Screenfly

Check your website for a variety of different screen sizes to be sure it is optimized for multiple devices. 

Website Content Creation Worksheet

Let’s face it. Coming up with website content can be a daunting task to tackle. Many times it’s not that you don’t know what to say, it’s that you aren’t sure exactly where to start. Feel free to use this worksheet to kick-start the flow for content ideas for your website.

InVision

A wildly popular prototyping app used by the pros. InVision helps you to create prototypes for your projects that act like the real-life version of the finished design, because you can link the pages, simulating the usage of a finished website.

Wires

Interactive wireframes and prototypes right in your browser window. 

Marvel

A cloud-based tool for interactive prototyping that requires no special coding skills. Create unlimited projects for free with commenting on your first three projects. 

SMAPs

Quickly and easily build site maps, taxonomy, or hierarchy data. 

Screenshot Webpage Emulator

Take a screen shot of any page and save it as a graphic. 

ColorMunki

Build and save color palettes that allow you to compare and contrast different versions with ease. Free to use and simply create an account to start saving palettes. You can also explore palettes that others have made.

Pantone Color Finder

Pantone is the premier choice for all things color! Find the CMYK, RGB, and HEX equivalents of a specific Pantone PMS color easily. Look at PMS color charts online to find similar colors.

RGB to PMS Color Converter

This is a color matching tool that could give us some spot color suggestions. If you don’t have Photoshop or Illustrator, and you would like to know what PMS color is matching to a RGB color, this is your best online free matching tool. Simply pick a color on the top color panel, or enter the RGB, HEX, CMYK or HSV color codes, then, this tool will give you some spot color suggestions automatically.

ColorHexa

A free web-based color tool that helps to generate effective color schemes. Enter a color value into the search field, and get detailed information back, including shades, tints, and tones, as well as suggested color schemes. ColorHexa also shows how a color will be perceived by a person affected by a color vision deficiency, making it a great way to design your palette to account for color-blindness. 

Paletton

A web-based tool that helps you to pick the right color harmony for user interfaces. Paletton offers simple functionality — just choose a color on a color wheel, or enter its value, and the tool generates beautiful color schemes.

Typography is so important to a digital design project. It’s actually a course that is studied in art school, because there are many facets to choosing the right fonts for a project. For those that haven’t had the benefit of art school, there are some online tools that can help you to choose the right fonts for your project, or find the fonts that work well together. 

Google Fonts

Google fonts features over 600 font families — all free to use on your design projects, both in print or online. Each of them can be previewed at different sizes or with custom text, before committing to a font choice. Google fonts provides the code for embedding specific fonts into your project, that you can simply paste right into the correct area of your HTML document. 

Fontjoy

A free tool that pulls a full library of fonts straight from Google Webfonts and curates them together on one page, Fontjoy is a great tool for help with font pairing. The process of finding the perfect match for a font can be tedious, at best. With this tool you can choose font settings with the right characteristics for your project, such as size, weight and style, and let it find recommended fonts for you.

Calligraphr

Did you even want to turn your handwriting into an actual font? With Calligraphr you can create fonts based on handwriting. Simply download a template, fill it out, scan it back in, and a vector typeface will be created of it for you to use. While they offer a premium plan that allows for unlimited font creation, their free plan will allow you to create up to one font concurrently, with up to 75 characters and two font variations for character randomization.

Typography is so important to a digital design project. It’s actually a course that is studied in art school, because there are many facets to choosing the right fonts for a project. For those that haven’t had the benefit of art school, there are some online tools that can help you to choose the right fonts for your project, or find the fonts that work well together. 

Icons8 App

An app for Windows and apple that contains more than 65,000 professional grade icons to use. New icons are added on a daily basis and the app guides you through a library to help find the right icons for your project by categories.

Icons8 Pre-loaders

Online app that lets you generate animated pre-loaders for your website. Customize colors and sizes easily. Export to animated GIF or SVG files.

Socicon Generator

Socicon Generator allows you to generate and download a set of social media and other icons for use on your website. You can use the social media platform’s native colors, or apply colors that match your branding. It also allows you to generate the icons in a variety of shapes and sizes.

Free Icon Maker

If you want to make your own icons, Free Icon Maker may hit the spot. It allows for creating and editing icons online.

One of the biggest — and costliest — mistakes newbies make when it comes to their websites is using a random picture they found online. Photography and graphics are not alway free to use and many people have been sued for grabbing someone else’s photo and using it on their website. Alway make sure you are using either properly licensed photography or royalty free stock photography. The following is a list of great stock photography sites that allow you to use their photos for free (some may require attribution, however).

Pixabay

Over 1.3 million (and counting) stock photos and videos to choose from. Photos, illustrations, vector graphics and videos are all available. Free for commercial use, making it the perfect choice for advertisers.

Burst by Shopify

Beautiful stock photography for various industries, captured with ecommerce in mind. Easy to navigate and search for photos thanks to a wide variety of collections. Free for commercial use. 

Unsplash

Beautiful high-resolution stock photography for everyone. Over 300,000 stock photos in total with thousands more added every day. Royalty free for commercial use. 

Gratisography

New high-resolution photographs added every week. Out of the box, humorous and high contrast photography to help you stand out. Free for commercial use. 

Little Visuals

A timeless archive of landscape and nature-focused stock photography. Tags allow for easy navigation through the expansive archive. Free high-resolution images for commercial use. 

Superfamous

Stunning nature and abstract stock photographs. Huge library of 100% royalty free images (as long as you provide attribution). 

Life of Pix

True to life, high-resolution stock photography. Over a thousand stock photos, including everything from food and people to architecture and textures. 10 new photos added weekly from a hand-selected “Photographer of the Week”. Copyright free images for commercial use, but some restrictions apply for distributors. 

Startup Stock

Beautiful, high-resolution stock images for startups, bloggers, designers and developers. Perfect stock photos for a tech-related website. Plenty of laptop-, desk- and office-related shots. Again, 100% royalty free images for commercial use. 

MMT

A full archive of free for commercial use stock photos with new photos added every single week. Heavy focus on nature stock photography and macro stock photography. Incredibly easy to navigate and find what you’re looking for. Sort by category, tags, colors and orientation. 

Pexels

Over 3,000 new stock photos added every month with well over 40,000 already available. Absolutely massive collection of artistic stock images for you to explore. From mountains to music, you’ll find what you’re looking for here. Looking for nature, abstract and technology photography? Pexels is perfect for personal or commercial use. 

Magdeleine

Sort the stock photography based on dominant colors, category, tags, etc. Easy to navigate system with palette and camera specs. Beautiful, high contrast photographs free for commercial use (as long as you provide attribution). 

Jay Mantri

Beautiful archive of landscape, ocean and city photography. Royalty free for commercial use. 

Stock Snap

Hundreds of high-resolution stock photos added every week. Powerful search engine for finding stock images with a user-friendly interface. Sort by date, popularity, views, downloads, favorites and more. Absolutely free for commercial use. 

Picography

Easily one of the top sources of gorgeous, high-resolution free photos. Hundreds of lifestyle photographs available for commercial use. Variety is the spice of life! City, cultural, hospitality, people, scenery, street—you’ll find it here. 

ISO Republic

Specifically shot with creative professionals in mind. Ever-expanding library of over 3,000 free images. Free commercial use images, no questions asked. 

StokPic

10 new, premium stock photos sent straight to your email every two weeks. Impressive library of hundreds of free images, especially in the lifestyle photography niche. 100% free for commercial use. Just don’t redistribute! 

Free Nature Stock

Hundreds of royalty free nature stock photos with dozens more added every month. Curated, high quality photos. You won’t want to miss even one new photo. All images are free for commercial use, with or without attribution. 

FoodiesFeed

More than 900 photos to search through. Don’t worry, the search functionality and tags are incredibly easy to use. Perfect for any food-related website looking for extremely high quality stock photographs. Makes good use of the always trendy overhead stock images. Royalty free and free for commercial use. 

Bucketlistly

Over 5,000 travel stock photos from literally all over the world. Photos from Russia, Hong Kong, Brazil, Peru, France and many more. Perfect choice for any travel-related website. Extremely high quality stock photographs, all of which are free for personal use (as long as you provide attribution). 

Cupcake

Stunning landscapes and nature-related stock photos, perfect for hero images. Free for commercial use images, more being added sporadically over time. 

Foodie Factor

From alcohol to healthy snacks to candy, Foodie Factor already has over 1,000 food-related stock photos to choose from. You can choose to have the newest photos sent directly to your inbox. All stock images are free for commercial use. 

Everyone wants their graphics on their website and social media to look great. Fortunately, you no longer have to be a Photoshop guru to make great looking images. Here are some tools to help your create your own hi-quality social media and blogging images, without breaking the bank or having to hire a designer each and every time. 

Canva

Canva allows you to easily create graphics, not just for social media, but for a variety of other things that you might use day to day in your business. They offer several plans, including a “Free Forever” plan which will give you 1GB of storage for photos and assets and access to over 8,000 templates. 

Adobe Creative Cloud Express

Adobe Express is a free tool that will allow you to not only make professional looking social media and blogging graphics, but also help you to make top notch videos that can be branded for your business and shared on sites such as Vimeo and YouTube to help you solidify your brand even further. You can even create mini-websites using their web pages feature (although they can’t be hosted on your own domain). These can make for great landing pages, or to tell a story about something that might not work directly on your business website.

Uploading images to your website that are too large can cause significant page load speed problems. Always be sure to resize and compress your images before adding them to your blog posts or website. These tools can help you to compress your image sizes, while still maintaining quality. 

TinyPNG

TinyPNG is a free online tool that uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your PNG files. By selectively decreasing the number of colors in the image, fewer bytes are required to store the data. The effect is nearly invisible but it makes a very large difference in file size! It can also compress and save JPEG images. 

Optimizilla

This online image optimizer uses a smart combination of the best optimization and lossy compression algorithms to shrink JPEG and PNG images to the minimum possible size while keeping the required level of quality. Use it to make sure you aren’t unnecessarily slowing down your web pages with slow loading images. 

Moz Keyword Explorer

Leverage the largest, most accurate search keyword database to discover and prioritize the best keywords for your site.  

Backlinks Checker

See the top backlines of your domain. Quality links can help you to outrank your competitors and get you additional referrer traffic.  

Check My Local Business Listing

See how your listing appears on local search engines and directories.  

Research Local Listing Categories

Start optimizing local business listings by first assigning the right categories. Categories are one of the most important ranking factors in local search on Google and other search engines. Use this tool to help you find the right categories for your business — for each search engine or directory.  

Yahoo!/Yext Business Local Listing Checker

Check to see how your local business listings are looking. Make sure your listings are consistent across all local search directories.  

Top Local Directories to Be Listed In

See a list of the top FREE local business directories you need to be listed in. You can submit yourself, with a bit of time investment on your part, to these directories.