The blogosphere is filled with templates, tools, and tricks to help get a website off the ground and make it unique. Yet if you’re just entering the world of blogging, chances are you are on a tight budget. The variety and price of blogging tools can be mind-blowing, with different payment plans or subscriptions attached. You may think you have found a free template or web design tool, only to find out that it has limited functionality or is subject to a short free trial period. Yet if you know where to look, there’s no shortage of free tools that will help you design and customise your site. The following are five of the Web’s best free design tools to make your blog stand out from the crowd.
1. CoffeeCup
For those just starting out, HTML coding can be quite intimidating to get the hang of. A free and easy tool to use is CoffeeCup, which helps you edit your blog templates or themes. No coding skills are needed when you use this tool, because you can see your blog’s source code in a more user-friendly format. This makes editing your new blog theme a snap.
2. Google Fonts
Google offers Analytics, Adwords, and Alerts to help keep you on top of the blogging game. Yet in terms of design, one of its most useful free tools is Google Web Fonts. This gives you easy access to nearly 600 fonts, which are all ready to go and use on your website. Playing around with different fonts is an easy way to suddenly transform your humble blog and make it look like it was designed by a fancy San Francisco web design boutique. All you need to do is copy and paste HTML and CSS onto the site, and you can also download any fonts you like for later use.
3. SumoPaint
Photoshop is an excellent photo editing tool, but it does require a bit of an investment. You can access many of the same features with the free Sumopaint photo editing app. It allows you to edit your photos online, with a wide variety of special effects and features to choose from.
4. HootSuite
Even if you opt to splash out on web design New York at Shopify or other professional design services, you’ll still need to think about how you’re going to market your new blog. This is where HootSuite and social media come into play. To be competitive in today’s online market, bloggers must sign up for everything from Facebook to Pinterest. Keeping track of all of these accounts can be difficult, but HootSuite helps you share links to all of your networks and keep track of your relationships from a central source.
5. Design-Seeds
Colour is an important tool to help you set the mood of your website, and shouldn’t be taken lightly. If you’re in need of inspiration, it’s worth checking out Design-Seeds. This pairs images with colour palettes for a host of seasonal inspiration. All of the colour information you need is available simply by hovering over the hues that you like.
From editing photos to playing with fonts, these free tools will help make your blog something special. Best of all, they won’t cost you a fortune as you’re just learning the basics of web design.
