Five Free Tools You Should Be Using for Running Your Design Business

Starting a design business can be a tough job, as you have to face various roadblocks. Most of the web design companies find it difficult to stay ahead of the competitors due to lack of manpower and resources. There are a number of factors like – man power, budget, business plan etc. that affect the growth of your business. However, with a solid team and appropriate tools, you may soon reach your business potential.

To overcome these hurdles, companies can take help of different tools. There are a number of great tools that every design business should use to increase the growth of the company over the course of time. A lot of these tools suit well for designers. By using these tools, you can run your design business with much ease.

If you take a look at the best tools that can help you to run your design business, you will find that there are plenty of options. But, experts believe that having a stock of the best tools will help you to set apart from the crowd.  A good designing tool, not only helps you become a good designer, but drastically decreases the amount of time you generally spend on a particular project.

Below is the list of top 5 free tools that help you to run your design business in an effective manner.

Bitrix24

This is an important platform that helps you to develop your design business. It is a highly secure solution for small as well as large businesses that are intended for effective collaboration and social networking. Creating unique websites with innovative features is a great way to promote your design business.  Bitrix Site Manager is a highly secured web management solution in the industry that delivers great value in performance and functionality. It is suitable for community sites, online stores, corporate portals and news services.  There are a number of templates that help you through web designing process while making your layout look simple and clean. If you have never tried Bitrix24 before, you should give it a try right now.

Word press

This is a free web hosting and web designing CMS that helped millions of designers and bloggers achieve their dream. It is the platform on which a number of high rank websites such as CNN, TED, TechCrunch etc are built. With thousands of templates and themes, you can design beautiful and highly functional websites without much effort. There are hundreds of free widgets that can be used for adding unique features to websites. By using Word Press, you can take your design business to the next level.  One of the wonders of WordPress is the functional design that exports all your efforts easily and moves it to paid service with numerous added features.

UI Parade

User Interface is one of the most important parts of a website layout. Having a few shortcuts of proven elements can help you design attractive interfaces. UI Parade can help you to do this. It provides innovative buttons, ribbons, icons and forms that can be customized as per the requirement of your client. The UI interface of live tools provides a variety of UI designs that are made by highly talented professionals. It not only encourages the designers to develop workflow and interactive designs, but also allows them to come up with creative ideas. People can even share their ideas and what they need from a particular design. In short, it is a great tool as the best ideas and designs can be incorporated into a website with ease.

Browser Sandbox

As an owner of a design business, you may need to have 3 to 4 browsers installed in your PC at a given time. This tool allows you to render your design in different browsers, so that the format compatibility is ensured across different platforms. Using this tool, you can run your design across different platforms such as – IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Mozilla etc. There are a number of similar tools in the market, but Sandbox has been considered as a reliable choice for years.  It continues to stay on top of the other tools with new features added every time.   If you want to get an edge over the competition, you should make use of Browser Sandbox. You can get advantage in terms of time and quality, which other designers may not have.

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is an image editing software that allows users to create beautiful designs and patterns.  It is hailed as the most powerful image editing software that provides you with the best quality designs. It is used by repute web development companies all over the world. This fully featured image editing software is important for a web designer, especially if you are working with clients who have a good web presence.  The reason behind this is that most of their files are in .PSD format and one can render this format only with Adobe Photoshop. One should consider mastering in Adobe Photoshop, to leverage the true power of this software.  Adobe Illustrator is another tool that can be used with Photoshop to create custom images. The illustrator can do a lot of things in terms of creating the desired image.

Mockup builder

This is another great tool for web designers. If you have a design in your mind, then it’s time to visualize your idea. Creating a mock-up design is what most of the designers do these days. It helps designers to speed up the process of creating beautiful web pages. With excellent drag and drop features, one can easily create customized concepts. Your programmers can look at the designs and understand them without much effort. This helps them to concentrate more on coding and develop the sites faster.

Jack Oki is an expert web designer and loves to write about different free tools. His writings educate beginners as well as professionals. He is the founder of numerous websites that provides effective tips regarding the usage of different designing tools.