A Website plays a major role in any business nowadays. It is important therefore to have a good, well designed and developed website to attract visitors, generate leads and in effect boost your sales. With almost 4 years experience in online marketing and working with different web designers and developers, I’ve noticed that their practices and tools keep on evolving to simplify their work. I wonder now what are the best design software/apps among these tools and how do they help to create a good website.

Good thing that as part of our Interactive Development Services campaign, Exist will come up with “Pinoy Web Designers Toolkit webinar” which offers web enthusiasts and technologists tips, tricks, and tools in web design and development. Design tools used by some of our Filipino developers and their own practices and techniques in web design and development will be discussed during this webinar. To further increase our excitement on this event, let me give you an idea first on some of these design tools and the preferred tools of some Filipino web designers. 

There are many web design software tools on the market, and new ones are released all the time, as technology advances. You can choose tools that will help you from concept to visual and to code. As there are many tools, we’ll try to discuss first those tools that will be featured in the webinar such as Balsamiq, Cacoo, Flairbuilder, Aviary, Inkscape.

I interviewed some designers as well as developers who had experienced in using those tools and got the help of Google of course in explaining the other tools.

“Basically, Balsamiq, Cacoo and Flairbuilder are tools used for creating rapid prototype wireframes”, said Joel Sudiacal, one of our UI Engineers here in Exist. I haven’t tried using Cacoo and Flairbuilder though. Aside that you can download Balsamiq for free, I like the sketch like look of it that you don’t even have to align the elements, which makes my job done rapidly,” Joel added.

According from a blog by Henry Jones, using Balsamiq Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it’s digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner. It has 75 pre-built controls to choose from, where you can design anything from a super-simple dialog box to a full-fledged application, from a simple website to a Rich Internet Application.

Here’s an Image of Balsamiq UI taken from their website:

Cacoo on the otherhand is an online drawing tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams such as site maps, wire frames, UML and network charts. It can be used free of charge. (www.cacoo.com)

(UI of Cacoo taken from their site)

Priced at $99, Flairbuilder takes good reviews and feedback as well from website owners, web designers and software testers. Paul Boag, a creative director mentioned in his blog that Flairbuilder does everything you would expect from a wireframing application. You can add, edit and remove pages. You can insert boxes, text, form elements and other screen objects. It is designed as a powerful prototyping application.

Moving on with the other tools, Aviary and Inkscape are both for design and image editing tools. “Aviary is the free version of Photoshop,” explained Mike Pamero, a freelance web designer/developer. It is used for editing images, designing logos and web templates, and audio editing as well. “Inkscape on the otherhand is an open source graphics tool. It is like an Adobe Illustrator which is a vector graphic editor application”, Mike added. 

When asked on their favorite web design tools, both Mike and Joel preferred Adobe Photoshop for image editing and designing. For wireframing, both have the same preference as well–Balsamiq. For xhtml css editor, Joel is using textmate and notepad++ (for windows) since he finds them light to install, minimal and clean. “For CSS editor, Adobe Dreamweaver works best for me. Though expensive, I find Adobe products powerful compared with others”, shared Mike. 

Before concluding this blog, let me share you some tips on choosing the right web design tool for you which I learned from the two designers I interviewed.   

1. The needs of every web designer are unique and require different features from their web design tools. Though, some tools are useful in almost every situation, it is still best to determine first your needs and purpose.
2. Before choosing a software tool package especially those that need money investment, it is important that the designer determine the functions and features that the software tool needs to perform to achieve your desired/expected results.
3. Take into consideration also, the complexity, usability and system requirements of these software tools. It should be easy to learn with easy to use UI
4. Lastly, don’t be afraid to try out, experiment and explore other web design tools for you won’t know exactly is suitable for you unless you try it.

Time to wrap up this blog. Hope you learned something. Feel free to discuss your concerns and other questions during the Pinoy Web Designer’s Toolkit webinar. See you then!

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