Creating a website is not as easy as it seems, even if you use the CMS WordPress Interface with the default, classic or Gutenberg block editor. WordPress has evolved substantially since 2003 and offers at present “frameworks builders” for the creation and the personalisation of modern and elegant visual content. The best known are Divi, Elementor and WPBakery (more advanced). However, if you are not familiar with web technologies (programmer or web developer), you will have a hard time understanding all the issues behind what you see, without being able to exploit all the features in order to have a well-indexed SEO site without errors in the source code.
A good designer-developer will avoid using too many unnecessary transitions (gadgets) avoiding the risk of a page taking too long to load (JS) and perhaps not displaying anything depending on the browser they use with their related built-in AdBlocks.
Read also our article “About cheap or free on-line site builder“.
DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRAMMING: What are the REAL challenges?
A professional design and development project require multiple resources, a lot of time, patience, concentration and, above all, pre-established specifications (clients user-end requirements, a workflow, a business model, etc.) if not the project will never fulfil the client expectations. Many Open-Source Tools available can help developers to produce professional, beautiful and functional websites.
Today, in order to be productive and with all the new complexities a website can require, these tools can help out your efforts reducing code mistakes.
Here you are several popular “Open-Source” tools
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tools
- Chat GPT: A language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have “human-like” conversations and much more created by OpenAI on Nov. 30, 2022;
- OpenAI: AI research and deployment company whose mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity (not really “Open” neither “Humanity oriented“. The final purpose is, as all online new “free” models APIs, to attract as many subscribers as possible and then create a premium access).
- TomeAI: Generative storytelling based on ChatGPT to forge slide presentations. With a prompt he creates the presentation with all related images (based on OpenAI). An intuitive, AI-powered storytelling tool that helps you unlock your best work for your work.
- D-ID: Digital Creations for Human Imaginations. Seamlessly add talking head videos / avatars to your product. Video generator with speech with a human-like face (deep-fakes).
- Midjourney: Images generator which runs with Discord server (available for MacOS and Windows). We can input prompts (like ChatGPT) but the result will be an image.
- Descript: Video editing program. The software can extract a speech in a text form. If I delete some incorporated text it will automatically cuts the associated part of the video.
- Soundraw: Music generator. We can input the theme, mood, style, gender (ex. rock), etc. and it generates a list of songs that reflect these preferences.
- Enhance: An Adobe tool for enhance voice recordings. An effective software for background removal noises (trafic, unwanted or unexpected noises, etc.).
- Runway: AI video Tools, real-time video editing. For example I have a video landscape with an object that I can select and remove it into the same sequence.
- Notion: A software to manage projects, write scripts for videos, books, set goals, categorise project, products via prompts that will be automatically paged out… (beta version).
Coding tools:
- Sublime Text Editor: The shell for coding that highlights any kind of language (the must);
- CodePen: Development environment for creating websites;
- Angular: AngularJS (Google) helps in simplifying the front-end development;
- Chrome Developer: A set of developer tools that are easily accessed in the Google Chrome browser;
- FireFox Developer: Firefox DevTools is a best-in-class JavaScript debugger, which can target multiple browsers. Is built in React and Redux;
- GitHub: Git is a way of tracking changes in computer files and computer codes by different co-developers;
- Laravel: A PHP Framework with expressive, elegant syntax (server side coding).
- Symfony: A PHP framework for web projects and a set of reusable components (server side coding).
- W3C Schools: The world’s largest (and oldest) popular web development tutorial for the most used programming languages.
- TopTal developer check-list: Web Developer Checklist;
- Tailwind CSS Framework: Build modern websites without ever leaving your HTML
- GreenSock: The GreenSockAnimationPlatform (GSAP) is an animation framework written in Javascript. It can handle almost any element contained in the DOM (CSS, SVG, React, canvas, objects, etc…) and can be integrated in any project because it is independent from other libraries and frameworks.
- Liveweave An HTML, CSS & JavaScript simulator playground for web designers and developers.
- TailWind CSS: Build modern websites without ever leaving your HTML
Design tools:
- Sketch: UX designers;
- Canva: Infographics & Graphic Design;
- Sizzy: For responsive UX websites & mobile web developers;
- Protopie: An App that can help you create mobile interactions in the easiest way possible.
- CleanUp Pictures: An editing took based on AI that removes unwanted object, defect, people or text from your pictures.
Project Management (PM):
- Trello: A project management or organiser application that is created to track the progress of a specific project;
- Hubstaff Tasks: A project management tool that helps teams in organising their tasks and collaborating effectively;
Online tools That Solve Your Files Problem Wow!
- TinyWow: Tools That Solve Your Files Problem (PDF, Images, Videos, Files & Much more…
Image conversion & compression tools:
- TinyPNG: Smart WebP compression (includes WP & Photoshop plugins);
- 11zon: PDF, Image compression, converter tools & Code formatter, beautify.
Creative proprietary professional design tools (Adobe):
- Adobe Creative Cloud: Graphic Design, photo, video, UI / UX, 3D / AR and social networks.
Notice: With time, many “open-source” tools, when they acquire a high number of visits, they offer premium options or become fee-based (small prices). With a lot of traffic they may also monetise their Apps with Google AdSense publicity.
By R. Lepori, CTO @ARTELABS.
