Free Resources For Web Design
It has been shown that one of the most critical factors to ensure more people keep visiting a website is its design. As time progresses, many websites improve their functionality and looks, and their looks can matter a lot. So if the website's design isn't looking good, or the website is hard to navigate, it can leave a bad impression and make it harder for people to revisit it. Usually, the solution to solving the website's design issues would be to hire a web designer to make your website's design looks good and easy to navigate. However, small business web designers can come costly, depending on how much you want them to work, so it's not something one can easily afford. This is why a person can try to give their website a good design by themselves, and there are a lot of resources online that help them with that for free.
Design Ideas
The first step towards having a good design for your website is knowing what design you are going for and knowing what is considered a good design. Depending on your website's design, it can impact its users' experience.
Moodboard offers a lot of website designs, or as the site calls it, "mood boards". The designs are grouped as different designs, such as "luxury" and "hip and minimal". Another exciting feature is that you can make your designs using the website and share them with others to get some feedback on what you made. And the best part about the site is that you don't need to create an account to do all those stuff, which makes the site easier to recommend.
Dribble is another good site for design ideas, but what makes Dribble so interesting is that it has a much bigger focus on user-created stuff, and it's a great place to showcase your web design work. You can browse through "Web Design," "Product Design," and even "Mobile" sections so you can have a specific idea of what your website should be.
One Page Love is a pretty neat website that offers a lot of design ideas for one-page websites. The website shows many images of one-page websites that you can visit and be able to examine. You can also browse the designs by website types, such as personal, portfolio, and even restaurants. So if you want to make a specific type of one-page website, and are unsure what design to go for, then One Page Love could have something that can help you.
Websites that offer free website designs
Designing your website can be a tricky task if what you are aiming for is complicated, and it can require a lot of skills to be a good web designer, which is why getting pre-made design is another thing you can also do.
UI Space offers thousands of free designs of fantastic quality, and the UIs it provides isn't just limited to websites. It also provides other assets that you can get good use of, be it for a desktop site or a mobile app.
Pixel Buddha can help you very well if what you are looking for in your website is a design that can make your site look professional. There are a lot of fantastic designs that you can get for free. If that isn't enough, new free designs get uploaded there constantly, so if what you are looking for isn't present in PixelBuddha, you can wait until you find a plan that fits what you are looking for in the future.
Tethr is a great website that offers a pretty impressive tool kit for iOS app designs that you can use while making a mobile website or an app.
Websites that offer free typography
Typography is another factor that matters in web design, and it isn't just about text's size, spacing, and alignments. There are a lot of elements that make it essential, such as font choice. So having good typography isn't just making your text readable, but stylish too.
1001 Free Fonts, just like the website's name says, offers over a thousand free fonts. It has various font types that can fit your preferences, such as fantasy fonts and sci-fi fonts. It has a preview feature where you type a sentence using the font you chose to see how it looks through different sizes.
Google Fonts is great if what you are looking for are professional-looking fonts. It has an elegant preview feature to preview the font across whatever size you want. Another thing that makes Google Fonts an excellent website for free typography is that it doesn't just offer English fonts, but there are many other languages fonts too, such as Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and so on. So if you are making a multi-lingual or a non-English website, then Google Fonts could help you provide fonts that can make your website look great.
Fonts Ninja is a neat browser extension that tells you what fonts a website uses, so if you are visiting a website and see a font that got your attention, then Font Ninja can help. You can also bookmark fonts Font Ninja has found to keep track of all the fonts that have interested you.
Websites that offer free to use stock images
Photography is a significant factor in web design since having an image on your website can make it more interesting. It can be challenging to make your image, and the quality isn't always going to look great, so using images you found online is another option. However, it's essential to know that copyright laws surround using images online. You need to get permission from the image owner or pay royalties to be allowed to use their image for your website. Not doing so can get you in some legal trouble. Thankfully, plenty of websites let you use their images for free without needing permission.
StockSnap offers a lot of stock photos in excellent quality that you can use despite being free. It doesn't just have stock photos of people but also objects, vehicles, and landscapes, making it a great place to get background images for your web pages.
All the Free Stock is another excellent website that offers free-to-use images and videos, music, and sound effects. And the best part about the website is that it falls under the Creative Commons Zero license, so you can use its images for commercial use without needing to get permission or pay any royalties.
Bucketlistly offers an impressive number of photos taken in many countries throughout the world, so if you are looking to use an image taken in a specific country. It's free to use, then Bucketlistly could help you find what you are looking for.
The Pattern Library offers a lot of pattern images that you can use for free. Pattern images can function as an excellent background for a website.
Websites for picking colors
Perhaps the most significant factor in web design is colors. Colors are everything. Even if all the other elements in your website's design look good, having poor colors can ruin all of that. So having a good color design can significantly enhance the design of your website and give it a fantastic look,
0 to 255 is a neat little site that lets you pick colors across various palettes, and you can get the hex color codes to implement the colors pretty quickly.
Adobe Color CC is a fantastic site for getting color combinations. It lets you choose the color on the wheel and suggest other colors that would go well as a pallet. There are a lot of color harmony rules that you can use to get the color combinations that interest you the most. Another great thing about Adobe Color CC is that it lets you preview background color and text color together to see how the background color and text color combination will look.
Cooler is another impressive site for browsing color palettes and color gradients. It also has a lot of neat features. One of those features is Color Contrast, where you can test out how text color and background color go together, and it will give out how good the combination looks and give out a rating on how small and large texts would look. Another neat feature is that you can extract color palettes from selecting images, choosing what colors to extract, and exporting the colors through many formats. Those formats can range from website URLs, photos, and CSS codes, where you can use the given codes to implement those colors to your site and save a lot of time. You can also copy CSS codes of the sites' gradient colors and even gradient colors you made on the website.
Other essentials
There are still a lot of other more minor web design elements that could impact the user's experience with your website. After all, it's the little things that matter.
Font Awesome offers a lot of free icons that you can use for your site if you still don't have one.
mobiReady is a great tool that lets you test how well your website would work across various mobile devices. An exciting feature mobiReady has is that it gives out a score of how good your website looks and works on mobile devices called mobiReady score. It also advises on what you need to do to improve your website looks and functions on mobile devices and score a higher mobiReady score.
Window Resizer is a pretty neat browser extension that lets you test how well your website look through various screen sizes, so you can know how websites look different resolutions and able to make it better,
Takeaway
You don't need to use every resource available, but it helps if you use some of them or be familiar with the features.
