If you run your own business or market for your employer, one of your jobs will likely be managing and administering the brand’s website.
If you’re building a new website, it’s a big job that requires lots of input from your colleagues and great tools to make it stand out.
If you’re on a small or non-existent budget, you’ll love this article, as I share with you several free tools to use and help you build a banging website.
Edit your images for free
When adding images to your website, you may need to edit them occasionally. You might need to resize them or remove the background. There’s no need to sign up for expensive Photoshop subscriptions when many of these tools offer the same features but at zero cost.
Here are our freebie faves:
All of the image editors above are online-based and are free. You can upload your image, and start editing the colour, adding text, and using different visual effects.
After you’re done, save it and download it to your computer. If you’ve been using Microsoft Paint, then STOP! These tools give you an option of a powerful image editor for free!
Ensure your website loads fast; get compressing!
Be honest; how often do you compress your images before you upload them to your website? I bet you don’t do it that often, if at all. But compressing your images is important as it helps speed up your website’s page loading speed.
If your website is slow to load, visitors will abandon your website and click elsewhere.
This could mean you lose valuable traffic and potential leads and sales. So from today, commit to compressing your website’s images.
Don’t be confused by the term compressing. Yes, we are making the file sizes smaller but not reducing the actual file’s dimensions.
A small image FILE is different from making the image DIMENSION smaller. For example, if I have an image that’s 7 inches by 11 inches in dimension and 1 MB in file size, I can use SmushIt to maintain the dimension at 7” by 11” and reduce the file size to 200 KB.
Need to do screen tutorials? We’ve got the perfect free tool
There are instances where you need to share a screen recording with a colleague or you want to record a how-to guide for your website visitors.
Snagit allows you to take screenshots of what’s showing on your device’s screen or even record a short video of what you are doing on your device.
When you take a screenshot, Snagit allows you to highlight certain parts of the screenshot with coloured boxes, arrows, insert comments, etc. You can then save the screenshot on their server for free, and it will give you a link so you can share the screenshot with anyone.
If you are recording a video, Snagit will also save it for you, upload it to their server at no cost, and give you a unique link for sharing. This makes sharing your video tutorials clean and efficient, as you aren’t attaching hefty video files to emails.
Help! I need an expert
You can’t be an expert at everything, and website building can be tough, especially if you want to add code to the back end to make it look even more eye-catching.
They didn’t teach code when I was at school, so if I need to do something whizzy on a website with code, I will often reach out to a few free tools (there will be a charge assigned to the service, but searching for experts is free.)
Fiverr, the world’s largest digital services marketplace, offers buyers and sellers a digitally streamlined transactional platform. The unique term for a service offered by a seller on Fiverr is called a ‘Gig’. When creating Gigs, sellers can choose their starting price point. Buyers then purchase a gig and message the seller directly.
99Designs and CrowdSpring allow you to post a job on their respective websites, and experts will all read what you want and start submitting their ideas for review. If you want a graphic designer to design a logo for you, just imagine having 20 different freelance designers showing you their work (and you don’t need to pay them)! You only pay for the design you like.
Get an email that links to your website’s domain
If you’ve built a website using a content management system, you should make sure that it also offers you an email interface; otherwise, you could have the following set up:
Website: www.acme.com
Email: [email protected]
It doesn’t look very professional, does it?
I often see a lot of small business owners with works vans that display their email address as [email protected], and I think to myself, all they need to do is buy a domain (calltheplumber.com) for a few pounds and then set up their email address. It’s so easy!
Google Business Apps, aka The G-Suite, gives you the interface of Gmail (pretty easy to use) and the reliability of Gmail with a professional email address.
So, instead of (for example) [email protected], Google Business Apps allows you to have [email protected].
Now, Google Business Apps isn’t free.
Wait, what? You said this blog was all about free tools!
And it is, in a sense. You can subscribe for a 30-day free trial and see how it works. If you like it, you can subscribe to an annual subscription which costs around £55 a year. That’s around £4.60 a month. A small price to pay for a professional look. For what it’s worth, I use this for my email [email protected], so I can vouch for how good it is.
Keep track of your website traffic and digital marketing activity with Google Analytics
Google Analytics has been in the news recently as they are about to launch the latest version of Google Analytics, Google Analytics 4.
Google Analytics is a free tracking tool that you can “plug” into your website builder, and it will track all visitor movement data within your website.
Most website builders will have a designated tutorial or area for you to insert Google Analytics. It will record interesting statistics such as how many visitors visited your website, how long they spend on your website on average, how long for each webpage, how many pages they visit on average, and which webpage they last saw before leaving your webpage.
If you have the Universal code (the name of the current Google Analytics) on your website, set up the new Google Analytics 4 tool and add the code to your website to ensure your traffic continues to be tracked. Universal will have already ceased tracking your web data, as this blog is being published after their 30 June 2023 deadline.
Do you back up your data?
Don’t think your website crashing or your work laptop being stolen will ever happen to you. It can, and it does. According to gitnux.com, 10,000 laptops are stolen yearly, so don’t rest on your laurels thinking your data is safe.
If you use Google Business Apps and get a Gmail email address (that looks like a corporate email address), you’ll also get access to Google Drive. This is cloud-based, and you can back up all your files saved on your device, and it costs you nothing!
