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Digital design technology is forever changing. Design trends come, and design trends go. Some design tools keep pace with the latest trends, and some don’t.
An effective way to keep a competitive edge is to maintain an awareness of the best tools and resources. You need to know where you might be able to use them to your advantage.
There’s a problem with that approach. It’s that you’ll find yourself having to sort among an embarrassment of riches. Not all tools and resources can qualify as being top-of-the-line of course. To find the best of the best can involve quite a bit of searching.
We’ve pulled together a nice little collection of top site, tools, apps, and resources. All of them are designed to make your work easier, and keep you up with the times. They can help you maintain that competitive edge.
Starting with:
1. Elementor
Elementor is the world’s best builder. Simple, powerful & flexible. Empowering designers to do it all. With over 2 million active installs and over 4500 5 star reviews on WordPress, it is by far the most popular page editor.
Design your vision faster and break free from repetitive tasks. Don’t miss the Pro version – equipped with cool new features like pop-ups, forms, and the theme builder letting you design the header, footer, and archive pages of your site.
2. AND CO from Fiverr
AND CO is an invoicing software that helps you spend less time invoicing and more time on the work you love. With both a web app and a mobile app available, you can send invoices quickly from wherever you are. Customize your invoices with your own branding and logo, so you always present a professional image to your clients.
You have an option to attach relevant files or documents to your invoices, and create recurring invoices for clients you work with regularly.
Accept payments directly on your invoices by creating your own PayMe page. Clients can click a button to pay via credit card, ACH, or PayPal. You’ll be notified when it’s time to invoice again, anytime a payment is received, or when your payment becomes overdue. Receive AND CO alerts on your desktop, mobile device, or via Slack, so you stay on top of your cash flow at all times.
As well as invoicing, you can create proposals and contracts or track your time in AND CO, and everything is integrated so you can even generate invoices automatically from this data. Save time, and get paid faster with AND CO.
3. Houzez
Every time realtors and real estate agencies are led to believe a Houzez’ based site has all the features and functionality they could reasonably expect, or even need, along comes a new update that provides them with an even greater range of options.
As you would expect with any top tool, its authors and designers are firm believers that there’s always room for improvement. The basics that have made Houzez so popular are still there of course; including advanced search capabilities, the property management system, and a range of listings options.
Custom fields builder for adding a new property page, currency type options, listings sorted by price, data, and region, and property status and luxury home tour scheduling are among the newly added features.
A Houzez-based site is easy to create and easy to use, and much of what is new is based on designer and user feedback.
4. TheGem – Creative Multi-Purpose High-Performance WordPress Theme
With its incredible wide selection of pre-build websites and demo pages, all designed in collaboration with best designers of Behance network, TheGem is the absolute design winner and trendsetter among all premium WordPress themes on the market.
Made with mobile and performance-first approach, TheGem hits the best page speed scores out there and is SEO ready. It is also equipped with industry leading Page Builder, premium plugins and features like header & footer builder.
5. Uncode
Uncode is one of the creative ThemeForest top sellers of all time with over 50,000 sales. It is a powerful, user-friendly theme with all the functionality you need to build a stunning portfolio or any type of website you want. You can use an Uncode-supplied template or, if you wish, design and build your own templates to work from.
The best way to see what Uncode brings to the table is to visit their showcase of user-built websites.
6. Amelia
Amelia is a powerful, award-winning WordPress plugin that can save business owners significant amounts of time and money if they rely heavily on efficiently managed client or customer appointments.
Amelia runs itself for all intents and purposes. It makes bookings, manages changes or cancellations, matches client requests to employee schedules, and even accepts payments. Over 2,000 users uses Amelia for bookings on their WordPress website and gave it a 4.85+ user rating.
7. wpDataTables
wpDataTables provides an all-in-one solution for anyone faced with the task of summarizing huge amounts of data in attractive, interactive, and easily understandable tables and charts. 21,000 active users have given this premier WordPress plugin a 4.7 star average rating. It is the only table and chart-builder that fully supports MySQL, MS SQL, and PostgreSQL database queries.
wpDataTables’ features include front-end editing, full customization of table designs, and conditional formatting (highlighting based on values).
8. Mobirise
Mobirise is an offline website builder. As such, it gives you the advantage of not being tied to any platform or host; giving you in effect total control over your site. Mobirise is free for both personal and commercial use. It’s easy to use, drag and drop, and requires no coding.
Website templates, blocks, and themes come with the package, and your sites will be crazy-fast and 100% mobile friendly. Download Mobirise to give it a try.
9. Logic Hop – Personalized Marketing for WordPress
There’s nothing clients love more than a strong ROI and personalized content can make it happen. Logic Hop for WordPress makes it easy to use UTM codes, visitor actions and more to create personalizations that generate huge increases in conversions. With Logic Hop you’ll have more billable hours and your clients will love the results. Don’t be the agency that doesn’t offer personalization – Check out Logic Hop today.
10. Round Icons Bundle – 38,000 icons and illustrations
Roundicons Bundle is the world’s largest icons and illustrations bundle, with 38,000 (and growing) premium, royalty-free images and icons to choose among. The bundle comes with a commercial use license and can be yours for a one-time payment. Use coupon code “GETBIG” for a 20% discount. Up to 10,000 new icons are expected to be added over the next 12 months.
11. 8b Website Builder
Fast, fresh, and futuristic aptly describes 8b, a brand new website builder that’s super-simple to use. With 8b, you can create websites at home or at work on your desktop and on your mobile device when you’re out and about. 250+ website sections and 16 slick starter templates will get your projects off to a fast start.
Your sites will feature lightning fast performance and be 100% mobile friendly thanks to Google AMP. 8b is free at the moment.
12. Goodie
The “Goodie way” joins end clients directly with web developers. There is no middleman to deal with, and Goodie will completely code your website at a special $999 price. The only thing required of you is to provide the design. You’ll get a carefully coded, high-performance website in return.
13. HelpJet
Helping customers makes them happy. Enabling them to help themselves makes them happier. With HelpJet you can build a self-service knowledge base that allows both you and your customers to rely less on customer support tickets and reduce response time to questions to near zero.
With a HelpJet knowledge base you can provide answers to your customers’ basic questions and others that are commonly asked. HelpJet is easy to customize and no coding knowledge is required.
14. Savah App
Savah is an advanced prototyping tool designed especially for supporting web and mobile app design and development. As such, Savah supports team and cross-team collaboration. Prototypes can be automatically synced with Box and Dropbox, and a design workflow and approval system is built-in.
A solo designer’s paid plan costs only $8/month while a team of 5 pays $40/month. A 30% discount is offered on annual plans.
15. WhatFontIs.com
Ever found a font you really like, but you don’t know its name or where to find it? www.WhatFontIs.com ‘s automatic AI system to the rescue. WhatFontIs works from a database of 550,000 commercial and free fonts. You supply the image, and the AI system tells you what you have in a matter of seconds.
Conclusion
It’s obvious you’re not going to be needing all 15 of these premier tools and resources. Unless it’s super-big and complicated.
Hopefully, however, there’s at least one for two products you can benefit from instantly. Whether it’s a website or page building tool, or something more specialized. Perhaps, a table and chart-building plugin or a bundle of a gazillion different icons.
Enjoy your shopping experience in any event.
