Creating a website is not as easy as it seems, even if you use a CMS such as WordPress . WordPress has evolved substantially since 2003 and offers at present “frameworks builders” for the creation and the personalisation of modern and elegant visual content. However, if you are not familiar with web technologies (programming and styling languages), you will have a hard time understanding all the issues (errors, bugs into the source code) behind what you “virtually” see.
A good designer-developer will avoid using too many unnecessary transitions (gadgets) avoiding the risk of a page taking too long to load many scripts and stylesheets (JS/CSS/etc.).
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.
Popular “Open-Source” tools.
Artificial Intelligence popular (AI) Tools (free vs premium versions) – hundreds every day…
- 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).
- 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, often used for deep-fakes pics on the web.
- Claude: A next-generation AI assistant for your tasks, no matter the scale. Fast, capable, and truly conversational (Premium only).
- 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).
- 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).
- Stable Diffusion: Text-to-image diffusion model capable of generating photo-realistic images given any text input.
- Ask The Laravel Docs: An excellent tool linked to ChatGPT for PHP programmers using Lavarel Framework. Example prompt “how to write data in database using eloquent“…
And hundreds of new ones every month, because BigTech companies need to be the first to capture the market first and build customer loyalty by improving services, adding features, making them more attractive, more “human”. It’s a new business like any other, but one in which companies believe without knowing how it works, and in which investments run into billions.
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…)
- Cloud Converter: +200 Formats Supported, it supports nearly all audio, video, document, ebook, archive, image, spreadsheet, and presentation formats.
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 (monthly subscription). Simple Free “Open-Source” platforms gaining a lot of traffic they may monetise their web apps with Google AdSense publicity.
PM/CTO @DIGITALABS, October 3, 2021
