Creating a successful site means having the right tools. From basic website development to responsive design, landing pages and wireframes, here’s a look at some of the best startup resources — free and paid — for web designers and developers.
Resources for Web Designers and Developers
1. Atarim
Atarim is the first and only project delivery system that drastically improves the time of project and task delivery, and speeds up internal processes. Instead of having a ton of tools for various purposes, Atarim gives you an all-in-one solution. With it, you are able to:
- Onboard the client and have the client communicate and leave feedback on your work directly
- Manage entire workflow in drag and drop kanban board
- Communicate with your team
- Gather content way faster
- Automatically login to all client sites
Atarim’s pricing starts at $20 per person per month, but they have multiple plans that fit agencies and digital teams of all sizes.
2. Startup 3
Startup 3 is a startup kit from Designmodo that allows you to create a website with the Bootstrap Builder. The kit designed to streamline the building process and help your site go live as soon as possible.
It offers 6 predefined design styles to get started along with customized controls for typography, colors, animations, images, and more. It also provides full class and element guides to help designers and developers find the best-fit style for their site.
For basic website design, Startup 3 offers the ideal starting point with an intuitive drag-and-drop approach paired with unlimited web elements and pre-designed modules, styles, options, and templates. In addition, Startup 3 is fully responsive and “retina ready” to help optimize your site for mobile devices.
Pricing is divided into three categories:
- Free — Use Startup 3 for free to create a great website using all available features. Don’t pay until you’re happy with the results.
- Quarterly — For $89 per quarter you get full feature access, unlimited exports, and dedicated support. Great for building a few websites per year.
- Annually — At $249 per year you save $107 overpaying quarterly; this package is ideal if you’re a full-time website designer or developer.
3. Go Responsive Pricing & Compare Tables
Go Pricing lets you create WordPress pricing and compare tables. Pricing tables are created to offer products and services and are an important part of any website. You’ll often see pricing tables at the bottom of websites — for example, the list of pricing points Startup 3 above was formatted as a pricing table that compared each plan and listed its basic price.
While traditional WordPress pricing tables get the job done with basic designs and themes, Go Pricing offers both classic and modern tables. You’ll get all of the basic pricing tables features, along with Video support (YouTube, Vimeo, Screenr) and image optional responsivity. The plugin is also suitable for creating Team Viewer and Compare Tables.
The system is flexible, allowing you to turn it on and off or customize your table to adapt to your site and CCS framework. You can even use more than one table on your site. Key features of Go Pricing include :
- Easy to use admin interface
- Multiple media types
- Google fonts support
- Live preview option
- Built-in plugin update
- 2000+ font icons
- Customizable responsivity
- Column animations
- Bulk actions
- Import & Export Functions
- Small Footprint
Strangely enough, Go Pricing doesn’t have a pricing table at the bottom of its site comparing service offerings, but the basic plugin is available for $27.
4. Bootstrap Studio
This is a powerful desktop app for designers and developers to create responsive websites. It is built on top of the popular Bootstrap framework and is ideal for designing and prototyping websites.
Bootstrap Studio has a simple, streamlined interface built around drag-and-drop functionality. The app includes various premium templates that are fully customizable, and each template includes multiple pages and widgets you can mix and match. It also provides numerous components to building responsive pages including headers, footers, galleries, slideshows and elements such as spans and divs.
Bootstrap Studio also includes a powerful Preview option that allows you to design webpages for multiple devices and then see the results before you go live. Along with full control over code edits, you can import and edit CSS, JavaScript and HTML to help customize your site.
Top features include:
- Support for both Bootstrap 3 and 4
- Grid tools
- Google web fonts
- Themes and icons
- One-Click publishing
- Smooth animations
- Productivity features
- Automatic updates
Bootstrap Studio is the perfect tool for web designers, developers, or anyone interested in web development.
5. BLOKK Font
BLOKK Font is designed to help you create website mock-ups and wireframes without the complication of more in-depth code. Simply download the font or use BLOKK’s embed font option to show clients what websites will look like without the distraction of specific text or images.
The font’s tagline is “for clients who do not understand Latin” which refers to the common use of Lorem Ipsum — an often-used placeholder text that looks like Latin but is actually gibberish. By replacing nonsense words with simple blocks for images and text, you can easily convey the general structure of a site and help clients visualize the end result.
There is no cost to download or embed BLOKK font.
6. Flat UI Pro
Flat UI Pro is a kit developed using the Twitter Bootstrap and includes a PSD version for designers.
The kit has a huge number of useful elements including basic components, icons and glyphs to simplify your work when creating new projects. It is great for quickly prototyping your project and it has a responsive layout that will help it work perfectly on any device.
Benefits of Flat UI include:
- Bootstrap 3 based HTML layout
- Easy embedded color swatch switching
- Perfect matching with same-style components
- Grid-based design for per-pixel alignment and sharp images
- Light and fast installation
There are three pricing options for Flat UI:
- Flat UI PSD — $39 gets you Photoshop 5.5+ PSD file, vector-based graphics and free fonts.
- Flat UI HTML — $39 includes a Bootstrap-baed layout, retina-ready icons and graphics and responsive layout design features.
- Flat UI PSD & HTML — The best of both worlds for $69.
7. Qards
Qards is a powerful WordPress plugin that allows you to easily create beautiful landing-pages with no coding skills required. Using simple blocks and components you create the basis of your webpage, then edit anything and everything you want to suit your design style.
his plugin has unlimited layout options in 8 content categories, stack-and-play options to combine different pre-design cards to give endless design possibilities and retina-ready, responsive layouts to give an amazing experience across all devices.
Its main features include:
- Pre-designed Blocks
- Fully responsive design functionality
- No coding skills required
- Easy, click-to-change editor
- Built with WordPress, optimized for WordPress
- Integrated Mailchimp subscriptions
Qards has three pricing models:
- Free — Get support for one domain with limited features and cards.
- Single — $99 gets you one domain, full-function access along with regular support and updates
- Agency — For $199 you can design up to 5 domains with full support and updates.
8. Futuro Icon Collection
Futuro Icon Collection offers both flat and line style combinations of icons to add to your website. They have a collection of 567 symbols, which are all created in uniform design based on a 64px pixel grid. All icons are ready to be used for any type of website you are creating.
The Futuro Icon Collection offers three different license types:
- Personal — $45 provides access to icons for personal use on one personal account.
- Commercial — For $90, the Commercial license lets you sell up to 5,000 end products and broadcast to 500,000 lifetime viewers.
- Extended Commercial — Coming in at $900, this license is designed for large commercial sites using a combination of digital, physical and mobile ads.
9. Grade UI Kit
Grade UI Kit is a powerful kit for Sketch and Photoshop. It has more than 1000 carefully crafted elements in 10 categories with over 100 icons. Every element comes in a light and dark theme, so you can mix and match to make stunning combinations. Its elements are designed on the Bootstrap grid, giving you a drag-and-drop feature and making sure everything fits together perfectly. It is fully responsive and designed to work well across multiple device types, helping you save time while designing without sacrificing quality.
Standout features include:
- Perfect pixel details for a professional look
- Fully customizable elements
- Vector shapes that allow every element to work at every size
- 12 column grids based on Bootstrap 3 to deliver the perfect fit
- Google fonts
The Grade UI Kit costs $58 for full access.
Final Word
If you’re a web designer or developer working on a new site or looking to impress a long-term client, these resources are a great place to start. Each offers a unique approach to designing a WordPress website, allowing you to focus on the form of your next great website design while these tools handle the function.
