Recommended Resources

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Great software makes everything that much easier.

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Resources we use for our design projects

Great software makes everything so much easier. Here is a list of digital tools that we use regularly and that we highly recommend.

Some of the links on this page are affiliate links, where we earn a commission if you make a purchase via our links. This helps us to be able to continue to search for, and test, new resources. We will only promote companies and products that we really believe are worth your money. Thank you very much if you use our links to make a purchase.

Website Design
Graphic Design

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For designing and prototyping websites...

Adobe XD is the new standard for UI / UX design. It’s part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which makes it perfect to combine with other Adobe tools like Photoshop and Illustrator.

Adobe XD makes it extremely fast to prototype your ideas for a website or app.
The Repeat Grid feature is amazing as it allows you to create and adjust grid layouts very quickly.
You can save different styles for your design elements and can make changes across all artboards with just one click.
You can share your prototype with other your team and customers via a link and get quick feedback.
It’s free! But you can pay to receive more prototype and sharing features.

Check out Adobe XD

Adobe XD

For building websites in WordPress...

Elementor is the one of the most popular WordPress page-builders with over 5 million installs.

Elementor allows you to drag and drop elements onto a page which makes it very easy to build a page.
It’s a very light-weight app which is built for performance and when used with Elementor's Hello theme it makes the code very clean.
You can design the header, footer, blog posts and even a shopping cart with the Pro version.
Their paid plans are aimed to fit around you as you grow and they offer a reduction in price when you renew your account after your first year.
Due to it’s popularity there are a great deal of companies offering add-on packages to expand it even further.

Check out Elementor

Elementor Pro Pricing

For sourcing design apps and more...

AppSumo was created with one idea in mind: the tools you need to grow your business shouldn’t put you out of business.

They find and partner with the hottest tech companies such as Evernote, MailChimp, Depositphotos... just to name a few.
They provide you with access to insane deals on their partner’s products. But don't sleep on it! Because their deals sell out within a couple weeks.
Save thousands of pounds and build up a full arsenal of tools to grow your business.

Check out AppSumo

AppSumo

Make your WordPress websites more dynamic...

CrocoBlock make it easy to make your websites more dynamic in WordPress with the suite of Jet plugins.

They come jet-powered with JetEngine which allows you to create your own custom lists, grids and advanced custom fields.
Use JetWooBuilder to customise pretty-much every part of your WordPress online shop.
Use JetSmartFilters with JetEngine to create filtering for your dynamic content.
JetSearch does what it says on the tin - a powerful search feature to add to your websites.
Use JetTricks for visual effects such as parallax scrolling.
Their unlimited websites packages are much more economical than their single website options.

Check out CrocoBlock

CrocoBlock

For expanding Elementor in WordPress...

ElementsKit ny WPMet is a plugin for Elementor that includes high-quality widgets, templates, modules, and sections for increased productivity and site performance.

ElementsKit helps you to create any type of header or footer you like for any of your pages.
You’ll also have your pick of mega menus, with both vertical and horizontal versions ready to be customised.
Sticky features ensure that headers, footers, or any other elements stay in front of visitors for increased air time.
The advanced widget builder lets you develop your own widgets without coding.
Choose from multiple parallax effects, with global and widget-based options.
You’ll be able to incorporate feeds from your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, and you can also get reviews from visitors for Google, Trust Pilot, and Yelp.
WooCommerce widgets are also included, like product listing, carousel, mini cart, and category list.
You can enable or disable specific elements on the options panel to keep your site super fast.

Check out Elements Kit

Element Kits Pro Pricing

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For backing up your WordPress websites...

UpdraftPlus is one of the world’s most trusted WordPress backup, restore and clone plugins with over 3 millions installs.

Performs complete manual or scheduled backups of all your WordPress files, databases, plugins and themes.
Backup schedules every 4, 8 or 12 hours, daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly.
Restores backups directly from your WordPress control panel.
Migrator clones your WordPress site and moves it to a new domain or host directly and simply.
Allows you to only backup changes to your files (such as a new image) that have been made to your site since the last backup.
Automatically backs up your website before any updates to plugins, themes and cores.
Encrypt your sensitive databases (e.g. customer information or passwords); Backup external databases and more…
Sophisticated reporting and emailing capabilities.
Lock access to UpdraftPlus via a password so you choose which site users can access backups.

Check out UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus Pro Pricing

For securing and protecting WordPress...

iThemes Security Pro takes the guesswork out of WordPress security. You shouldn’t have to be a security professional to use a security plugin, so iThemes Security Pro makes it easy to secure & protect your WordPress website.

Prevent WordPress hacks, security breaches, malware and more.
Limit the number of failed login attempts allowed per user with WordPress brute force protection. If someone is trying to guess your password, they'll get locked out after a few attempts.
If a bot is scanning your site for vulnerabilities, it will generate a lot of 404 errors. iThemes Security will lock out that IP after the limit you set.
Set which level of users on your site (admins, editors, users, etc.) need to have strong passwords.
Keep bad users away from your site if they have too many failed login attempts, if they generate too many 404 errors, or if they're on a bot blacklist.
Change the default URL of your WordPress login area so attackers won't know where to look.
Make complete backups and send them to off-site storage destinations.
Get email notifications when someone gets locked out after too many failed login attempts or when a file on your site has been changed.

Check out iThemes Security

iThemes Pro Pricing

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For managing all your WordPress websites...

MainWP brings all your WordPress management needs under one Dashboard. You can keep adding your WordPress sites and manage them with ease. Once you connect your WordPress sites, your MainWP Dashboard gives you the full overview of all your WordPress sites.

MainWP makes it easy for you to access all of your WordPress sites a breeze with their intuitive one-click access, no more logins and passwords to lose!
Stop wasting time updating your plugins and themes manually in each site separately and. automatically update all plugins and themes that you trust with no further interaction from you.
You can view plugins installed on each site, install plugins and themes on all your WordPress sites, and activate, deactivate, delete plugins in bulk across multiple sites.
Manage all your users from all your sites directly from your MainWP Dashboard, without the need to log in.
Not every backup option works for everyone, so MainWP offers multiple backup options including UpdraftPlus.
The Advanced Uptime Monitor quickly lets you know if your site has an issue regardless of whether a server is down, or there is something wrong with the code of a website, Advanced Uptime Monitor will alert you.

Check out MainWP

MainWP

For sending email campaigns from WordPress...

MailPoet helps you stand out in any inbox by creating and delivering beautiful emails directly from WordPress.

MailPoet allows you to easily create and send different types of emails, including messages you should be automating.
Quickly create a welcome email series, abandoned cart emails, and transactional messages using the tool’s simple automation and workflows.
You’ll love MailPoet’s beautiful, customisable email templates, find the perfect responsive template for your newsletters, welcome emails, and post notifications.
MailPoet also integrates with WooCommerce, allowing you to send automatic notification emails to customers after they make a purchase.
MailPoet’s drag-and-drop email editor lets you add text, images, buttons, social, products, and other elements you want to include.
You can also load recent blog posts from your WordPress site directly into your newsletter without having to copy and paste.
With MailPoet, you can view sent messages, drafts, and scheduled messages, all from your WordPress dashboard.
Plus, MailPoet makes it easy to turn casual site visitors into loyal subscribers by adding email signup forms as pop-ups, slide-ins, fixed bars, or sections below posts.
You can also add forms to your sidebar or footer as widgets, and every form is customisable in WordPress.
You can also view, add, or remove subscribers from your list in just a few clicks.

Check out MailPoet

MailPoet

For expanding Elementor in WordPress...

A very well designed library of unique Elementor Widgets from Brainstorm Force to add more functionality and flexibility to any WordPress website.

A growing library of unique Elementor widgets that takes your design abilities to a whole new level!
Highly customisable and visually stunning website templates that will speed up your workflow.
Pre-built sections are simply dragged, dropped, and customised, making your page unique in a few clicks.
With the Cross-site Copy Paste feature, you can simply copy and paste sections, pages, and widgets from one domain to another.
The Ultimate Addons’ modular architecture gives you control to switch on and off widgets as you require. This keeps it light and fast!
The Ultimate Addons’ navigation menu widget helps you create various clean, clear and easy-to-navigate mega menus that are ideal for larger websites with lots of pages and a very diverse set of products or services.
Stuck with WooCommerce’s limited styling options? Enhance your online store design and improve the shopping experience for your website visitors using WooCommerce Widgets.
Impress your client with a branded login page. The Login Form Widget of the Ultimate Addons helps you build and design login pages with Elementor itself.
If you write blogs or articles that require step-by-step instructions for your audiences to follow you will love the How-to Schema widget which adds How-To Schema automatically to the page to help skyrocket your SEO.
And loads more features available...

Check out Ultimate Addons for Elementor

Ultimate Addons for Elementor

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For creating stunning product mockups...

Forget about spending hours learning how to use Photoshop. Smartmockups enables you to create stunning high-resolution mockups right inside your browser within one interface across multiple devices.

Create professional mockups right inside your browser, even on the go.
The fastest web-based mockup tool, no experience or skills needed, super easy-to-use with ever-growing library of professional mockups.
Upload your own image or video from computer, use third-party integration or grab a screenshot from URL.
Change the background, colour of the item or crop the whole scene, the customisation options are truly endless.
Once your mockup is ready, export the final image in super-high 5K resolution in few a seconds with no limits.

Check out SmartMockups

Get SmartMockups

For creating high converting product images...

Are you selling on Amazon, Shopify, Woocommerce or any other online platform? If yes, Glorify is the best choice for you. In short, Glorify is THE FIRST graphic design tool focused on eCommerce businesses. With Glorify, you can:

Create images from beautiful niche/theme product-focused templates
Make them look pro with awesome effects, such as shadows and reflection
Adapt your images for all channels with a single click
Access to almost infinite stock photography
Automatically cut-out images with just one click of the AMAZING Remove Background button - it's worth using Glorify just for this feature alone!
And more... It’s time to use Glorify to lure new customers into your store.

Check out Glorify

Get Glorify

For making your sites search engine friendly...

SEOPress is a powerful WordPress SEO plugin to optimise your SEO, boost your traffic and improve your social sharing.

All the features you need in one plugin: breadcrumbs, redirections, schemas, sitemaps, broken link checker and more...
Installation Wizard, quickly enable/disable features, modify your title tags in seconds...
No footprints in the source code, no ads, no anonymous data sent, white label, even in the free version.
Manage your titles, meta description, meta robots (noindex, nofollow, noodp, noimageindex, noarchive, nosnippet...) for every post, page, custom post type, archive page...
Improve Search Engines crawling by providing XML sitemaps of your posts, pages, custom post types, terms taxonomy but also videos, images and news.
Improve social networks sharing with Open Graph tags (Facebook and Pinterest), Twitter Card, Google Knowledge Graph and more...

Check out SEOPress

SEOPress Pro Pricing

SEOPress Insights

For keeping your website’s policies up to date...

Termageddon is a generator of policies for websites and applications. When the law changes, so do the policies, keeping your company protected and allowing you to focus on more important things.

Any website collecting as little as an email address on a contact form should not only have a Privacy Policy, but also have a strategy to keep it up to date when the laws change.
A privacy law is in place to protect the personal data of UK residents with fines up to £18 million or 4% of annual global turnover, whichever is greater.
On top of that, there is an ever-growing number of proposed privacy laws in the US that, if passed, will enable US citizens to sue businesses of any size and location, including businesses in the UK, simply for collecting their personal data through a website.
If you do not have the budget to hire a privacy solicitor to create and keep your policies up to date, we recommend using Termageddon.

Check out Termageddon

Get Termageddon

Edit Content

For sourcing design apps and more...

AppSumo was created with one idea in mind: the tools you need to grow your business shouldn’t put you out of business.

They find and partner with the hottest tech companies such as Evernote, MailChimp, Depositphotos... just to name a few.
They provide you with access to insane deals on their partner’s products. But don't sleep on it! Because their deals sell out within a couple weeks.
Save thousands of pounds and build up a full arsenal of tools to grow your business.

Check out AppSumo

AppSumo

For creating vector logos and graphics...

The industry-standard vector graphics software lets you create everything from web and mobile graphics to logos, icons, book illustrations, product packaging and billboards. And now, experience the freedom and flexibility of Illustrator across desktop and iPad.

Turn shapes and colours into logos and icons. Create typography, draw freehand and trace and recolor graphics. Illustrator is vector-based, so your artwork stays crisp even when you scale it up to stadium size.
Work on desktop or iPad, even off-line — your files are synced to the cloud, so you can always pick up where you left off.
Create smarter with features powered by Adobe Sensei AI. Automatically extract colours from a photo and add them to your design, auto-trace a hand-drawn sketch and turn it into a vector graphic and more.

Check out Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator

For photo editing, retouching and much more...

From photo editing and compositing to digital painting, animation and graphic design — you can do it all in Photoshop. Bring ideas to life across desktop and iPad. Magically transform images with the power of AI. Learn new skills and share your projects via livestream. With our latest release, Photoshop is faster, smarter and easier than ever.

Make portraits pop and expressions more expressive. Swap skies in a click. Remove objects, retouch and recolor. With powerful editing tools and new smart features for creating magical effects, you can turn imagery into artistry.
With one-click selections, easy masking and virtually unlimited layers, you can quickly create what your camera can’t capture.
Paint and draw with thousands of customised brushes or create your own — Photoshop puts the world’s largest collection at your fingertips.
Posters, packaging, banners, websites — graphic design starts with Photoshop. Combine photos, graphics and text to create entirely new images. Select your subjects in a click. And play with colour and effects to polish any design project.

Check out Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop

For creating page design for print & digital media...

Adobe InDesign is the industry-leading layout and page design software for print and digital media. Create beautiful graphic designs with typography from the world’s top foundries and imagery from Adobe Stock.

Create digital magazines, eBooks, and interactive online documents that draw people in with audio, video, slideshows, and animations. InDesign makes it easy to manage your design elements and quickly deliver immersive experiences in any format.
Design faster with tools built for collaboration. Make changes quickly with Paragraph, Character or Object Styles. Simplify reviews by sharing your designs to the web or share files for feedback via PDF. The app integrates with Adobe Creative Cloud and Experience Manager so you can share content, fonts and graphics across projects.
Design everything from stationery, flyers, and posters to brochures, annual reports, magazines, and books. With professional layout and typesetting tools, you can create multicolumn pages that feature stylish typography and rich graphics, images, and tables.

Check out Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign

For designing and prototyping websites...

Adobe XD is the new standard for UI / UX design. It’s part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which makes it perfect to combine with other Adobe tools like Photoshop and Illustrator.

Adobe XD makes it extremely fast to prototype your ideas for a website or app.
The Repeat Grid feature is amazing as it allows you to create and adjust grid layouts very quickly.
You can save different styles for your design elements and can make changes across all artboards with just one click.
You can share your prototype with other your team and customers via a link and get quick feedback.
It’s free! But you can pay to receive more prototype and sharing features.

Check out Adobe XD

Adobe XD

For creating stunning product mockups...

Forget about spending hours learning how to use Photoshop. Smartmockups enables you to create stunning high-resolution mockups right inside your browser within one interface across multiple devices.

Create professional mockups right inside your browser, even on the go.
The fastest web-based mockup tool, no experience or skills needed, super easy-to-use with ever-growing library of professional mockups.
Upload your own image or video from computer, use third-party integration or grab a screenshot from URL.
Change the background, colour of the item or crop the whole scene, the customisation options are truly endless.
Once your mockup is ready, export the final image in super-high 5K resolution in few a seconds with no limits.