Apart from a website’s content, its web design and strategies of digital marketing are the two factors to grow the number of visitors. While web design refers to structuring and providing aesthetic looks to a website, digital marketing leverages the potential of the internet to spread the word.

Various areas of web designing include web graphic design, user interface, coding, proprietary software, and search engine optimization. Thus both the visual appearance and the website functioning are a part of web designing. Web designing was previously focused on desktop browsers only, but today a website’s compatibility for mobile has become is part of SEO. If a website is not compatible with mobiles then the search giant Google will not give it preference in its results.

Designing a website and filling it up will high quality content will go in vain if only your close friends know about it. People should not only know about it but the should be able to inform others about the great content or services offered on your website. Digital marketing strategies tap the immense potential of various tools like a landing page, email marketing, on-site SEO, off-site SEO, on-site sharing and social media to make the website popular. On-site chats and feedback are also a part of digital marketing.

While there are several tools promoted by the websites for both the web design and digital marketing, you only need to know a few best ones.

This article eases the search of any individual who wants to learn web designing. By the end of this article, you will have one of the best web designing, digital marketing tools and resources to download the tools. Also, you will know about the resources from where you can add images, icons, fonts and other stuff to a website.

Web Designing

Designing a website is fun as well as gives self-satisfaction if designing own website. The web designers are also paid quite good. You can choose a company to get a job as a web designer, or an independent freelancer. With any choice, web designers are paid good money.

That being said, learning web designing is Simple but not Easy. It’s simple because there are simple steps to create a website and several learning resources available today than they were available a decade ago. It’s not easy because it takes years of effort, practice and patience with different tools to get well-versed with the field.

1) Lorem Ipsum

Lorem Ipsum is is a text placeholder for web designing. It is used for a public demonstration of a web page before it is ready with the real text. Lorem Ipsum is quite useful to design the structure of a web page by drafting several text layouts without placing the real text.

In the initial stages of web designing the purpose of to focus on the layout, not the content. Lorem Ipsum generates natural looking block of text that does not distract from the layout. The text generated by Lorem Ipsum has no meaning and just serve just the purpose of text placeholders filled with random text.

Below image is an example of a Lorem Ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum is derived from the sections 1.10.33 of Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum . Although it is not known when the text was shaped in its current form, however, it can be dated back to 1960s.

When to use Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum can be quite useful when the sole objective is the layout of the page, not the text content. A web page filled with text gives a feel of completion to eyes, even though the text itself may not mean anything. A web page with the same Lorem Ipsum text can be used for different niche websites like photography, diet control, Finance and any niche you can think of. The web designer has just to alter the layouts.

Another usage of Lorem Ipsum is that while presenting the final web layout to the client with real text may lead to an unnecessary discussion to just change some text. Yes, team members of a client may have different perceptions of the word to be used at a specific place. This happens when a web layout is presented with real words to the clients. Thus, the presentation focus may get distracted from the web page layout to the word selection. Using the Lorem Ipsum prevents this distraction. Just make sure that your client knows what a Lorem Ipsum is, otherwise your work may lead to misinterpretations.

How to generate Lorem Ipsum?

You can generate the Lorem Ipsum text directly from Lorem Ipsum website. You can also get the Lorem Ipsum for WordPress, text editors and programming languages as plugins .

2) Copyright Free Images

An image is worth more than a thousand words. Also, images remove boredom from the web page as it changes the environment for the visitor.

Using some kind of graphic is a necessity for a web page. Either the designer can create his own image or he can get a copyright-free image. A copyright-free image ensures that the web page will not face any controversies by the creator from the legal point of view.

While there are many websites which claim to provide copyright free images, most of them are not even worth visiting. They just provide low-quality images which will damage your own web brand.

Zoommy

Zoommy helps a user find free stock photos for his web page. There are more than 30,000 photos licensed under Creative Commons Zero and Public Domain from more than 50 sources. While searching, you can filter the photos by shape and colour. Zoommy even provides an option to search by emoji.

Visit zoommy to get copyright free images.

3) Vector Graphic

While raster images are good and fun to create, editing them is quite a headache. Also, rasters are quite heavy and occupy a good amount of size on the hard disk.

Vectors images are more easily created and editing them is even easier. The best part, they are quite light in weight.

There are several tools for the vector graphics. But there are a few which are preferred by web designers. Among them, Sketch is the most popular and flexible vector designing tool.

Sketch – The digital design toolkit

Sketch provides intuitive vector editing, fast prototyping and powerful collaboration tools. Sketch is the most powerful vector designing tool for a web designer. Apart from the inbuilt powerful but lightning speed features of Sketch, there are hundreds of plugins available to ease up the extra needs.

Some of the plugins’ features are as below

i) Felipe plugin – Turn wireframes into UI elements

ii) Runner plugin – Speed up the workflow with quicker access to all the tools and actions

iii) Zeplin – Automatically create specs and guidelines

iv) Material plugin – Create, customize, and share your own Material theme

v) Angle plugin – Turn your screenshots into perspective mockups

Visit Sketch website.

4) Raster Graphic

Yes, vector graphics are excellent but they are still vectors. They are built with point, polylines and polygons. An image based on pixels has a different feel and workflow.

GIMP

GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is an open source image editing software which gives very good competition to its commercial buddy Adobe Photoshop. Yes, some web designers find Gimp more powerful and feature-rich than the Adobe Photoshop.

Gimp is cross-platform software thus whether it’s a Linux, Mac or Windows GIMP is always there. Being open source, you can edit the codes and redistribute it as well.

With its vast resources of tutorials available online, a novice can be a pro in a couple of months. Also, the community built around GIMP is always there to help with your GIMP problems.

Visit GIMP website.

5) Interface Design Tool

A website without a user-friendly interface will not appeal to the visitors even if it has good content. Yes, the interface matters. If the user doesn’t feel comfortable browsing a website, he will move on to the next website to get the same information. There are plenty of websites in the same niche, why one will waste his time understanding the interface of a website.

There are two types of tools required for interface viz.

i) Prototype tool

User Interface (UI) prototyping is a developmental process in which users are actively involved to mock a UI on a system. UI prototypes are used for many reasons viz.

To find the optimum design that satisfies the client To develop a robust foundation for future developments To find out what works and what not

InVision Studio Prototyping tool

The InVision Studio which is still in its infancy has grabbed the attention of several pro web designers for prototyping. InVision Studio comes with a huge collection of in-built features to design beautiful interactive interfaces. Several custom animations and transitions can be developed with the help of various gestures and interactions. The best part, an InVision user does not have to create multiple artboards. He can create a responsive design from one artboard within the InVision.

Visit InVision Studio website.

ii) Wireframing tool

Wireframing refers to designing a website at the structural level. A wireframing tool is used to outline the presentation of a web page. It achieves its objective by laying out the content and functionality on a page which takes into account user needs and user journeys. Wireframing is applied much before the visual and content part of web designing is initiated.

Balsamiq Wireframing Tool

Balsamiq wireframing tool offers a wide range of ready-made elements. All these ready-made elements are categorized in a simple to understand categories. A Balsamiq user can drag any element to the drawing surface, then format it according to his project requirements. Simplicity is the highlight of Balsamic.

Visit Balsamiq website.

6) Text Editor

A good web designer should have a strong grip on the coding part as well. A coder needs to have a good text editor which can understand various programming languages and provide easy workflow and formatting to the code.

Sublime

Sublime stands out of the crowd of text editors for every Operating System whether it is Linux, Mac or Windows. What makes it more appealing is its coding background and the various plugins offered by the community. Also, there are hundreds of snippets created by the users to be used in any project. If you can’t find the one useful to you, a new snippet can be created within 5 min of time.

Visit Sublime website.

7) Customer Feedback

A competent commercial web store should understand its customer’s experience on the website. While not all the visitors may be inclined to give feedback, the dissatisfied ones will surely find this a gateway to reach to the authority. If a website does touch the emotional corner of its customers, they are surely going to be converted as a loyal customer in future.

Emolytics – Emotional Market research

As per Emolitics, emotions are the core of a customer. If triggered properly, they may induce actions such as purchases, word of mouth sharing, loyalty and recommendations. Emolitics widgets capture visitor’s emotions with a high response rate. Inputs through these widgets help the business owner to take better decisions.

Emolytics provides various features viz.

Qualitative feedback Socio-demographic data Lead Generation Brand equity audit Easy-to-read in depth reports Cross Channel Unique marketing KPIs backed up by science Easy to install plugins Unlimited domains export and sharing

Visit Emolytics website.

8) Icons

A picture conveys the message quicker than a text. Because our brain takes less time to convert picture data to information than the text. Icons play a very important role in a web page because they are not as big and heavy as an image. But they give the same visual appearance to the visitor.

A web designer can create his own icon with the help of any vector/raster tool. But, even if the designer is capable to design from scratch, in the initial stages an icon from some website can give a little boost to the project.

Freepik

With the graphics resource of more than 4.5 million with 100 million monthly downloads, Freepik has become one of the fastest growing start-ups in Europe.

Freepik is full of world-class free and premium graphics which include illustrations, photos and icons.

Visit Freepik website.

9) Automation

A web designer has to run the same processes again and again to find the one that suits the best. This happens at every stage, wireframing, prototyping, interfaces and adding content. Automation saves the time of a designer by queueing up the repeated processes.

Gulp

By preferring code over configuration and minimal API surface, Gulp makes the life of a web designer very easy. Gulp gives the power of faster builds by not writing the intermediate files to the disks. This is achieved by using the power of node streams.

Gulp automates and enhances the workflow of a web designer so that he can focus on the creative parts of the project.

Visit Gulp website

Digital Marketing Tools

After the completion of that awesome website, it’s the time to make it popular in the cyber universe. At this stage, digital marketing comes into the picture.

Digital marketing consists of three steps viz.

1) Research tools

Before starting a campaign, it’s important to first research the popularity of the keywords in-hand, or find the keywords that will bring success for the campaign. It’s also important to understand your competitor because right now that is the one which needs to be outranked. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is also a part of the research and implementation of keywords.

i) Google Trends

With a 92% share of the worldwide search market, the search giant Google literally rules how the websites should behave. When it was announced that SSL will be a factor for websites to rank in its results, almost every website implemented it. Of course, it was for a good cause, to make the web a more secure place. Not only Google makes the web a well-informed place but also shares its search data with the world.

Google Trends discloses the search trend of a keyword for time duration and geo-location. Below is an image from Google Trends for the keyword digital marketing.

Google does not reveal the actual search volume but it scales the number of search for a keyword between 1 – 100. In this scale, 100 reflects the maximum number of search volume and 1 represents the least volume for the selected time frame.

The above image is showing the Google search volume from January 2004 to June 2019 for the US. As you can see that since 2013 the search volume for the term digital marketing started increasing. Currently, the search volume for the term digital marketing is at its peak. This suggests that this is the best time to understand the concept of digital marketing and apply it to your business. If you still keep yourself ignorant, your competitor will get the benefit by applying it.

How Google Trends helps in Digital Marketing?

The help of Google Trends is taken in the first part of the process of digital marketing. The idea is to find the potential of the keywords in-hand for the specific location. If a keyword does not feel to be promising it’s better to drop it for a better one. Thus, only a handful of potential keywords are kept for the project.

ii) Google Keyword Planner

This is another tool from the search Giant. The Google Keyword Planner also shows the search volume for a keyword. While the Google Trends displays the search volume on a scale of 1-100, the Google Keyword Planner reveals the actual numbers of the search volume.

The Keyword Planner is developed for the advertisers, who place their ads through Google. However, while doing keyword research for the website, a user can take leverage of this fantastic tool. You can find the keyword planner by clicking the tools icon.

Google Keyword Planner is not a stand-alone utility from Google. It is a feature of Google Adwords, one of the revenue machines of Google. Do you know that in 2018 Google revenue from ads was 116.3 billion US dollars? The credit goes to the Adwords which is described in the marketing section southwards to this article.

Below is an image from Google Keyword planner for the term digital marketing.

As the planner suggests that the search volume for the keyword digital marketing is 10,000 to 100,000 every month. Thus, the Keyword Planner gives the actual number of search volume for a specific keyword.

Such information is quite valuable to develop an SEO strategy.

iii) Ahrefs

Every website has a niche. But, that website is not alone in that niche, right? The website has competitors, who are already getting high ranks in Google SERP. Thus, the owner ought to know the keywords that are giving the competitor high rankings. Also, the SERP for specific keywords unfolds the scene a bit more. One also needs to know the backlinks source and how many backlinks the competitor is getting from every source.

Here come the champ Ahrefs . The site explorer tool can give you all the valuable information you want to know about your competition. Yes, everything you need to know about the reasons they are getting good SERPs. You can even set alerts so that when a site is ranked for that keyword, you will get the alert.

The content explorer tool on the Ahrefs gives information about the most shared content for a keyword. This gives more insight into the popularity of a keyword and its future prospects.

The keyword explorer tool provides information about the potential of a keyword. This tool takes keywords as an input and provides the volume of searches that had been made in the past. Apart from the historical volumes, it also suggests the additional keywords that can be used.

iv) BuzzSumo

There is always a moment for a writer when he knows nothing, popularly called a writer’s block. Such instances bring a pause to the cycle of content publishing. Information about the good topics that are in demand is all the writer needs to know.

BuzzSumo clears the fog by delivering topics related to a keyword. All it needs is the keyword to start its job. BuzzSumo gives the titles that are trending around the keyword. Also, it gives information about the shares on social platforms.

Buzzsumo also provides a section for questions and answers where it informs about the questions being asked around the keywords on the sites like Quora, Amazon, Reddit and Q&A.

v) RankMath

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) makes it easier for the website content to rank on the search engines. There are several strategies developed to understand how the search engines work and pick the results. In fact, SEO has emerged as an independent field of study. You don’t have to understand all those SEO details but the basics should be very clear. There are several SEO tools available to assist you in getting good SERPs, but only the best wins the race.

Rankmath is quite new in the SEO industry as compared to its peers. But, in a short span of time, it has become a favourite for the WordPress users. The main reason is that it offers several features for free, which others charge. And yes, it does its job pretty well. Its worth to mention that Rankmath is developed by MyThemeShop which has developed more than 113 WordPress themes and 23 plugins for WordPress.

It creates a sitemap of the website and offers to submit it to the leading search engines through its wizard. If a website does not submit its sitemap to a search engine, the bots don’t have the idea of its existence. Also, the future content is not crawled meaning complete absence from the search results.

Rankmath also provides an option to include up to five keywords, whereas others provide just one in the free version.

Some other notable features of Rankmath are

SEO Analysis SEO optimisation Rich Snippets AMP SEO 404 Monitor Redirection Manager Google Search Console Integration External/Internal Link counter

If WordPress is your CMS, don’t miss Rankmath.

2) Marketing

This part deals with the strategies to market the content which has been published after applying the research (part-1) results. This consist of advertising, social media, email marketing and much more.

i) Adwords

Google leverages the potential of its search platform and earns its maximum share of the revenue from the ads. These ads are shown on the top of the results, thus have high conversion rates because the visitor gets the content he is looking for. A win-win situation for the advertiser, the visitor and the Google.

Google Adwords is a complex ad placement platform, but it’s worth understanding. The immense potential of the search giant brings more conversion if the ads are placed after understanding the platform well.

ii) Facebook Ads

With monthly 25.5 billion visits per month and an average of 16 minutes per user, Facebook has established itself as the most popular online social media. Apart from those visitor metrics, Facebook holds more personal data about the user than any other social media does. This is because its users provide more personal information to Facebook and the world.

Considering the volume of data it consists, it’s quite beneficial to let Facebook tell its users about your website. Facebook ads, has the potential to boost conversion rates of a business. Thus, one should leverage the data Facebook holds to increase the sales.

There are several types of ads you can place based on your requirements and the target users. Below is an image from the Facebook ads.

The options on the above image are detailed below

Awareness

a) Increase Brand Awareness

This type of ad is used to reach as many users as you want. The objective is to make people aware of the new brand of yours.

b) Reach

The option with Reach, your brand gets the exposure to the maximum for the money you pay.

Consideration

a) Traffic

This type of ad is mainly used by Facebook marketers. This type of ad is targeted to the users who are most likely click the ads, thus, sends traffic to your website. Use this type of traffic to increase Facebook traffic to your website.

b) Engagement

This type of ad is targeted to the users who are more likely to engage with a post. Engagement refers to likes, comments and shares. The targeted users also click the posts, thus covert as a traffic to your website.

c) App Installs

If your website is about a mobile app, then this ad is designed specifically for you. The targeted users are more likely to install mobile apps than they engage with the post.

d) Video Views

The targeted users for these ads are the ones who get more engaged with videos. Also, a video content not only shows how many people opened to watch the video but for how long they watched. This can be useful to get some insights about your product in the video.

e) Lead generation

Lead generation is important to grow any type of business. If you are not getting leads from your landing page, this ad is quite suitable to generate from facebook. The target users are the ones who are most likely to sign up for something in return they get. You can offer them something via a different page.

f) Messages

With the invention of chatbots, interaction with the customers has gone to another level. Facebook also provides to chat with bots. If a user has sent you a message, the bot can communicate as per the fed algorithms. In case you don’t have a bot, you can directly chat with the users.

Conversion

a) Conversions

This type of ad can track every action of a user on your website. But to get it to work properly you need to place the Facebook Pixel on every page of your sales funnel.

b) Product Catalog Sales

This ad is placed by the owners of the store because they can present the exact catalog of the product they have. This ad also has high conversion rates.

iii) Hootsuite

Owing to the volume of user interactions, social media has huge potential for conversions. If a product is published effectively on several platforms the ROI can increase multifold.

Hootsuite, with the potential to publish the content on 30 platforms presents itself as a preferred pick for the marketers. With Hootsuite, in a couple of minutes, you can publish the same content to all the 30 social media platforms. Not only that, you can get engaged with any response on any of the platforms.

iv) Trello

Trello is not just another social media platform, however, it is seen like as way by many. It is a great collaboration and content marketing tool.

With Trello a user can get the quality check on a content even before it is published. This saves the time of getting it from emails. Sometimes serious mistakes are found out in the content thus, saves from the embarrassment, if published directly on the website.

v) Landing Pages

A website is filled up with too much content for a visitor. It’s quite possible that he does not find the product he came for, but is present on your website.

Landing pages are designed to showcase the potential of your website. The intent is to make the visitor aware of the products you offer and the user has just to fill up the email. This is a good way to generate leads and convey about the website to the user with a couple of text.

vi) Email Marketing

A website without subscribers is like having no loyal user base. With a good volume of responsive subscribers, a website can not only increase its conversion rates but also charge a premium for its products.

With email marketing, a website owner can not only generate leads by showing various forms but can also send them automated emails in a cyclic way. Exempli Gratia if a user signs up then he receives a welcome email, then he receives the pre-generated emails on a regular basis. This happens with every user that signs up or is added to the subscriber’s list. Besides the initial automated emails, everything is automated and no interaction is involved from the side of the web owner.

Hubspot is a great email marketing tool. Hubspot is a full-featured CRM, with all the tracking features.

A good marketing funnel is required to get insights of conversions and Hubspot provides several tools for that. Some of the tools you can get help with are

i) Blogging

ii) SEO

iii) Social Media

iv) Website

v) Lead Management

vi) Landing Pages

vii) Calls-to-Action

viii) Marketing Automation

ix) Email

x) Analytics

vii) Watson Assistant

Artificial Intelligence is making the bots smarter and more communicating. A chatbot can ease your task of dealing with the customers and answering the repeated questions. Today a chatbot is an important part of digital marketing because it reduces the load from dealing with the questions and automated processes.

Watson Assistant , a chatbot developed by the technology pioneer IBM is able to communicate with customers on a manual level. This is due to the AI feature of this bot. Watson Assistant has already got training for various fields.

Some specific feature of Watson Assistant are as below

It can gain its knowledge from your historical chats or call logs. It can search for the information in the knowledge base provided by the user. It can ask the customer for more clarity. If unable to answer, it can transfer the communication to a human representative. It can ask the user to give specific training

Watson Assistant can run on the websites, messaging app, customer service tool and mobile apps.

viii) Pushcrew

Web notification is a new method to keep informed the users, without getting their email id. Of course, the user needs to opt-in for the notifications. If opted-in, the notifications from the website are shown on the browser, even if the respective website is not opened.

Pushcrew offers rich web notifications to its subscribers. A website owner can sign up for a Pushcrew account and design the funnel. He can send the image and emojis in the message to grab the user’s attention. Also, the user can instruct Pushcrew to show the message at a specific time to engage the users.

Some of the features of Pushcrew are

Triggered campaigns Personalisation Segmentation A/B testing Rich notifications

3) Insights

After the application of all the research and marketing strategies, the time comes for analysing whether the strategy works or not. This analysis is done with insight tools. These tools give data about the traffic, user engagement, interactions and conversions.

i) Google Analytics

Google analytics holds a major market share of traffic analysis tools. It is a preferred tool for analysing the user behaviour on the website to having a database of their OS and screen resolutions.

With Google Analytics you can track the journey of a buyer, understand the reason why most of your customers drop the idea to buy the product at the last moment.

You can also perform the A/B testing and find out what works better for you and what not.

ii) Google Search Console

First, you need to submit your XML sitemap to Google search console so that the Google bots may know the existence of your website. This task is automatically performed by the SEO tool. if not, then you can get the sitemap XML address of your webpage and submit it manually.

With Google Search Console, you can find the pages which Google bots could not crawl. These are marked as error pages. Make sure to rectify those problems and submit the page again for crawling.

The Search console also displays the volume of search keywords for which your site appeared and the volume of clicks as well.

This metric, if used properly can drive more traffic towards your website leading to more conversions.