Awesome web design tools

We thought we’d write a quick blog outlining some of the great tools that we use on an almost daily basis to create captivating websites.

In no particular order – here we go:

WordPress:  The most used, open source blogging software on the internet.  Free to install on either WordPress’s own servers or as a self hosted solution, WordPress is super customisable, highly functional and very forward thinking.

Adobe Photoshop:  A great piece of software for designing graphics and editing images.  Great for the web.  Not great for producing scalable vector images though.  Use Adobe illustrator for that.

Adobe Dreamweaver:  We don’t use this anywhere near as much as we used to, but still great for editing HTML and other coded documents.

IMAC27:  A great big Apple computer, perfect for web designers.  You can have all your applications and software open on your screen at once, dragging and dropping stuff as required.

Istockphoto:  A huge library of stock photographs and graphics.  Nice.

Iphone:  Takes a decent enough photograph to be used on any website.  Also syncs with a Mac computer so that your photo’s are available to use on your desktop right away!

Dafont:  Tons of cool fonts, many of them free to download.

Vimeo:  Stick your videos on Vimeo before you embed them on your website.  The Vimeo player looks much cooler than YouTube and the way in which your videos are embedded can be customised.

Animoto:  A cool, cloud based tool which creates animated videos from still photographs.  A quick way to give the impression of video on your website when, in reality, you really havn’t bothered to have a proper video produced.

Themeforest:  Loads of amazing premium WordPress themes to give your blog a creative boost.

SEO by Yoast:  A great WordPress plug-in which will give you a great (if not 100% perfect if we’re being over critical) overview of how well your web pages and posts are optimised for the search engines.