Websites play such a crucial role in building a solid business online presence. It’s the ideal place where you can incorporate all of your marketing strategies, such as video marketing, content marketing, conversational marketing, and more.
In fact, more than 36% of startups and small businesses do not currently have websites. And since small businesses are most likely to be on a shoestring budget, even a simple and plain website for them is more than enough. In other words, hiring a professional team from a trusted firm to tackle your web design is just too much.
That’s being said, website design is crucial. Just take a look at this stats:
● 94% of your business first impressions actually come from the design of your
website.
● 75% of website credibility comes from the design.
● 66% of internet users prefer to look at a beautifully designed website to consume
content.
● The well-designed websites could raise conversions by up to 200%.
Thankfully, there are many affordable tools out there that can help you design your website
to make it stand out in the crowd. Below are five little-to-no-budget website design tools for small businesses you should consider using.
The Top 7 Website Design Tools For Small
#1. Canva
Canva provides you with free, professional-looking graphics. You can use it for the
homepage to set the tone of your website and give visitors a quick visual representation of what they can expect.
The drag-and-drop interface makes this tool super easy to use. It allows you to edit and
repurpose the graphics based on your own liking. You can add text to the graphics and
replace the default images with your image as well. Not to mention you are also allowed to change the color to represent your brand.
Once you finish editing, you can directly download it to your device and upload it to your
homepages hero section on your website.
#2. AniJS
AniJS is a vast library that provides you with CSS animations to make your website more engaging. Don’t worry. You don’t have to be a professional website designer or programmer
to use this tool. All the animations are easy to use — no coding skills are required.
AniJS allows you to set animations for users’ activity on your website, like when the mouse hovers over a button or when an element is clicked or focused on. The tools can be used for websites from WordPress and Joomla.
Animations like this can create a great user experience for your visitors. That way, they don’t hesitate to come back to your website.
#3. Orion Icon
Need icons for your buttons so you can make the visitors stick around? Orion Icon can help you out. This tool allows you to create ready-made icons in both vector SVG and PNG format. Youll get access to all 4800+ of customizable icons from different industries in its vast library, like foods, books, social media, e-commerce, communication, and more.
The tool has such a friendly interface towards non-designers. You can pick the icons you
want and change their colors, sizes, corner of shapes, and more. So, with Orion, you don’t have to hire professional designers just to create icons for your small business website.
#4. Squoosh
Design is not all about making it prettier and artsier, but it also about effectiveness. For
instance, your website should load faster to keep your visitors longer and convince them to explore more. Design statistics show 47% of visitors expect a web page to load at least in two seconds.
And one of the best ways to make your website load faster is by compressing images you’ve included on the website. That’s where Squoosh comes in. This tool helps you to compress images of files and icons speedily and efficiently.
Squoosh packs with various image processing settings that run in your browser window.
This way, you can see the preview of the effects of different compression actions in real-
time.
#5. W3C Markup Validator
W3C Markup Validator helps check the validity of web documents. It allows you to check
HTML and XHTML documents for well-formed markup. Why is this important? Well, markup validation is essential to make sure that the technical quality of a website is all fine and well-formed.
It’s much easier to perform if you have some basic skills in website development. So, if you create or use some codes on your small business website, it never hurts to check them with markup tools, so your overall design on the website can be improved.
#6. Unsplash
Images are crucial for your website to make it less copy heavy and easier to read. Using
stock images is the easiest way to give your website a visual touch. In this case, you can use Unsplash. This tool is a Website Design Tools with thousands of artsy images for a wide variety of industries.
No attribution is needed. All the images are captured by professional photographers. It’s free to use for commercial use and easy to download too. You can use the high-resolution images to complement your blog posts, use it on your homepage, or more.
You also don’t have to worry about the copyright strike because all the images are copyright free.
#7. Type Genius
Another website design element you should pay attention to is your font. A unique and eye-pleasing font can delight your user experience. Thus, the tool that you really should consider using at this point is Type Genius. This tool allows you to find the perfect font combination for your small business website.
You can select specific from a number of trendy web typefaces. Instantly, you’ll get a complete list of possible matches. Now it’s much easier for you to find fonts that go well together in a heading or paragraph setup.
Wrapping Up
Creating a website for your small business can be daunting — let alone designing it. But, no matter how much you deny it, the visitors much prefer a well-designed website than the stale and plain ones.
The more attractive and functional your website, the more visitors want to spend time longer to explore more. Today, you don’t have to spend a thousand bucks to get your website designed by professionals. You can do it by yourself cost-effectively with the affordable tools mentioned above.
Author Bio
Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award-winning explainer video company.
He helps business increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order).
Twitter: @breadnbeyond
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: Andre Oentoro
