For the freelancer designer, the journey is filled with more tumbles than the average roller coaster. From WordPress freelancers, developers and designers all competing for the same projects, time and resource management are your best assets.
Freelancing isn’t the career path for everyone but for some professionals, it’s the ideal job for managing your own schedule. Technology has advanced to the extent that you don’t need an office space to complete tasks. To save you precious time, we’ve done all the hard work compiling the best tools designed to make your life easier and optimize your efforts..
The best web design tools for freelancers
- Time doctor
Time Doctor is an amazing productivity tool that tracks time as you work. It a good software for freelancers working in a team. You can track everything from idle time, social media, time spent on applications, websites and more. Take screenshots for a proper evaluation at the end of the workday
- Harvest
The major problem facing freelancers, most of whom charge by the hour is time management. It’s’ easy to overwhelm yourself with too many projects. If you’re looking for an efficient time-tracking tool with an easy to use UI, Harvest is the tool for you. Aside from time, you can track budget for projects and future project estimation. A unique feature is that Harvest integrates well with popular apps such as Basecamp, Asana, QuickBooks and more.
- Timely
Timely is another alternative to Time Doctor. Its’ a time tracking and scheduling tool that allows you track time (hourly rates) for current projects and plan your week in advance.
- Upwork
Every freelancer has heard about Upwork. It’s a popular site where thousands of freelancers connect with clients and bid for projects. The client reviews bids and based on his criteria, picks
the best bid. As you increase your workflow, you’ll be able to charge more and build a following.
While many designers complain that the cheap price of designers on Upwork undermines their effort and pricing, it’s the best place for beginners to gain experience and build a decent portfolio. If you want to skip the bidding process, visit Toptal where they use a screening process to assign jobs.
- Paypal
Money inspires work and as a freelancer you need a payment system. PayPal is the most widely used tool for freelancers to collect fees, manage finance and track flow of cash. Payment options include ACH payments, credit card, PayPal credit or in person. While other services charge a smaller fee, PayPal is the safest and most reliable.
- Square
An alternative to PayPal, Square works online and offline. It’s ideal for creating, sending and receiving payments through a debit, credit card or in person. It simplifies the difficult process of managing income with easy-to-use features every beginner can navigate.
- QuickBooks
Even freelancers pay tax and if you want to stay organized for tax season, QuickBooks is a personal favourite. You can monitor income and expenses by linking your QuickBooks with your bank account.
- Firebug
The talented folks at Firefox developed Firebug, a tool that’s been acknowledged as one of the best web dev tools in the industry and an essential for every web developer. With Firebug, you can edit, debug and monitor JavaScript, HTML and CSS live from your browser.
- Proposify
Want to impress the heck out of your prospective clients? Proposify is a proposal building tool based on design-leaning templates. Save old proposals in template formats, create fresh proposals using customizable features such as online signature. Proposify also includes a Sales Team feature to track sales metrics and proposal success rates.
- Browser calorie
Web developers and designers always monitor the weight of any page they’re currently working on. Browser calorie is a browser extension that appears beside the address bar and if you click it, you’ll see the page weight, which can be broken down by resource if you want.
- Typeform
Now that you’ve sorted out time management and accounting, you can focus on the actual job. Typeform is a good tool that reduces the time spent designing survey questions and answers. With Typeform’s amazing templates, your surveys are branded and engaging for any device. There’s actionable and useful analytics feature when you buy the premium version.
- Webflow
This is an essential design software for every web designer. Instead of working by yourself in the code editor, you’ll save a lot of time with Wefbflow because it allows you to design while it writes the code on your behalf. Simply drag the HTML elements to the canvas and use an array of features for styling.
If you have many clients you’re currently working with, Webflow’s impressive CMS comes in handy. It even provides an invoice that takes care of payment. Define your price and Webflow sorts the payment process. In addition to Webflow CMS, you’re going to need a very good web hosting service and options for cheap domain names if you plan to host your own web design freelance website.
- Responsive home remodelling themes
Two things web designers can’t get enough of – themes and some shut-eye. We can’t help you with sleep but we can supply you with a fantastic collection of ready to use themes for your next contract. These home remodelling themes can be used for exterior and interior designers. The themes include customizable features like grid display, slideshows and 20 distinct skin choices.
- Pingdom
You can monitor the downtime, uptime and performance of a website you’re working on using Pingdom. Pingdom mirrors the loading process of the entire website when you upload a full HTML page and incorporates the elements such as RSS, JavaScript, CSS and images. Thus, allowing you to monitor and check site efficiency.
- Blokk
If you don’t understand Latin language written on Lorem Ipsum generator, Blokk offers a fun to use font. Generic text is suggested with blocks to replace all text allowing you to create amazing wireframes and mockups that won’t confuse your client.
Conclusion
Life as freelance web developer and designer can be frustrating especially when you don’t have the right tools and resource to guarantee success. The tools we’ve mentioned in this article will make you faster and more productive.