In honor of me turning 40 this year, I put together 40 of my favorite free web design tools to celebrate the four decades I’ve lived on this earth.
Being in the web design biz for so long, I understand how web designers undergo a hard time trying to find the best free tools, software, and web apps to use. As a matter of fact, you may be surprised to find out that you don’t have any clue about most of the freebies out there.
I have come across numerous useful sites like these, given the fact that I have been in the web design business for more than 15 years, so I decided to do one of my favorite things, and make a list.
So, allow me to share with you some of my favorite free web design tools, and also give you are reason why you should bookmark them, and use them regularly, like I do.
- http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com is an awesome tool to find out whether a website is down for you alone, or everyone else is experiencing the same.
- https://namechk.com lets you type in a username and it will search for available domain names and social media platforms, to see the available results that match the username.
- https://www.checkli.com is the best site to make free checklist for anything. The best part is that you can easily share an editable or a read-only version with your colleague to help you accomplish the given task.
- http://draw.io is a great online tool that offers free and quick way to make site maps, diagrams, wireframes and more. It’s an incredibly useful tool for web designers.
- https://builtwith.com is a free online tool that lets you find the plugins or other tools used to build a given website.
- https://corrupt-a-file.net is an oddly useful website because it lets you send a corrupt file to your client or boss – in case you take long to deliver work. Awesome!
- https://soovle.com is one of the quickest tool for keyword research. You will see keywords appearing once you start typing. It’s really simple, which makes it fantastic.
- https://gtmetrix.com offers a free way to analyze a web page regarding its speed, and outlines reasons why the web page is slow.
- https://pixlr.com/editor is a great alternative for Photoshop, and it is free.
- http://iphonemockup.lkmc.ch is the best site to visit for free mobile wire-framing. You only need to drag, draw, and share the URL with clients or colleagues.
- https://iconmonstr.com comes in handy with absolutely free icons for personal or commercial use.
- http://www.endlessicons.com/ is another awesome site that offers ‘infinite’ free icons for personal and commercial use.
- https://faxzero.com is an awesome way to send faxes to clients who are old-school and still use the outdated fax machines.
- https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/stock-up is full of free stock images (Public domain or CCo) sourced from more than 35 different sites. You should consider bookmarking this site.
- https://optimizemysite.com/ is a great site to see how Google-optimized and made a specific web page SEO-friendly for a keyword. I am proud to be the guy who built this beast back in the day. Unfortunately, it was so awesome that I had to sell it to some big company who paid handsomely for it.
- https://imgbb.com makes it easy for you to upload images totally free and share them with clients or co-workers.
- https://www.copypastecharacter.com is one of the best sites to visit when you want to copy and paste irritating keyboard characters.
- https://smallpdf.com helps you do whatever you want with your PDF. Yes, get freaky and unlock, rotate, edit, compress, and even convert your PDF.
- https://ocean19.com/free-contractor-agreement-maker/ offers a free and fast way to create contracts for your freelancers, so he or she doesn’t steal your client, project idea or whatever. I love it because it only takes 5 seconds to create.
- https://easyriver.com/free/ndabuilder.htm ensures that nobody ‘steals’ your idea by offering quick and free NDA maker. However, you shouldn’t put much focus on the idea because execution is the most important part. Only true entrepreneurs know about this.
- https://behappy.me/generator is an awesome site to visit for making free and quick quotes.
- https://send.firefox.com gives you the chance to send safe and secured files (up to 1 GB) to paranoid digital marketing clients. The files get deleted immediately the client opens them.
- https://wetransfer.com lets you send up to 2gb of large files to clients and it’s totally free. Highly advisable for the lesser paranoid people.
- http://www.oldversion.com is the best place to go if you want to view versions of any web development or design software. You will be more than amazed to find out that this site has Macromedia Dreamweaver.
- https://www.futureme.org is an awesome site that allows you to send future emails to yourself. I must admit that it’s awesome and addictive.
- https://maildrop.cc offers a great way of creating ‘fake’ emails that can be used to sign up for websites that are not so useful.
- https://wordcounter.net/website-word-count makes it easy to count the number of words on your page. I often use this site when blogging. Gotta write more than 2,000 words on one of these posts. Not this one☹.
- https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ can easily determine the font family on a photo or image by simply looking at it.
- http://scr.im/ helps you mask your email with a cute or funny link to avoid getting spammed.
- https://brandcolors.net/ offers numerous types of color hex codes for any big brand you may think of.
- https://app.prntscr.com/en/index.html lets you take screenshots, draw on them, and even share them with co-workers or clients. It is a bad ass browser extension that you should consider installing now.
- https://publicdomainvectors.org/ is a great site to get free public domain vector graphics, icons, and images.
- https://whenshouldwe.com/ offers a great way to create a meeting time with your colleagues or clients.
- https://unsplash.com is one of the best websites that offer free stock photos. No need to worry about copyright – they’re all public domain, a CCo.
- http://exif.regex.info/exif.cgi lets you easily find Meta data that is hidden in images you ‘borrow’ online.
- https://www.bounceapp.com is one of the best tools to take screenshots of any page. You can easily make notes on the screenshots you make, download them, or share with clients or colleagues.
- https://www.toptal.com/designers/htmlarrows offers numerous HTML symbols and arrows that you can easily copy and paste to your source code or website.
- https://www.pdfescape.com is one of the best sites that let you edit your PDF files online, and it is totally free.
- https://www.codecademy.com is the best site that offers free and easy way to learn coding. Absolutely awesome, right?
- https://pastebin.com is a great tool for sharing code snippets online, and prevents pesky HTML code from tagging along.
Did I hit the 40 mark? It’s now your turn to go and check out the sites listed above and embrace the ones that will help grow your biz.
If I’m missing any, PLEASE comment below so I can check them out!
Good luck!
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