Awesome Free Tools & Paid Tools for your Business – Curated News (4)

Tools matter a lot when we talk about projects in online marketing, web design and web development. Either we talk about tools as plugins, websites, editors, software programes, apps, I guess we all use at least one tool. Tools are important because they can help us achieve our goals.

On the other hand, tools cannot replace your knowledge, experience or skills and we always welcome (new) tools to help us do our best work. Put in 2 words, these tools can enhance your efectiveness and efficiency and they are used with a specific purpose. Tools can help you solve different problems instead of just guessing which these problems are (think at the tools that reveal certain test hypothesis in A/B user testing)

That’s why we would like to present you a curated list of tools that we use, like and think might help you as well in your online projects. Hopefully, they will help you achieve the goals for your business.

We liked that the +300 awesome free things for entrepreneurs and startups are grouped separately. We added some more (the paragraphs in orange and all the other links)

• website performance, quality test tools and optimization test (dareboost.com,  webpagetest.org)
• analytics (Yandex Metrica & Yandex Webmaster Tools for free form analysis, user session recordings & mouse heatmaps and eyetracking). Some paid ones are: Mouseflow, Inspectlet, Hotjar, Crazyegg, Formisimo, MyGaze, Tobii 
• wireframing / prototyping (not free: UXPin, Balsamiq, Mockingbird, Moqups, Proto.io, InvisionApp (using existent designs), Axure, Protoshare, Wireframe. Read also who uses wireframes and why (a practical approach)
• user testing (User Testing, What users do) + a long and useful UX Project Checklist
• form templates: Wufoo, JotForm
• social media – tools for small business, SumAll, Knowem + others free 
• free websites, logo, hosting, invoicing
• free business, project name generators (we would like to add: Nomipede, Brand Bucket, Hover – recommended by Seth Godin because they are humans, Namegrep  for geeks, with regular expressions and curated sets, Namecheap for education, Namemash, Name Station, Brand Bucket)
• writing/blogging – you don’t have to be an author to start writing, so Econsultancy offers more 17 fantastical tools to use. We would add URL Profiler (free for 14 days), Swayy, PlagTracker, Grammarly, Written that connects bloggers with brands. Here are some content distribution tools depending on your content type: owned, earned, paid, Help a reporter out and more 50 awesome tools for blogging
• SEO / website analyzers (we would add Screaming Frog, Feed the bot + some more from Search Engine Land)
• free image optimizers (we would add JPEGmini with your photos on a diet for Mac, iOS, Windows)
• free image editors
• collect and send emails for free
• free community management tools + surveys (we should add also Freesurveycreator and another list of paid ones with pros and cons)
• A/B Tests & growth hacking: Five Second Test, get feedback on your designs and from the community of webdesigners and here are more tools for webdesigners; A/B testing for mobile
• free design resources (from Speckyboy)
• color pickers
• inspiration (we vote also Niice, Ffffound)
• free stock photography (we would add here a list of free hi-res stock photos websites for commercial and personal use + another one)
• free typography
• free icons (we would add: Pngify, Fontastic and another list) and an inspiring website with 60 free quality flat icons
• free usefull stuff (We would add Ninite that helps you install or update multiple apps at once
• background sound to focus
• avoid distraction
• organize and collaborate (we use also Jira, an issue and project tracking software)
• digital nomads and remote working
• discover tools and startups (btw, producthunt is one of our favourites)
• build together
• learn (Udemy, Learnable,  Skillfeed, Mijingo, CodeHS, Bloc, Code School, Treehouse, Web Platform, The Open Univeristy, Analytics Academy, Google Web Academy, edX,  Open Yale Courses, Code Playpen, Code School, Hubspot Academy)
• newsletters that don’t suck

Source

Here are some more tools to make you a super marketer from SMX (by Kevin Mullett – check out his impressive list of social media profiles/pages)

And here’s another mixed list of tools for web designers

Conclusion: Work smarter by using the right tools (don’t get obssessed with them) but don’t forget to use your brain, too 🙂

As a bonus, here are some useless (but funny) websites (non-tools): Staggering Beauty (warning: contains flashing images), Weave Silk, Koalas to the max, Geek Typer, Blue Ball Machine