Software as a Service has been a boon in the field of web design as now so much can be achieved without burning a hole in the pocket. Web designers across the length and breadth of the country have tried and adopted SaaS which has indeed revolutionized their field. If you are a web designer, here are some of the best tools for web designing that you can get via SaaS.
SEMrush
It is invaluable as it comes loaded with various client optional features like SEO optimization as well as keyword opportunities which helps you stay ahead in the competition. This program offers you a feature which you can use to find untapped keywords necessary for your own site or blog. It’s indeed a very powerful tool packed with a lot of great features which offer enormous help with all of your web projects. It offers you everything that is needed for any basic web designing project. Right from the creation of a flawless and optimised website design to ensure a steady, if not heavy, flow of traffic to your client’s site SEMrush is your one-stop destination for everything. What is even more interesting, with its easy-to-use and simple features it is so easy to learn or work with, that it is also the perfect tool even for a beginner entering the world of web designing.
InVision
This is an incredibly cool web designing tool which has been gathering quite a bit of praise due to its excellent and easy-to-use online prototyping services. InVision works best when it comes to collaboration therefore if you do have to work all alone this might not be your best bet. However, if you are looking for an excellent tool offering complete prototyping service, without even having to hack your way through Photoshop, InVision is what you absolutely need. It packs a punch with its superb and powerful features using which you can easily design wireframes and also connect them to a larger prototype for any project of any size, be it web or mobile. You can easily check any of the parameters like website architecture, content flow, individual page design, UI/UX design strategy etc simply by sharing the results with your clients.
Hootsuite
With social media playing such a huge role, it is important for every single brand to have accounts on various social media platforms for promotion, advertisement and even visibility. Once you do that, you do have to manage and handle these accounts smartly because your social media profile is a representative image of your brand. Hootsuite is an excellent tool which helps you manage every single of your brand’s social media accounts from one dashboard. Hootsuite can automate all of your tweets, Facebook updates, and ManageWPPinterest posts, helps you schedule them in advance and respond to comments and replies without even having to log into the individual accounts. It also enables you to track your user interactions to understand and work out which content goes the best with your target audience.
Google Analytics
Every web designer understands the importance of studying, tracking and working on their web analytics in order to know what works out best for their customers. When it comes to web analytics, nothing can be better than Google Analytics. Boasting a brilliant SaaS dashboard, it is not only an excellent tool for inspecting as well as sharing analytics with your clients while working on SEO, it is also completely free of cost. All you have to do is to create an account and you can enjoy 100 different web properties and flawlessly detailed reports on various important metrics like ‘time on page’, most visited page, the total number of unique visitors, biggest geographies, traffic referral from websites and even device or OS types. This makes it the most useful and popular tool among web designers. The Google brand name ensures that you will get nothing but the very best.
Cloudflare
A content delivery network, popularly abbreviated as CDN, is extremely important for any website in order to host the static assets which help in drastically increasing load times. Cloudflare is the best tool available in the market for this purpose since the global network they offer is indeed massive. They also run an incredibly competitive and useful CDN business, irrespective of how much content you need to cache. It gives you full access to analytics from your CDN nodes right from your dashboard which helps you to check for bottlenecks by inspecting the amount of traffic going through. It comes loaded with some incredibly cool and useful tools for webmasters. Although it offers a free basic service, there are plenty of upgrade plans available for your niche needs. This is amazing because anyone from a cash-strapped freelancer or start-up to a better-established web designer can make use of its superior SaaS package due to the free as well as upgradable options.
FreshBooks
Maintaining your books seems to be an increasingly boring and even annoying task. It has not even a remote creative association with your work of web designing. It is also extremely time-consuming and can be creatively draining and distracting, especially for new and freelance web designers because it eats into precious designing time. Hence, if you are also drained by this boring but absolutely important task, FreshBooks is here to your rescue. It’s a wholesome tool for your finances that you can use for all kinds of needs like sending your invoices, saving various payment dates, planning as well as covering expenses and all project revenues. It also lets you set up a calendar to mark all the important payment and invoice dates to ensure that you never miss a deadline again!
ManageWP
WordPress is an extremely powerful and widely used website designing tool. Although when it was initially conceived, it was not designed with this aim the blogging site soon developed into a popular option for website designing by web designers all over the world. A larger number of web designers now prefer to use WordPress over other web designing mediums. If your work requires you to manage a number of WordPress websites, ManageWP is the right tool for you. It saves you the pain of memorizing all those login ids by giving you one login to access all the dashboards of the websites that you run. What is even better is that the basic plan is completely free. You can buy better security features which include website backups, advanced security checks at regular intervals etc. Owing to its ease of use this tool is an absolute asset for every web designer who has to work with WordPress for his or her design needs.
UserTesting
Often it is seen that while designing a website a designer just guesses the best interface techniques or web copy options and applies them without testing them beforehand. But it is not a wise idea because something working flawlessly on one site does not ensure that it will work just the same on yours as well. This can result in confusion among your visitors and limited functionality in quite a few areas of the page. The only way to ascertain a smooth and functioning page is via extensive usability testing. UserTesting is an incredibly useful tool which offers the largest number of tests which you can perform. All the data is stored in a single handy dashboard. Irrespective of whether you are running your own website or you simply working to collect feedback for your client, you can do it with much ease using this tool. The best thing is that it works for any website or even mobile application making it an incredibly useful fully cross-platform solution for all your testing needs. Any web designer who knows the value of usability testing will absolutely love this nifty tool immediately!
Optimizely
Optimizely is an incredibly useful tool for web designers of all scales. It offers you excellent A/B testing where you can test and work on your conversion rate on various different pages on your website. It tests and analyses the performance of all the multiple variations of everything on your website across all devices right from copy function to button call and so much more. Its SaaS platform is very easy to use and learn, making it a great choice even for beginners. It includes a host of useful features like A/B, multivariate, multi-page testing, iOS and Android app support, as well as a desktop and mobile browser support. Its powerful Stats Engine is useful in providing analytics which aids better decision-making. It also offers you the option to personalize in order to deliver proper and targeted content to your clients in real time. This is a very effective and extremely useful tool which will ensure higher conversion rates in no time!
Trello
Every website designer starts his or her career with big dreams of handling important and numerous prestigious projects. But when it comes to managing a larger load of work or multiple projects what you do need is a standard task management tool to help you manage your tasks efficiently so that you do not have any scope of messing up. Trello gives you the chance to boards where you can arrange tasks based on their categories. Thus you can create different boards for all the different tasks in progress and place them in order of their urgency. You can also share your boards with your clients who can easily share their ideas and offer inputs, making it easier for you to deliver better. Using Trello’s advanced setup you can even manage a small team if you’re outsourcing some of your work. All these services can be used for free with their basic plan which ensures that even the smallest web designing start-ups with money constraints can also have access to sophisticated task management tools.
GoToMeeting
If you are a web designer who works with international clients regularly or if you have a team spread across different places, it is important to have an excellent video conferencing tool in order to ensure a sterling quality of video and conference calls. Using GoToMeeting you can now have a meeting in high-quality HD video with up to 100 clients from all over the world. It also enables you to share your screen and applications from your computer with your clients in real-time, which ensures better sharing and interaction during your meetings. It has superior drawing tools to help you elucidate your points better. It offers one-touch recording and easy scheduling options so that you never have to miss out on an important meeting again. You can get limited but useful features on the free basic version which you can update to include advanced features at any moment.
Litmus
Email marketing is an extremely important tool for any web designer in order to reach out to the maximum number of people and to ensure the highest ROI. But it is true that email marketing needs quite a bit of time and effort to be comprehended and utilized to its optimal capacity. You need to test your emails and for that, you need a tool like Litmus. This product which is available on SaaS is a complete testing solution which has built-in engines rendering all the most popular email clients like versions of Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook as well as some of the smaller clients as well. It also offers its own email builder using which you can easily code emails from scratch in the browser itself. Thus you can demo your emails right away without having to launch a mail client.
Using the right kind of tools will give your web design immense power and flawlessness which will reflect in your work. Using SaaS you can now access the most sophisticated tools to offer the very best to your clients.
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