Freelance Web Designer's Toolkit: Essential Tools and Resources

What's good y'all? John D Saunders here, you know the vibes. In today's video, I am going to show you some of my favorite tools I use as a designer and developer in this space. So without further ado I'm jumping on my computer and let's do this together. 

ARC Browser

All right y'all, so prepare for the best rundown of all of our web design tools that we use at the agency. First things first I'm going to show you Arc Browser, that's actually what I'm using right now as a browser. So you can see on the left hand side, I've got my favorite icons here, I've got folders with all of my favorite things which I'm going to go through with you today. I think Ark is awesome. It's a personalized version of a browser. It's really clean, great aesthetic and just the way that it's organized.

I'm not even using it to its full capacity but check it out it's an amazing new browser that seemingly came out of nowhere. You've got a split view, you've got different themes, privacy, made to be private and secure. This thing is changing the game. This is my primary browser now, this is what we use at the agency. Just a really really great tool to use to get the job done, really efficient. And they also have an iOS and I think they're coming up with an Android app as well. 

Opus Clip

So first things first AI, some of my favorite tools. Opus Clip is really amazing. It'll take one long video and break it down into 10 viral clips. It's powered by open AI. Really amazing tool and super affordable actually. I think I pay maybe 10 or 15 bucks a month to use this tool. I basically record my main video, the long form video which is what you're listening to right now and then this tool will slice it up into really great candid bits that I can use on different social media platforms. Really great tool. Y'all do not want to miss this one. Really awesome.

Music FX 

Of course we all know this is a tool called music FX. This is to make your own music using AI. It's still in its infancy a bit, so it does need a bit of work, as you can see. But it's really cool to test out and try for content.

Bard/Gemini

Of course you have Bard, which is an amazing tool for well not Bard actually changed to Gemini AI which is an amazing chat and competitor to open AI chat GPT. You can start writing, planning, learning and doing more with Google AI. 

ChatGPT

Amazing tool, as you all know ChadGPT. I don't even have to mention that one that's another amazing one as well. And then in here, at the top just some of the things that I use to run the entire agency. ChatGPT which you all know is an amazing tool.

Notion

We also have Notion here. Here's an example of our dashboard. Gmail, Slack, Webflow, those are all pretty common. The rest of these are all pretty common as well. 

Clickup

I do like Clickup for task management which is what we use for the entire agency running the entire company here. This helps us be as efficient as possible. I have another video on this where I talk about this a bit that you can check up in the upper right hand corner.

Ui8.net

Now when it comes to design, here's some of my favorites, love ui8. This is an amazing platform that has tons of design resources for you to use. Website kits, design systems, illustrations, other items, mockups, I mean this website's awesome. Fonts, typeface, just amazing stuff that you can use and extremely affordable for what you get out of this. I mean I think I pay 150 bucks a quarter, something like that. And I get 10 downloads per day where I can go on here and I can just download really great content. As you can see some of this stuff is just really cool. I'm looking at this and I want to find a way to somehow use it. So let's figure that out!

Punchlist

Punch list is another great tool. Punch list is actually an overlay that adds an option, let me actually go to the homepage so you can take a look at this. Let's go to about, open that up. So yeah, punch list is awesome. It adds an overlay on your website where folks can leave comments and feedback. You can share with your client, with your team. We usually do an internal QA and then we give it to clients. So this is a really great tool for us to be able to collaborate directly on a project in real time on a website and just works phenomenally well. 

Webflow

I also love Webflow's inspiration page. Any of the new websites and content that they come out with I always love to see what new work is being created, what new contents out there. Just a really great tool.

Lapa Ninja

Lapa ninja, another one this is a one to check out. Recent landing pages and content that you see out in the marketplace. You can also save these screenshots just use them for inspiration and promo as well.

Landbook

There's a competitor that I like a little bit more called Landbook. I have the pro version. It's about 9 bucks a month. Love this tool because you can organize content by section, by CTA. I can say okay I'm just looking for calls to action or I'm just looking for inspiration on footers and I've got all that content here that I can view. And if you click it, it'll actually show you the footer and what website it's a part of. As you can see, beautiful design here. Another really awesome tool. 

Pexels

Pexels is a free stock photo and video website. You all probably know about this already but again another amazing tool here

Unsplash

Same with unsplash. We actually have unsplash plus I think, it's called the premium version. I think it's 10 bucks a month we pay and you get a ton of really quality great images. All the free images are here, any ones that have like this plus in the corner are premium. So you can go ahead and browse that as needed.

Freshbooks

Money we run everything through freshbooks, that's our main platform. Freshbooks is an awesome tool. Let me see if I can go to the homepage. This Is how we do all of our invoicing. All of our content here, everything on the back end there as well.

Thrivecart

And then Thrivecart, really great for creating converting cart pages, funnels, affiliate campaigns, courses. We use this for all of our courses and premium goods. Works well, really easy to add discounts and different attributes. You can embed your cart anywhere and integrate with HubSpot, MailChimp any third party tools that you're using.

Tiny PNG

When it comes to productivity, I've got a couple links here. Love TinyPNG. This takes images and compresses them to speed up your website. Really great tool.

Mapbox

For web design tools, I really like mapbox. Mapbox is a great way to add local intelligence to your business. So you can for example, you have multiple locations, you can integrate a 3D map and really cool assets and items that bring your maps to life. They have their own SDK as well. And you can use AR/VR for this. Just really well done and really affordable actually as well. We use this for any websites that have multiple locations, that need to add that and we integrate this in with webflow. 

Relume

Also big fan of Relume. Website designed and built fast with AI. We use them for creating sitemaps, creating architecture, creating wireframes for websites. This tool is probably one of our most used tools. Phenomenal, I can't say enough great things about it. And yeah it's really affordable for what it can do and what it can provide. So if you're looking for a platform to help you develop your sitemap, leveraging AI and Chachi BT definitely check out Relume. Really great tool. So Relume, that was the last tool.

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This is pretty much all of the tools that we use within the agency. If you all have any questions, drop them in the comments. Thank you all for checking out the video content. Make sure you subscribe, drop a like and if you have questions drop comments below. I'll see y'all next week, peace.