Have you been smothered with so many online success stories that you are thinking about starting something online yourself? With all the big named stories and biographies, it can sometimes be intimidating with just the thought of starting.
It is simply sad to see a good idea go to waste because they were just afraid to start.
With all the apps and tools available online, creating your first website has never been easier. Below is a collection of tools that could definitely help create and kickstart your online presence through a website.
Backgrounds
Websites have changed quite a bit over the past years and nothing is more important than a nice clean, no intrusive background. This also differs from site to site as we are all trying to sell different services and products. But for starters, a nice website background is key.
Service: SubtlePatterns
Like most good things, choosing the right background color, tone, style takes time. The website features an online collection of backgrounds submitted in by designers and is a great online resource amongst designers and developers. Designers submitting their backgrounds find it is a way of giving back to the next generation of designers/developers, therefore everything is free on the site.
Icons
Whether it be your logo or the small details on your site, icons have never played a more important role in websites. An image which is easily understood and in the end, eases navigation for your customers. Sometimes the perfect icon is all that is necessary. No text required!
Service: IconFinder | TheNounProject
For colored and more jazzed up icons, IconFinder plays the perfect role for your website. Search the site with specific keywords of icons that you are looking for and tada . . . it works like magic.
The Noun Project is also another decent site that I would like to recommend. With a very clean and clear way to project information, the site has created an online visual language for everyone to understand. A collection of symbols and icons to quickly deliver messages across. Great tool for websites in need of great user navigation.
Fonts
Have you seen a great website get killed just because of the font it uses? Too many colors seemingly blinking into your eyes? Most commonly used techniques to test this is through Photoshop or firebug, but this can be too work intensive and time costly.
Service: WhatFont Tool
The WhatFont tool has created one of the easiest ways to find out how certain fonts will work on your site. Simply click and download and you are done! Now go to your website and click WhatFont button and select any font you want.
Photos
The perfect photo on your homepage could make or break your website. So many have wondered why customers are staying on their website. Little do they know, first impressions are everything. It’s the same thing with advertising. A great advertisement has great pictures. Anything less, and users quickly become uninterested even though you have great content.
Choosing the perfect picture or uploading the perfect picture could also be risky. Have you ever gone to a website and it just simple takes too long to load? Most of the reasons are due to the large image sizes. People are still stuck to the fact that quality images means you need to upload a larger file sized image. This is untrue and is clearly explained by this service.
Service: JPEGmini
Their slogan ‘your photos on a diet’ helps reduce file sizes but not image quality. Play around with the slider on their homepage and you will spot that there is no difference in the 2 images even though the files clearly have different file sizes, thus lowering the time it takes to load up the image.
Load Time
Keeping on topic of website load times, this could potentially be a make or break for your customers. If keeping customers on your site is key, then load time is key. This is crucial both for your customers and for Google. Having a better load time means your website loads faster and is not stuck on loading some image, javascript or codes.
Service: Pingdom
With an easy to use interface, users simply enter in their website domains and within a few seconds, they make complicated issues easy to understand. The analysis will show you everything form loadtime (in seconds), page size, performance grades, files loads etc.
—
What other tools do you use for your website? Share with us in the comments!
Image by FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
Discussion