6 Free Design Tools to Help You Keep Your Website Updated and Looking Fresh

You spent a lot of money hiring a web design company. But now the work is finished, your website is live, and customers are visiting your website.

Congratulations!

Don’t get comfortable, you still have a lot of work ahead of you. There are many paid tools out there that will help you increase sales, organic traffic, and more, but who likes to pay when they don’t have to?

We don’t and neither should you.

If you like free, read on friends

Most web design can be done for free with the right skills and tools. If the idea of coding a website makes you shudder, don’t worry – these tools and resources will help you keep your website updated and they won’t cause your hair to fall out.

Pixabay

One of the most challenging parts of creating new content is finding images that you can use. Buying stock photos is expensive if you don’t have a membership with one of the budget stock photo websites.

Seriously, it can cost as much as $1-$50 per photo. When you consider that the average blog post contains 2-4 images, those costs can add up.

Pixabay provides a great selection of free photos. Don’t believe me? Check it out for yourself. When browsing their photos, make sure the copyright license states that it is “CC0 Creative Commons.”

CC0 – What?

Simply put, this means that the photo is free for commercial use and doesn’t require any attribution.

Wix

If you are looking to test the waters of web design, Wix is great starting option to learn some of the basics.

Wix doesn’t require any coding knowledge because they provide you with a simple to use website builder.

But there’s one problem

A free Wix membership domain has Wix’s name in it and the average Wix website doesn’t look as good as one that has been designed by a professional web designer.

You also have to pay to have a custom domain and some of their more premium features. If you are going to pay, we recommend you do it right and work with a web design company.

Still, don’t write Wix off, it’s a decent solution for the average Joe.

Wix doesn’t require any coding knowledge because they provide you with a simple to use website builder. Here is a comparison of other website builders

Google Fonts

Google Fonts are one of my favorite free design tools.

Here’s the deal

Your websites font can make or break the user experience. Don’t be that guy that uses Comic Sans font on a professional website.

Google Fonts are free and provide you with a wide selection of fonts to help you stay true to your brand and keep your website looking fresh.

Let me put my money where my mouth is

I use Google Fonts on Montreal Graphic Design and I recommend them to a lot of my clients because they will save you money and they look really good.

Why pay more when you can get the same quality for free?

WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular design platforms on the Internet. The company itself brags about powering 28% of the websites on the Internet.

Do you know why this is the case?

It has a lot to do with all the plugins you can install on your website. There really is a plugin for everything.

WordPress is a great option for beginners or advanced designers and there is a huge marketplace for templates if you want to kickstart your web design.

Unlike Wix, WordPress generally requires you to know a little bit more about web design and how it works.

But you’re not alone.

The WordPress community is huge and usually more than happy to help you troubleshoot issues. If you don’t find the answers you need, we’re more than willing to help you out.

Web design isn’t easy, but our goal is to help you survive the process and build a website that you love to showoff to your clients.

Canva

I spent years mastering Photoshop. It wasn’t easy.

Canva is the perfect middle-ground if you find Photoshop too complicated to use.

Here’s what I like about Canva

• It’s free
• It comes with a lot of tools that are useful for creating custom images and graphics
• It’s really easy to use and provides you with all the dimensions you need
• You don’t have to jump through any hoops to save your files

If you are looking to make some basic images for your blog posts, a promotion, or ads on a budget, Canva is a great option.

I’ll always recommend hiring a professional graphic designer for larger projects, but Canva is great in a pinch and it can help you get more out of your limited marketing budgets.

Buzzsumo

One of the most common problems my clients face is what to do with their website once it’s live.

While I focus on web design and graphic design, I’ve found Buzzsumo to be a great tool to help me find relevant content that people find useful and will share.

Buzzsumo lets you search for shareable content using keywords. Depending in what industry you are in, you can use relevant keywords to find content that people are actually reading, sharing, and engaging with.

If you ask any content marketer, they love it when people interact with their content because that helps them rank for specific keywords and it usually results in new leads.

We want to hear what works for you

These are just a few of the tools that we find useful and often recommend to new and past clients. These tools will help you keep your website looking fresh.

But even better, these are tools that industry experts use because they work.

Don’t be scared of web design and keeping your website up to date. Montreal Graphic Design is ready to help you give your website a facelift, to help you produce some killer graphics, or to write copy that converts.

What are you waiting for? Let’s get talking about how we can use graphic and web design to make your business grow. Reach out and contact us today.