12 Web Design Tools For Low-Budget Startups

You’ve created a great product. Now, you’re ready to get investors on board and to get that product out to the masses. Unfortunately, if you don’t have a great website, your startup is sunk before you even get it off of the ground. That’s a tough task in any case, but if you are operating on a strict budget, it can be even more difficult. The good news is that all is not lost. The following web design tools are perfect for low-budget startups.

This may not be most well-designed website there is, but Icones Pro contains a repository of more than 200 thousand icons. Better yet, they are free for the taking. It doesn’t matter if you prefer flat, skeuomorphic, or something in between. You can find exactly what you are looking for here.

For many novices, web designers, typography is an afterthought. That’s assuming it’s a consideration at all. This is a shame because the perfectly selected font can really do amazing things for a website. Unfortunately, custom designed fonts can be pricy. Thankfully, Google has provided a variety of free fonts that can be embedded into your web page. This include:

• Serifs
• Sans Serifs
• Handwritten
• Display
• Monospace

CoffeeCup provides a free HTML editor to anyone interested in downloading the product. It is intuitive, easy to use, and is just what you need for designing a responsive website. While it is a bit bare bones, this free product has plenty of features for most startups. However, if you want a bit more, there are two premium versions available as well.

Wikimedia Commons is a repository of videos, photographs, and images that are available to the public for free. Any piece of visual content that you download from this website can be used on your website, and in any other content that you produce. This is very useful when your budget is tight, and you cannot afford the additional expense of paying for stock images.

This is a free graphic design, and image editing toolset. Users of every experience level can use BeFunky website also provides users with great tutorials.

• Animate images
• Edit photos
• Create Collages
• Add visual elements to blogs
• Create infographics
• Design social media pages

You can import your own images for editing, or you can select free images Pixabay.com. The templates provided make image editing and using other features extremely easy. The BeFunky website also provides users with great tutorials.

Like typography, backgrounds are a simple yet important web design element. Lost and Taken provides a wide variety of free textured backgrounds that can add the perfect touch to your company website. Backgrounds include:

• Book covers
• Tree bark
• Film
• Cloth
• Stained paper
• Print
• Metal
• Cardboard
• Scratched

If you want all options made available to you, it is possible to download all of these background images in one file.

The most beautifully designed website is absolutely useless until it’s been filled with great content. Lord of Papers is a content writing service that charges very reasonable rates for the following content:

• Blog posts
• Home pages
• Landing pages
• Service pages
• Policy pages and terms of use
• Product descriptions and reviews

In addition to providing the content for your website, they can proofread, edit, or rewrite existing content.

You probably don’t need to be told that visual content is attention grabbing, trust earning, and conversion boosting. With InfoGr.am, you can build charts and infographics to add to your website. However, unlike most infographic design tools, this utility provides the ability to create visuals that are truly dynamic. This is because you can connect your infographics and charts with a dropbox file, Google sheets, or even a JSON connection. Pricing for businesses starts at only $67 per month. This comes with many features including the ability to create charts and graphics that incorporate your logo and your branding.

Maybe you don’t want to gather up all of the individual tools and resources you need to design the ideal website for your startup. Instead, you might prefer an all in one solution. If this sounds like you, take a few moments to check out Mobirise. This suite of tools gives you all you need to create a mobile friendly website, and you don’t need to write a single line of code to get things off of the ground. You can use the tool to create:

• Landing pages
• Image galleries
• Contact forms
• Video backgrounds
• Social share buttons
• Image sliders
• Integration with Google maps

Because it has such a simple interface, you can have a website up and running in just a few hours.

10. Canva

This online graphic design tool gives you the ability to use a drag and drop interface to create beautifully laid out web pages. This is perfect for creating product pages, landing pages, menus, company bios, and more. You can also use Canva to beautify your social media pages. Have you thought about creating an online brochure to really highlight your products and services? You can also do that with Canva.

Themify flow is a custom theme builder that has been developed for WordPress users. You can use this free utility to create the perfect theme for your brand. You’ll have the ability to select your font family, add update headers and other parts of each web page by selecting various elements, then dragging and dropping them into place. Once you have created your theme, you can export it to any existing WordPress sites.

12. Prezi

Prezi is online presentation software that you can use to create compelling stories to share on your website. Even better, Prezi for business is made for collaboration, and includes features that allow you to interact with your audience as you show your presentation. This is perfect for sales and investment pitches.

Conclusion

Unless you’ve got a great website, your startup won’t go far. Fortunately, these twelve tools provide you with everything you need to get started at little to no cost.