Tools for helping your website’s design and performance: Psst, these are free! 🤫
Websites need to be managed and updated regularly as technology evolves and people’s needs change.
The more time-saving resources you have, the easier it is for you to work on your business.
Tools such as AI assistants will save time for routine tasks like copywriting or finding resources for images and content. Any tools EV Advisory comes across that helps complete the job quicker, better and more efficiently without sacrificing quality is worth saving and reusing. Here is a first post in a series of tools available online we will be sharing.
Design and UI 🎨
Designers and website maintainers need to be up-to-date with the latest design practices and tools to ensure they provider their readers with an excellent experience. Online you’ll find a bunch of resources that can help you create the perfect landing page or website.
Here are design tools we at EV Advisory use and their coverage on their free subscriptions:
Canva - provides a variety of templates for landing pages in HTML or creating comprehensive documents with the ability to customize your documents with proprietary or publicly available assets. The premium version allows you a bit more flexibility in your templates and theme edits.
Figma - Online, collaborative design tool for teams so that products can be delivered more quickly and with better quality; free tier includes unlimited files and viewers with a max of 2 editors and 3 projects.
AllTheFreeStock - A curated list of free stock images, audio and videos for your website. It also happens to offer great things for prototyping a product or connecting with your clients such as mockups, sound effects, website templates and email templates.
Unsplash - Free stock photos for commercial and non-commercial use online or wherever you please. Similar to #3, but this resource includes a premium version with additional images that may fit your needs in Unsplash+.
Cloud Convert - For up to 25 conversions per day, you can use this resource to convert file types between images, videos, and documents with coverage of up to 200 different file formats. In the event 25 conversions doesn’t cut it, their pricing is flexible and reasonable to pay for exactly what you need.
Mastershot - Intuitive web-based video editor that is 100% for editing videos and churning out high quality content up to 1080p. This is perfect for your business’ social media channels and if you don’t have the budget to buy expensive editing software that’s often more complicated than useful.
Website Performance 🧰
Website performance is a multi-faceted measure determining the speed at which websites respond to users and whether or not the site fulfills the needs of the user. The web performance measures include the time it takes to load web pages, the number of seconds it takes to load each page, and how long it takes for the browser to respond when you click on a link, button or other UI.
The tools below help identify where you may have shortcomings on your website and where you can
improve your web presence:
Google’s Lighthouse - A chrome extension that is used to benchmark how a website performs by speed, accessibility, SEO and other metrics that effect your rank overall. If you use the extension sparingly for your site and your site’s pages, you’ll never have to pay a dime for running the extension.
GT Metrix- A website that conducts a benchmark of your website using the Lighthouse methods by Google and additionally benchmarking with their own methods that permit an export to PDF with a comprehensive audit.
Dare Boost - A website analysis tool similar to the above, but includes a comprehensive report for security risks such as Cross Site Scripting and other security risks. Although it’s not completely free, you can get 5 free reports a month without being charged.
This is the first in a series of tools that EV Advisory will be sharing with readers to help them in their journey establishing their ecommerce or blogging website online. Reach out to us to learn more