Hey Inspirational Pixels readers! To make your job easier I’ve searched high and low for the best quality web design resources available. My main aim here is to help you work better and more efficiently. If any of the resources below cost a monthly, yearly or one-off subscription I’ve added a note so you can clearly see how much. If there’s no note on price then it’s a free app or service.
If you’ve got any great articles, tools or any other type of web design resources that would make a nice addition to this page, please get in touch!
Disclaimer: Some of the links below are affiliate links, please don’t buy anything unless you genuinely want to. The only reason I’ve added affiliate links is because I’ll get a very small commission if you do decide to buy something. This page isn’t about trying to sell you anything, so please don’t think that’s what I’m doing.
Table of Contents
- Learning
- Web & UI Tools
- Blogging and Writing
- SEO
- Freelancing and Consulting
1.) Learning
- Treehouse: From learning HTML and CSS to building iPhone apps, they have a course on it.
Price: $25/month – $49/month (50% off first month).
- Lynda: Lynda has the biggest library of courses you’ll find anywhere on pretty much anything you’re looking for.
Price: $25/month – $37.50/month (10 day free trial).
- Codeacedemy: A giant resource for learning to code. Codeacedemy puts a heavy focus on coding, whereas Treehouse and Lynda also have other courses like design and people skills.
- First Site Guide: A great resource site for learning anything from setting up a blog to web hosting. They also feature interviews with various experts on different subjects such as web design, branding, marketing and a lot more.
- Website Setup: A real in-depth guide on setting up and managing your first WordPress website.
2.) Web & UI Tools
- Media Temple: I highly recommend Media Temple as a web host. This site is hosted with them and they’ve always provided me with a top-notch service.
Price: From $20/month
- Kraken.io: An image optimiser. You can use it completely free but there is a restriction on how big the image can be (1MB). You can also sign up to one of the plans, which start at $9, to get access to the Web interface pro, a WordPress plugin and a 16MB file limit increase.
- PageSpeed Insights: An in-depth look at what factors are affecting the speed and overall performance of your site. It actually tells you how to make your site faster.
- Iconfinder: One of the biggest and most well-curated libraries of icons I’ve ever seen. It’s great because you can heavily filter your search for things like commercial use, size, price and so on.
- FontAwesome: An icon font that’s one of the best and well-maintained available. It’s completely free to use in both personal and commercial projects.
- Font Squirrel: If you’re struggling to find new fonts I highly recommend Font Squirrel as they have a huge amount of handpicked, commercially available fonts you can use for free.
3.) Blogging and Writing
- CoSchedule: A fantastic WordPress plugin that gives you an editorial calendar and some really powerful social media sharing tools.
Price: From $9/month (14-day free trial)
- Hemingway: A tool to help you write better by giving you pointers on how to improve what you’ve written.
- TheStocks.im: A huge collection of 15+ royalty free stock photo sites, all in one place.
- The Ultimate Social Image Size Cheat Sheet: There are loads of different image sizes you need for social media and this guide is a list of every one you can think of.
- How to Get Read on Medium: With all the other content out there, getting your content read is hard. The team at Medium have put together a guide on getting people to read what you’ve written.
- Headline Analyzer: Great content is one thing but nobody will read it if the title is poor. This free tool gives you tips on how to improve your article headlines.
4.) SEO
- Quick Sprout: A fantastic blog on internet marketing but the number one reason you should go to the site is to use the free SEO site analyser which gives you in-depth analysis. It can even compare your site with up to 3 others to see who is doing what better.
- The Beginner’s Guide to SEO: Truly the ultimate guide to SEO. Although it came out a few years ago it’s still packed full of fantastic info.
- The Definitive WordPress SEO Guide: Optimising your WordPress blog is essential and this article goes into great detail on everything you need to consider.
- Ahrefs: Quality backlinks have been tested as one of the number one reasons you get higher rankings in Google. Ahrefs is a great tool for checking how your site is performing for backlinks, the different types of links on your site and a load more.
- WordPress SEO by Yoast: If you’re running a WordPress blog this is an essential plugin because it gives you a full suite of powerful SEO tools for free.
5.) Freelancing and Consulting
- Workshop: A great service run by Robert Williams that sends you 8 to 10 freelance web design and development leads every day.
Price: $64/month
- Double Your Freelancing Rate: A book with video interviews, work templates, a contract template, a proposal template and advice on client meetings (as well as a ton more). It essentially covers how to charge more and work better with clients.
Price: $299
- Bidsketch: Creating client proposals is no easy task so Bidsketch does all the heavy lifting for you. It even lets you keep track of how your proposals are performing by telling you things like open rates.
Price: $29/month – $149/month