Best Free Tools For Website Design

Website design is a Renaissance process that requires you to be a craftsman of several different technologies. Whereas many tools have proliferated to ease these demands, many are expensive and can hamstring your attempts to build your first website. Below, we explore a few of our favorite free tools for website design.

Design

Figma

Figma is a design tool that works great for websites. It’s collaborative, so you can invite teammates to work on your projects as well.

We use Figma at Cedar Studios, and it’s a staple in many tech companies as well.

You can arrange your page’s elements in a menu along the left-hand side.

On the right is the element inspector. You can change an element’s color, size, font, and any other property you can imagine.

Figma even has a new “Dev Mode” that can suggest code for you!

Pros

• Free to use
• Highly flexible
• Can collaborate across teams

Cons

• Only 30 days of historical changes
• Takes some time to learn

Pricing

Starter: Free

Professional: $12/mo

Organization: $45/mo

Enterprise: $75/mo

Paid Alternative

Adobe Dreamweaver

Images and Graphics

Pexels

Pexels is a great, free resource for high-resolution stock images. Included are nature landscapes, professional photography, and web graphics.

Because the images are all royalty-free, you won’t need to credit anyone if you use these images!

When using their search feature, make sure to take advantage of the filters to get an image that perfectly matches your needs.

For example, in the above search, we selected the horizontal filter with a custom color filter. This ensures that the image would look great on a horizontal layout with a neutral color scheme.

When you click into an image and scroll down, there will be a “More like this” section that is very handy. Sometimes you will even find multiple images with the same model, allowing you to tell a cohesive story throughout your website.

Pros

• Great quality images
• Royalty free
• No account needed

Cons

• Few graphics/illustrations
• Images are more likely to be used on other sites

Pricing

All Plans: Free

Free Alternative

Unsplash

Paid Alternatives

• Storyblocks
• Etsy

Image editing

GIMP

GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is a free and open-source image editing tool. It’s been the favorite tool of enthusiasts for years and has a large community built around it.

It can do nearly everthing Adobe Photoshop can do, which is perfect if you are on a budget or just need to edit a handful of images.

At Cedar Studios, we do so much photo editing that we’ve opted for Adobe’s tools—so we don’t have as much to say about GIMP.

Pros

• Free and open-source
• Powerful image editing
• Large community

Cons

• Steep learning curve
• Lacks some features of paid competitors

Pricing

All Plans: Free

Paid Alternatives

• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe Photoshop

Miscellaneous Tools

Here are some other free website design tools that save us hours building sites for Cedar Rapids small businesses.

Cloud Convert

Cloud Convert is an image file-type converter on the web. We primarily use it to convert images to a modern, compressed format.

As website speed is hampered by large and poorly formatted images, it is important you have a tool handy to format the images correctly.

Pros

• No account needed
• Quick file conversion

Cons

• Limited to 10 credits
• Only web-based

Pricing

Package: $17/1,000 credits

Subscription: $9/mo

Iconify

Iconify has a ton of svg icons that you can download for free. There are dozens of popular icon packs like Material and Remix.

We particularly like Material, Tabler, and Hero for our small business clients.

Pros

• All icons are free
• No account needed

Cons

• Icons from different packs may clash
• Brandname icons (e.g. Facebook) are missing from some packs

Pricing

All Plans: $0

Donate: $1–1000/mo

Conclusion

Here are some of the many free tools we use to design websites for Cedar Rapids small businesses. Please support the creators of the free tools if you find them useful.