The best way to see if this creative multipurpose theme will be the right choice for you will be to visit their website, where you’ll find its website-building features nicely explained.

The highlight of your visit, however, will be Uncode’s library of user-created websites. It demonstrates the virtually unlimited possibilities open to you when using Uncode. Be prepared to be impressed and inspired!

TheGem – Creative Multi-Purpose High-Performance WordPress Theme

Many of TheGem’s customers, and Envato as well, consider this website-building toolbox capable of producing the most modern and creative websites on the market.

TheGem is 100% flexible (you can build anything). It’s 100% simple to use (you can accomplish a great deal with a few clicks); and customer satisfaction has also hit the 100% mark – thanks to TheGem itself and to its 5-star customer support.

Logic Hop – Personalized Marketing for WordPress

Personalized websites simply do better. Bounce rates decrease, visitors stay longer, and conversion rates go up by 200% or higher.

Logic Hop for WordPress gives you the tools to easily personalize content based on UTM codes, on-site actions, geolocation, and more. Personalization gives you a new revenue stream from clients while giving them a higher ROI. Logic Hop is the must-have SaaS to take your work to the next level.

Mobirise

Mobirise is offline, it’s easy-to-use (drag and drop with no coding), and it’s free for both personal and commercial use. There’s much more of course, but the highlights include lightning-fast speed thanks to Bootstrap4 or Google AMP, a large selection of free themes, premium themes, website blocks, and templates.

There’s also a library of 7,000 icons, 850 Google fonts, and 500,000 free images. Download now and add to the 1.5 million+ sites that have already be created with Mobirise.

wpDataTables

If you’ve found most efforts to create a relatively simple table or chart to be somewhat painstaking; wpDataTables has a surprise for you. This WordPress plugin is by far the best on the market for creating colorful, interactive tables and charts from mountains of complex data, and doing so in seconds

wpDataTables fully supports MySQL, MS SQL, and PostgreSQL. Tables and charts are responsive and key information on them can be highlighted or color coded.

Round Icons Bundle – 38,000 icons and illustrations

The Roundicons Bundle is the world’s largest icon and image bundle for websites and other digital applications. The number currently stands at around 38,000 and is growing. You can get all 38,000+ plus whatever comes down the pike (10,000/year maybe?) for a one-time fee. The bundle comes with a commercial use license.

Order now and you’ll be eligible for a 20% discount (be sure to use coupon code “GETBIG”).

HelpJet

Install this knowledge base software and let your customers help themselves. They’ll appreciate the self-service HelpJet provides, and you’ll appreciate not having to deal with nearly as many customer support tickets. HelpJet stores answers to common questions, plus any other answers or useful information you believe your customers will appreciate having ready access to 24/7.

HelpJet won’t enable you to eliminate your support staff, but it can help you keep the size to a minimum.

Goodie

Tell Goodie what you want for a website or application, and their team will develop it for you. You can eliminate the back and forth usually involved in having a website built for your business. All Goodie requires from you is a design to work with.

Your design can feature as much or as little detail as you wish; just enough so the Goodie team understands what you want. They’ll deliver for a fixed, up-front price.

8b Website Builder

8b is a new kid on the block, but this futuristic website builder is already making waves. It features a super-simple UI, and you can work with it from your desktop at home or at work or from a mobile device should you get an inspiration while on the go.

Google AMP guarantees your site will be crazy-fast and 100% mobile friendly, plus a single click will get you an immediate Google ranking. 8b is currently free.

WhatFontIs.com

WhatFontIs has proven to be an outstanding resource for thousands of designers seeking the fonts they want and need to complete their various projects. At last count, www.WhatFontIs.com could boast of a 550,000 font database and an automated AI system that identifies a designer’s font from an uploaded image.

If you’ve fallen in love with a must-have font and don’t know its name or where to find it, WhatFontIs can solve your problem in seconds.

Savah App

Savah App is an advanced prototyping and team collaboration platform for web and mobile app designers. Getting visual feedback from team members and project stockholders has never been easier, and users will make good use of Savah’s built-in design workflow and approval system. Savah easily integrates with Sketch App and auto-syncs with Dropbox for design sharing purposes.

Conclusion

You obviously don’t need all of these 15 top-of-the-line tools and resources. Just one or two of them would probably make your day. It can transform a website creation of yours into something awesome.

You might be already in the habit of creating truly awesome websites or apps. Yet, there still should be something in this collection that will make work much easier for you.

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