Design & Dev Tools Archives

24 Free Web Tools, Design Elements from Fall 2016

24 Free Web Tools, Design Elements — Fall 2016

December 12, 2016 • Sig Ueland

Utilizing free elements and tools from the design community can be a good way to add style and value to your website. Here is a list of new web tools and ...

Design & Dev Tools

Simple Ways to Note Glitches during Holiday Rush, to Fix Later

December 8, 2016 • Pamela Hazelton

Last year I addressed ways for ecommerce merchants to keep the momentum going in January. Tips include changing up the home page, using section headers, and running the best types of sales.

Design & Dev Tools

10 DIY Website Builders for Small Businesses

September 4, 2016 • Sig Ueland

Do-it-yourself website builders can help small businesses get online quickly and affordably using customizable templates and drag-and-drop design tools. Businesses can create simple landing pages, blogs, and even basic online ...

Design & Dev Tools

20 Free Design Tools for Ecommerce Merchants

July 25, 2016 • Sig Ueland

Whether building an ecommerce store from scratch or just freshening its look, merchants can find plenty of help with free online design tools. Here is a list of free online design ...

Design & Dev Tools

25 Free Web Design Elements, Spring 2016

May 23, 2016 • Sig Ueland

One of the easiest ways to add value to your website is to utilize free elements offered by the designer community. Design-focused websites, such as Dribble, are excellent resources for ...

Design & Dev Tools

19 Free Website Design Tools

April 10, 2016 • Sig Ueland

There are plenty of free tools and resources to help with your website design, whether you’re looking for a little flare or you want to build a new site from ...

Design & Dev Tools

6 Online Appointment Scheduling Tools, for Service Businesses

January 20, 2016 • Kathleen Fealy

Online appointment scheduling tools provide efficient, practical, and profitable solutions for consulting and professional service businesses to manage their customer, vendor, and prospect communications. Schedulers are appearing on "contact us" forms, support pages, and services forms throughout the web.

Design & Dev Tools

2016 Online Marketing Checkup: 10 Tasks, Tools, Guides

January 6, 2016 • Kathleen Fealy

January is the perfect time to make improvements to your online marketing plan or implement a particular strategy to benefit your business, both in the long and short term. Having a solid foundation as you begin the year will help your business grow and compete more effectively.

Design & Dev Tools

11 Online Video Creation Tools for Small Business Use

July 15, 2015 • Kathleen Fealy

Online video has become an integral part of the business marketing toolkit, especially in an era when the use of mobile devices is commonplace. Despite this fact, small businesses often consider the use of video to be a difficult and expensive undertaking. Business owners worry about everything from the skills needed to produce video content to camera-shy employees to promotion and distribution costs.

Design & Dev Tools

10 Online Backup Services for Small Businesses

July 12, 2015 • Sig Ueland

For small businesses, online backup services offer more than just storage space in the cloud. Complete solutions provide a variety of features to protect your system, including file management, encryption ...

Design & Dev Tools

14 Color Tools to Grow Your Business

June 14, 2015 • Sig Ueland

Color has a powerful affect on consumers. According to KISSmetrics, up to 90 percent of a person’s initial assessment of a product is based solely on color. Bring dynamic color ...

Design & Dev Tools

20 Podcasting Tools, for High-quality Content

March 9, 2015 • Sig Ueland

Podcasting continues to be an effective way to generate rich content for your website. With so many inexpensive and relatively simple tools available to capture and edit audio and video,

Design & Dev Tools

12 Tools to Create Animated GIFs

February 23, 2015 • Sig Ueland

The Graphic Interchange Format can turn a stack of images into a short looping video. Animated GIF images can be embedded into a website, email, or ad — giving viewers ...

Design & Dev Tools

11 Tools for Online Presentations, Videos, Animations

February 18, 2015 • Sig Ueland

Presentation tools can be helpful for creating content, such as product demonstrations to enhance a shopping experience. Oftentimes, slide presentations can be repurposed from your existing content. And, you can ...

Design & Dev Tools

14 Tools for Feedback on Web Design, Usability

January 26, 2015 • Sig Ueland

When launching an online business, be sure to test and improve your design through feedback. Get expert opinions from fellow entrepreneurs and web designers, and test your site’s usability with ...

Design & Dev Tools

14 Product Photography Tools and Resources

August 19, 2014 • Sig Ueland

To create beautiful product photography, take advantage of some terrific and affordable tools and resources. Get the help you need without significant cost. Here is an assortment of tools and resources ...

Design & Dev Tools

15 Tools to Optimize Ecommerce Images

July 28, 2014 • Sig Ueland

Does your website have an acceptable load time? Images usually account for most of the downloadable bytes on a page. Optimizing your images can yield a large boost in your ...

Design & Dev Tools

10 Tools to Create Social Media Graphics

May 14, 2014 • Paul Chaney

With millions of images uploaded each day, social media is now a visual medium. Platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, Flickr, and Vine make sharing photos and videos much easier than ...

Design & Dev Tools

11 Mobile Website Builders for Ecommerce Merchants

May 5, 2014 • Sig Ueland

There are a variety of solutions for merchants who are interested in establishing or improving their mobile presence. For small businesses just starting, there are affordable do-it-yourself options with basic ...

Design & Dev Tools

WordPress Ecommerce Plugins that Speed Up Redesigns

February 17, 2014 • Joe Robison

In “7 Ecommerce Design Trends for 2014,” we addressed factors that will likely influence ecommerce redesigns in 2014. These include the popularity of images, video, and other rich content, and ...

Design & Dev Tools

5 Tools to Personalize your Marketing Efforts

July 25, 2013 • Jerry Jao

In "8 Tools to Personalize your Ecommerce Site," I discussed methods to customize visitors' experiences on your website. In this article, I'll list five tools to help personalize your advertising and marketing efforts. PadiAct Not everyone is going to buy from you on the first visit....

Design & Dev Tools

8 Tools to Personalize your Ecommerce Site

July 23, 2013 • Jerry Jao

Personalizing an ecommerce site doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. Often, it’s just about finding the right tool, implementing it on your site, and letting the software do its magic. If you’re thinking about adding more personalization features, the following tools and services ...

Design & Dev Tools

19 Free Design Tools for Your Website

May 29, 2013 • Sig Ueland

If you have a small business website, chances are you can use all the free design help you can get. Here is a list of tools and resources to help you with website design. There are font, icon and image tools, as well as audio and video applications. Also there are resources to give you ideas and generate your design inspiration. All of these tools are free.

Design & Dev Tools

21 Free Tools to Open a WordPress Shop

May 27, 2013 • Sig Ueland

WordPress is a free content management system with an abundance of free plugins and themes to launch and manage an ecommerce shop. If you’re looking for an inexpensive and flexible solution to test the ecommerce waters, WordPress might be right for you. Here is a list of free tools to...

Design & Dev Tools

15 Easy Mobile App Solutions

May 6, 2013 • Sig Ueland

Mobile apps can be easy to make. With the variety of mobile app builders to choose from, even non-coders can build their own mobile apps with ease — from basic catalogs to complex utilities. Here is a list of solutions to build your own mobile app. These tools are primarily for users w...

Design & Dev Tools

11 Free Screencasting Tools

April 22, 2013 • Kevin Webster

Screencasts are an effective way to promote your products or services. As a video tutorial, a product demonstration, or for reviewing the strengths of your company, screencasts offer substantial benefits.

Design & Dev Tools

19 Tools to Test your Site for Mobile Devices

January 21, 2013 • Sig Ueland

Is your ecommerce site ready for mobile commerce? Preparing your site for mobile customers can be daunting, considering the huge range of mobile devices and browsers. Fortunately, there are some great tools available to make sure your site is mobile compatible. Here is a list of tools ...

Design & Dev Tools

8 Tools for Managing Multiple WordPess Sites

January 7, 2013 • Sig Ueland

Managing multiple WordPress sites is getting easier. With the release of WordPress 3.0 and its multisite feature, you can run multiple sites from a single WordPress installation and create a network of sites. However, if you run several websites with a variety of requirements, your need...

Design & Dev Tools

29 New Tools to Develop Your Site

October 9, 2012 • Sig Ueland

Website owners interested in developing their sites can always find a variety of new resources online. Here is a collection of recent tools to develop your site. There are resources to monitor activity, such as backlinks, downtime, and customer behavior. There are wireframe and mockup...

Design & Dev Tools

Qwiki’s New Video Creator May Have Ecommerce Applications

July 2, 2012 • Armando Roggio

A New York-based rich-media technology firm has released a new platform that may make it easier for online retailers to produce product-detail videos with little more than product images and a microphone. Qwiki first announced its Creator platform in May 2012 and set up a private beta ...