Though often there’s no substitute for professional experience and hard-won expertise, occasionally free online tools can help you to boost your branding and improve your business’ design, SEO and aesthetics. To help you get the most out of the hundreds of free tools available on the web, we’ve selected some of the best online apps around.

Design

Whether you’re creating a web page, a flyer or a promotional product, getting the aesthetics right can be hard. If you want to improve the standard of design on your site without splashing out on a professional every time, or you simply just need some inspiration, these apps could help.

1. Infogr.am / Create / Share Infographics
2. Dribbble / Awesome Design Inspiration
3. Easel.ly / No Design Experience Req
4. Placeit / Mockup Templates
5. Kraken / Image Optimisation
6. Freebbble / High Quality Freebies
7. Fotor / Photo Editor with Filters
8. Fribble / FREE PSD Downloads
9. Freepik / Million + Image Resources
10.Pixden / FREE Web Resources

Web design

Unless you’re an experienced web designer, it’s unlikely you’re going to break down any barriers with your self-made site. However, with the help of these online tools – and a bit of practice – there’s a good chance you’ll be able to come up with a web presence that does your organisation justice.

11. Weebly / Create Website / Blog
12. WordPress / Website Framework
13. Moonfruit / Free Website Creator
14. Wix / Website Builder
15. Logster / Manage Logs in the Cloud
16. uCraft / Another Web Builder
17. Quickpages / Publish and Analyse Landing Pages
18. Site Builder / 1000’s of Templates available
19. Webnode
20. Jimdo

Name generators

The name you choose for your business is incredibly important. As well as being one of the main elements of your brand identity, it will help to determine the success of your business’ SEO. Choose well, and your company name could go down in corporate history, choose poorly, and it could end up holding your business back and causing you serious branding embarrassment.

21. Hipster Business / Trendy Domains
22. Namefresh / For the Perfect Domain
23. Impossibility / Find Incredible Domain Names
24. Wordoid / Find Short and Snappy Names
25. The Name App / Find a Unique Name
26. Short domain search / Short Domain Lists
27. Dominr / Great Dynamic Domain Availability Search
28. Lean domain search / Name Inspiration

Stock images 

Images are essential to any design, and unless you’re going to pop out with your camera and take some snaps yourself, you’ll probably end up on a stock image site at some point. To ensure you don’t waste your time looking through poor quality pictures. Here are the best stock image sites out there.

29. UnSplash / Hi Res and Free
30. Pexels / Free for Commercial Use
31. Splash Base / Hi Res and Free
32. Designer Spics / Personal and COmmercial Use
33. Foodies Feed / 1000+ Food Pictures
34. Jeshoots / Royalty Free Images
35. Free Photobank / Mega Hi Res Images Available
36. RGB Stock / 100,000+ Images
37. Dreamstime / Millions of Vectors and Photos
38. Stock Vault / 90k + Resources
39. Public Domain Pictures / Some Public Domain Archives
40. ISO Republic / Creative Pictures

Icons

Though the style of your icon may not be the first thing you think of when designing a new website or a new app. It’s pretty significant in the long term. Make sure your icon design doesn’t let you down by using one of these excellent online tools.

41. Flat Icon / 16,000+ Vectors
42. Ico Moon / Icon Generator and Free Vectors
43. Fontello / Font Generator
44. Endless Icons / Free Flat Icons
45. Glyphsearch / Icon Search Engine
46. Icon Finder / Great Resources
47. The Noun Project / 1000’s of Icons
48. Perfect Icons / Social Icon Generator
49. Material Design Icons / Open Source Icons
50. MakeAppIcon / Generate App Icons

E-commerce

E-commerce is now an essential part of many companies’ business plans. Helping to boost potential income and bring in vital revenue, e-commerce is a must have capability for most of today’s websites.

51. Magento / E-Com Development Framework
52. Woo Commerce / WordPress Plugin
53. OpenCart / Cart Creation
54. OS Commerce / Self Hosted Service
55. Prestashop / Free Online Store
56. Web Scraper / Scrape Dynamic Web Pages
57. M2EPro / Inventory for eBay and Amazon
58. Google Merchant Centre / Google Merchant Tools

Payment gateways 

If you’re you going to have an eCommerce element built into your site, you’ll also need a reliable and secure payment gateway. Though fees do apply to most payment gateways, without them, your online shop is unlikely to turn a profit.

59. Paypal / Easy Integration
60. Stripe / Established and Trustworthy
61. Go Cardless / Collect Direct Debits and more

Storage

Online storage is a versatile and powerful tool that can help you to access work remotely, collaborate with other businesses and keep your precious files out of harm’s way. If you’re looking to expand your online storage capabilities, here are the sites to choose.

62. Dropbox / The Big Boy
63. Box / Simple File Sharing
64. Google Drive / More Free Storage Facility
65. Onedrive / For the Microsoft Lovers 😉
66. Drp.io / Fast, Private and Free

Security 

Keeping your site safe is essential if you want to retain customer trust, protect your business and thrive online. Though no security is foolproof, these will give you the best chance of keeping your online presence safe and secure.

67. Lastpass / Trustworthy, Powerful Share Feature
68. Enpass / Create Strong Passwords and more
69. Dashlane / Form Filler and Password Manager
70. Chrome Password Manager / For Chrome
71. Firefox Password Manager / Guess what… For Firefox 😉

File sharing

Like online storage, file sharing is an essential tool in most contemporary working environments. Making it easier to collaborate with other companies and with clients, file sharing can make your life easier, less stressful and more productive – and let’s face it, who doesn’t want that?

72. Dropbox / Of Course The Big Boy Again
73. Wetransfer / Simply Awesome for Large Files, and its FREE
74. WeSendIt / Safe and Easy up to 20GB … WOW!
75. Seshi / Easy File Exchange
76. Hightail / Sharing for Creatives

Communications 

As well as being able to share and access files, you need to be able to communicate over the web if you’re going to work remotely successfully. Luckily, there’s an excellent choice of communications tools around at the moment, with voice and video capabilities getting better all the time.

77. Skype / Unless you’ve been living in a dark cupboard… Skype
78. Yammer / Alternative Comm Tool
79. Hipchat / Good Group Chat
80. Slack / Great with Massive Integration Capabilities

Analytics 

If you want to know exactly how your website is performing, you’ll need to sign up for one of the many analytics tools available online. Able to tell you everything from how many people accessed your site to where these people came from and what they were searching for, analytics tools can revolutionise your approach to SEO.

81. Google Analytics / This is ESSENTIAL
82. Piwik / Open Source with Extras
83. Similar Web / Competitor Analysis
84. Stat Counter / Simplicity is sometimes overlooked
85. Open Web Analytics / Understand how people use your website
86. SEM Rush / Online Marketing Intelligence for SEO
87. Applyzer / App Rankings
88. Heap Analytics / Analytics Automation
89. Hotjar / Collect User Feedback
90. Facebook Insights / Social Engagement Metrics

Marketing

Last but definitely not least, if you want the right audience to see your site, contact your company and buy your products, you need to market it correctly. If you’re new to marketing or need to brush up on your B2B or B2C skills, these tools might be just what you’re looking for.

91. Notify / Startup Mentions
92. Hello Bar / Convert Site Visitors into Customers
93. Sumo Me / Grow Website Traffic with Free Tools
94. Google Trends / Essential Understanding
95. Mautic / Open Source Marketing Automation
96. Sumo Me Scroll Box / Grow Email Lists
97. Sumo Me List Builder / Grow Email Lists Further 😉
98. Visual Ping / Website Checker
99. Marketing Grader / Free Online Tool

By using a combination of these tools, you should be able to transform the look, feel and effectiveness of your website and give your online business a whole new lease of life. Get started now and make 2017 a year to remember.

And if all else fails you could always contact us at Papersky and we’ll guide you through and deliver ANYTHING you might require. https://www.papersky.co.uk/affordable-web-design/