Solopreneurship for Software Developers
Best free resources and tools for Web Developers and Designers.
In this insight, we are going to look at some of the best online resources for Web developers and designers. Most of these resources are free and some have premium features that you can pay for.
These online resources are going to help you to develop and design quickly and efficiently.
Since there are thousands of online resources, we will concentrate on Web Templates, CSS frameworks, Online Design tools, Icons, and Chrome extensions. For the sake of Diana, let’s get started.
HTML & CSS TEMPLATES
Most of these are free beautiful Web templates and themes, premium templates and themes are available as well. These templates are going to help you with a quick start to your project. They are fully customizable, responsive, and neatly written.
HTML5 UP makes spiffy html5 site templates that are fully responsive, built on intelligent html5 and css3, are super customizable, and are 100% free under the creative commons.
W3CSS Templates are free responsive Website templates. You can modify, save, share and use them in all your projects.
FreeHTML5 has Carefully Crafted Beautiful and Functional Free Bootstrap Templates with more than 1 million downloads. They also have premium templates.
Templatemo templates are responsive HTML5 mobile-ready CSS layouts. All templates are absolutely 100% free download to use for your sites. You can freely use the templates for commercial or personal purposes.
HTMLxCSS3 has a lot of Free Responsive Css3 and Html5 Website Templates in different categories.
CSS FRAMEWORKS
CSS has a lot of wonderful frameworks that will make styling easy and your project beautiful. CSS Frameworks enable you to work faster hence boosting your productivity. We will look at five of the most used CSS frameworks to integrate into your projects.
Bootstrap is one of the most popular open source CSS frameworks that help you to build fast and responsive sites. You can quickly design and customize responsive mobile-first sites with Bootstrap.
The Framework features include; Sass variables and mixins, a responsive grid system, extensive prebuilt components, and powerful JavaScript plugins.
Materialize is a modern responsive front-end framework created by Google. It is based on Material Design. Materialize is simple and easy to use. It has refined animations and transitions to provide a smoother experience for developers and users.
TailwindCSS is a utility-first CSS framework packed with classes that can be composed to build any design, directly in your markup. TailwindCSS helps you to rapidly build modern websites without ever leaving your HTML.
Bulma is a free, open-source framework that provides ready-to-use frontend components that you can easily combine to build responsive web interfaces. Bulma is a modern framework that just works.
UniformCSS is a lightning-fast, Flexible responsive utility class generator and CSS framework designed to help you gain the full power of functional CSS without compromising on Sass.
Foundation is a Framework for any device, medium, and accessibility. Foundation is a family of responsive front-end frameworks that make it easy to design beautiful responsive websites, apps, and emails that look amazing on any device.
Foundation is semantic, readable, flexible, and completely customizable. The Foundation team is constantly adding new resources and code snippets, including handy HTML templates to help get you started!
ONLINE DESIGN TOOLS
There are many online design tools available that make Web development and design a bliss experience. We will look at some of the tools you can use without installing them on your computer. Whether you are on a Mac, Windows, or Linux, these tools are available.
Figma can be used to create UI Designs for Websites and applications. other user cases include; UX design, Graphic design, Wireframing, Diagramming, Brainstorming, Templates, and Remote design.
Figma has an Online Graphic Design Tool that has all the elements you need to create amazing logos, social media graphics, presentations, and more, for free.
Canva has thousands of professional templates, images, and quality content to choose from, you can get a head start on bringing your best ideas to life.
Canva also has features that help you to collaborate with ease. You can Invite people to edit with you or set your whole team up in Canva Pro to manage brand assets, leave feedback, get approvals, and scale your visual content.
Taler helps you to create graphic designs Talered to your brand. You can Make your social media projects stand out with free design templates.
Remove.bg helps you to remove backgrounds 100% automatically in 5 seconds with one click. This will help you save on editing time if you need an image with transparent background for your website or application.
Wix is the platform that gives you the freedom to create, design, manage and develop your web presence exactly the way you want. Wix helps you to create a website without extensive knowledge of HTML and CSS.
Glassmorphism is an incredible online tool for generating quick glassmorphic UI in CSS code snippets. This will help you to create modern beautiful looking websites.
ICONS
Icons are a good communication tool without actual written words. Icons make a site visually appealing and communicate intuitively. There are a lot of icon libraries to choose from with different design philosophies. Here are some of the popular ones.
Font Awesome is the Internet’s icon library and toolkit, used by millions of designers, developers, and content creators.
Material Icons are available in five styles and a range of downloadable sizes and densities. The icons are based on the core Material Design principles and metrics.
Fontisto gives you scalable vector icons that can instantly be customized: size, color, drop shadow, and anything that can be done with the power of CSS.
For designers and developers. There are many ways to use symbols; On your website or at your favorite frames (photoshop, illustrator, xd, sketchapp, zeplin, invision studio, framer).
Ionicons are Open source Lovingly hand-crafted icons by the IONIC team. You can use them in Websites, React Native apps, Ionic mobile apps etc.
Weather Icons is the only icon font and CSS with 222 weather-themed icons, ready to be dropped right into Bootstrap, or any project that needs high-quality weather, maritime, and meteorological-based icons!
CHROME EXTENSIONS
Extensions have amazing features that provide many useful functionalities as you browse through the internet. Here are some of the chrome extensions that you must install as a developer.
WhatRuns shows you pretty much everything that powers a website, Web apps they pay for, CDN they’re hosted on, how they track their visitors, WordPress plugins, fonts – you name it!
This is an awesome screen recorder and screen capture & screenshot tool to record screens. You can also share your recordings or save them to your online account.
Daily.dev provides you with programming news for free. Daily.dev is the fastest growing online community for developers to stay updated on the best developer news. Get all the content you love in one place collected from +400 sources.
Provides an elegant and quick way to create default text or generate Lorem Ipsum. Optimized for quick usage, but it can be customized.
The web editor is a tool that provides you with an enhanced way to inspect any website elements, alter their properties, insert contents, design, and visualize the way you want to see them.
BONUS TOOLS
Free QR Code generator for your website
Free Image Compression tool to reduce image file size.
There are many online resources and tools available for web developers and designers. We have left out a lot of them. We will have another insight highlighting those that we find most useful for many developers.
