15 Easy-to-Use Tools & Services to Improve Your Workflow
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There’s no lack of tools and services out there that you could put to use to improve your products or your business. Also, to increase your productivity, or save you time and money.
It’s quite the opposite in fact. There are so many that finding one or more that will satisfy your most urgent needs can be a problem in itself. Some of the tools you use or services you subscribe to today may have served you well, but there’s no guarantee they will continue to do so.
The very nature of web design demands that you keep up with the latest trends to stay abreast or keep a step ahead of the competition. That often requires finding new tools or services that will enable you to do so.
We hope this list of top tools and services for 2020 will serve to help you stay on top of your game and increase your productivity as well.
1. UXPin
UXPin is a collaborative prototyping tool for UX and UI designers. It is used for creating advanced prototypes that look and behave like the final product. UXPin comes in a browser-based version and a desktop version. It’s great for real-time collaboration and allows entire teams to work in-context by previewing designs, exchanging feedback in comments, giving approvals, or using the Spec mode and Documentation for a smooth designer-developer handoff.
Working with UXPin is a lot like working with your team in Google Docs, except UXPin is much more powerful.
Features include:
- Easily accessible built-in libraries for iOS, Material Design, and Bootstrap.
- Fully interactive form elements, including text fields, checkboxes, and radio buttons to replace the need to draw static imitations.
- Vector drawing tools that enable users to draw and combine vector shapes to create everything from icons to beautiful illustrations.
- Design components that can be used to create designs quickly without having to resort to repetitive work.
- HTML importing to kick-start a prototyping effort by importing web page content.
Click on the banner to find out more.
2. BeTheme
BeTheme is the biggest WordPress theme of them all — largely due to its more than 40 powerful and impressive core features.
BeTheme is fast, flexible, and easy to work with. It’s an ideal tool for both beginners and advanced website designers. A beginner could build an award-winning website on the first try, while experienced designers have come to appreciate Be’s many productivity-enhancing features.
- The powerful Muffin Builder 3 page builder is just one of the key highlights, and together with Be’s powerful Admin Panel gives you all the flexibility you’ll likely need.
- Shortcodes and other features provide a wide range of design options while eliminating any need for coding.
- The most popular core feature, however, is the library of 500+ pre-built websites. These responsive, customizable pre-built websites cover 30 industry sectors and a wide range of business niches and major website types
Click on the banner to learn more.
3. Mobirise Website Builder
There are 3 pretty solid reasons for choosing Mobirise as the website builder for your 2020 projects.
- Since it’s an offline builder, you simply have to download it to use it, and you can use it however you want.
- It’s free, with no strings attached. You can download it for free and it’s free to use for personal and commercial uses.
- You’re not restricted to a particular platform or service provider, which means you have complete control over creating and publishing your site.
Mobirise gives you a host of useful HTML themes and homepage templates to work with. Your sites will be crazy-fast, and 100% mobile-friendly. No coding is necessary. In addition, you’ll have ready access to 2,500 trendy and customizable website blocks.
Click on the banner to find out more.
4. LayerSlider
The name LayerSlider doesn’t come close to describing what this amazing animation builder is capable of.
LayerSlider can be used to create sliders as you would expect, but it also features:
- Animated page blocks which you can use to build a complete website
- Well designed and stylish popup windows
- A feature-rich and easy-to-use visual editor
- An ever-growing selection of slider templates, including helpful ones for beginners
Plus, LayerSlider is SEO friendly and optimized for every device.
5. Dr. Link Check
Dr. Link is a useful tool to have to check out a new website before going online or for checking an existing site for broken links or other issues that tend to degrade site performance.
Dr. Link crawls through the site’s entire code to
- examine each site link
- check for proper formatting
- check for server response time, error codes, and more
It’s ideal for finding problems that are not all that obvious but can cause trouble down the road.
6. Uncode – Creative Multiuse WordPress Theme
To see what Uncode could do for you it’s best to visit the website and browse this creative theme’s marvelous showcase of user-created websites. You’ll be impressed and likely inspired as well.
Key features:
- A powerful front-end editing capability
- Adaptive images and advanced grid systems
- 400+ Wireframes Sections
Uncode a ThemeForest Top Seller with 65.000+ sales and it is ideal for agencies and small businesses as well as for creating portfolio, blogging, and magazine-style sites.
7. 8b Website Builder
8b is new, crazy-fast, and easy to work with. You can work with it from your desktop or from your mobile device, or from both if you wish, and it will deliver fast Google rankings for you.
8b key features include
- 250 cool templates
- AMP, PWA, and Site Export
- Free domain
- and it’s free to use
Why not check it out today?
8. Stockfresh
A great service is one that can give you a huge range of choices and great plans and prices together with helpful, friendly support. That’s what you want in a stock photo agency, and that’s what you’ll get with Stockfresh.
- Visit the Stockfresh site, sign up for free, and browse the huge inventory
- 30 categories of popular topics and image types will ease your search
- Stockfresh offers monthly and credit plans, and competitive pricing
With more to come.
9. XStore | Multi-Purpose WooCommerce WordPress Theme
One way to create the exact online store you want is to build it from scratch.
Another, far easier way to achieve the same or better results is to put XStore to work.
XStore gives you, along with much more:
- A selection of useful and inspirational product demos
- Premium plugins valued at $300
- A powerful single product page builder
- 90+ ready-to-go stores you can customize to meet your exact needs
Sound easy? It is.
10. Slider Revolution
Slider Revolution has a long history of enabling designers to incorporate award-winning sliders and special effects into their designs. Version 6.0 of this popular tool does much more.
- 500 ready-to-go templates, 20+ addons, and a 2,000 royalty-free element object library provide a ton of design possibilities
- you can create sliders, content modules, carousels, and hero headers
- you can even create complete websites
Perhaps it’s time to become one of this tool’s 7 million worldwide users.
11. Rank Math
You can continue to tie yourself in knots trying to make the search engines love your website content. Or, you can let Rank Math do the SEO heavy lifting. This SEO plugin, with its clean and simple interface, offers the following:
- Elementor, Automated Image, Local, and WooCommerce SEO tools
- 404 Monitoring and sitemaps
- Sitemap, redirection, and error page checks
- Analyses of 40 different SEO factors to help your website attract traffic like flies to honey and make it an eCommerce powerhouse
12. Movedo Theme
Movedo was created by a top rated author who didn’t mind venturing outside the box a bit when it came to providing out-of-this-world, yet extremely useful special effects – like things that move or appear to without actually doing so.
- Aside from that, this premium quality theme
- Features a clean, modern design
- Is responsive and provides all the flexibility you’re likely to need
- Offers 24/7 support
Movedo can make your 2020 a year to remember. Movedo rocks!
13. WHATFONTIS
Problem: You’ve found a font you’re wild about, but you don’t know its name, its cost, or where to find it.
Solution: WhatFontis.
This remarkable service can help you in more ways than one.
- It can identify the font
- It can find close (very close) matches
- It can find a more affordable alternative if the font in question is too pricey
Simply download a sample. The WhatFontis character recognition app does the rest.
Check it out.
14. Goodiewebsite
Goodiewebsite offers a development platform for a web designer who needs help finishing a project, or that a small business owner who wants to establish an online presence can count on to get the job done and do it well.
You’ll get outstanding results if you:
- need a simple WordPress website
- intend to conduct business via a simple WooCommerce site
- have a modern, high-quality 1 to 10 page website in mind
Goodiewebsite can also provide responsive email templates to help you with your marketing.
15. Heroic KB – Knowledge Base Plugin
Giving your website visitors a fact-filled knowledge base they can access can do wonders for your business. The Heroic Knowledge Base plugin:
- Give visitors much more useful information than most FAQ pages even come close to providing.
- Gives customers access including instant search 24/7, freeing up your staff and minimizing email correspondence.
- Helps you improve your customer service by providing useful and valuable action analytics and feedback.
This can indeed be a valuable investment.
Conclusion
With this list of 15 tools and services we’ve tried to make it easier for you to find one or more that will help you save time, minimize costs, and help your workflows and/or business function more smoothly. It’s certainly better than having to sift through hundreds of potential candidates to find what would work best for you.
These tools and services have one thing in common in that they practically guarantee to help you increase the amount of time you’ll have to devote to your more pressing tasks and items.
