Web Design and Development Resources

(Note that some links are affiliate links, so I make a little money if you use my link to purchase the software. I have indicated these clearly for full transparency. I only post affiliate links for products I USE, LOVE, and HIGHLY RECOMMEND!)

Freelancing

Plutio (affiliate link) – “Everything you need from projects and tasks to proposals and invoicing, all in one intuitive and deeply customizable platform. No more multiple subscriptions and juggling between apps.”
The Collective Legal Guide For Designers (Contract Samples) – Smashing Magazine
How Specializing Keeps Your Freelance Business Alive – Nuts and Bolts Media, LLC

Software and Apps That I Like – Beyond the Obvious

Asana – This is my favorite project management app. I’ve worked with several others and always come back to Asana for the ease of use!
Stencil (affiliate link) – really handy for quickly creating good looking images for social media
WP Engine – Plans (affiliate link) – WP Engine is the absolute best WordPress managed hosting I have worked with. They make everything easy and give you confidence that your website is fully protected and backed up.
10Web (affiliate link) – An interesting combination of managed WordPress hosting and WordPress website management. I’m testing using it for the WP management of websites hosted elsewhere. So far I really like the interface and management features. I’m intrigued by their hosting services but haven’t yet tried that side of their services.
A2 Hosting (affiliate link) – This is web host I use for most of my client websites. It’s competitively priced, reliable, good speed, and the support team is responsive and amazing. Their reseller account is especially good, in my experience.
Harvest – I use this for tracking my time and invoicing. It has been a tremendous help, saving me untold hours of my time that I would otherwise would have spent invoicing clients.
iThemes Security Pro (affiliate link) – This is the first security plugin I install on all WordPress websites that I create, work on, or manage. Easy to configure and understand, reliable, and effective at protecting WordPress sites.
BackupBuddy (affiliate link) – My go-to WordPress backup plugin. I especially like that I can schedule backups automatically and have them stored on my Amazon S3 account.

WordPress and Plugins

Copy and Paste Editor Blocks via GutenbergHub’s Block Library – WordPress Tavern
Better Search Replace – I use this WordPress plugin all the time, most often when working on development websites. My most frequent use is after making a WordPress staging site live, when I need to change any instances of the old URL to the new one. There are many other potential uses, such as changing shortcodes when you remove or switch to a different plugin that uses shortcodes. The free plugin is very useful, but I have always been glad that I bought the lifetime license for Better Search Replace Pro, which shows you in advance what changes will be made, amongst other perks. The lifetime license is a steal for how much I get out of it!
Disabling Gutenberg on certain templates — Bill Erickson
Gravity Forms (affiliate link) – This is probably my absolute favorite WordPress plugin. There is so much power here! And yet working with it is simple. There are a bunch of extensions you can install to increase its power and integrate with other services and web apps. When you need to do something complex with GF, searching the internet usually brings up several pages discussing solutions.
GravityView (affiliate link) – This plugin, along with many extensions, expands the functionality of Gravity Forms in almost infinite ways. I love it so much, I purchased the the lifetime all-access license.
SoliloquyWP (affiliate link) – My favorite WordPress slider plugin, extremely flexible while also being lightweight. I use this on a WP site whenever I can!
SuperSide Me – (affiliate link) This is a really nice plugin that adds a configurable mobile menu to your WordPress website. I use this on most of my Genesis framework WordPress website designs. The price is excellent and the features are great. Even better, Robin Cornett, the developer, provides information for other developers to adapt and extend the plugin. Try it out!
Six/Ten Press Featured Content (affiliate link) – is a plugin designed with the Genesis Framework in mind, but it can be used with non-Genesis websites. It’s more advanced, with more options, than the featured content widget built into Genesis.
How To Safely Update Your WordPress Site (Ultimate 2019 Guide)
Bloggers Guide to WordPress Security – BestVPN.org
A better, and easier, grid loop – Bill Erickson
Optimizing Your WordPress Database – A Complete Guide – WPMU DEV
Custom WordPress Body Class Examples – snippetswp
What is Pods? – Pods Framework
How to Add a Video Background to Your WordPress Site in 4 Easy Steps – WPMU DEV
Hooking into WooCommerce Actions – SkyVerge
Simply Show Hooks – helps theme and plugin developers to quickly see where all the action and filter hooks are on any WordPress page – WordPress.org Plugin Directory
Custom WordPress Body Class Examples – snippetswp
Uncluttering the Admin Experience – Carrie Dils
How we stopped contact form spam with CleanTalk – fairly marvellous
How to Add a Video Background to Your WordPress Site in 4 Easy Steps – WPMU DEV
WordPress Settings and Plugins | Website Comment Spam Security – TemplateToaster Blog
Some media management plugins to consider:
- EWWW Image Optimizer – “Reduce file sizes for images in WordPress including NextGEN, GRAND FlAGallery and more…”
- Enable Media Replace – “Enables replacing attachment files by simply uploading a new file in the media library edit view.”
Postmatic – “lets your readers subscribe to comments or posts by email. And comment by simply hitting reply.”
- Why I’ll Only Use Postmatic for WordPress Blog Comments – Danny Brown
Moving A WordPress Website Without Hassle – Smashing Magazine
Exporting Your Database from Your Previous Host – WPEngine
Social nav menus: Part 2 – Justin Tadlock
Image Meta Data 101 – Title, Caption, Alt Text, and Description – WPBeginner
How to add Navigation Menus to your WordPress Theme – WPMU DEV
Removing file extension via .htaccess – web development blog

Mobile and Responsive Design

Fluid Width Video – CSS-Tricks
Can I Use…CSS Selectors – Can I use… Up-to-date browser support information about CSS selectors.
Masonry — Cascading JavaScript grid layout library
Responsive Design Workflow: Mobilism 2012 – SlideShare
Getting Started with Zurb Foundation 4 – gun.io
10 Best Responsive HTML5 Frameworks and Tools – Design Instruct
Adaptive Images
Focal Point: Pure HTML/CSS Adaptive Images Framework – GitHub
Which responsive images solution should you use? – CSS-Tricks
Build a responsive site in a week: designing responsively (part 1) – Creative Bloq
Automate Your Responsive Images With Mobify.js – Smashing Magazine
How To Avoid Duplicate Downloads In Responsive Images – Smashing Magazine
Pure – A set of small, responsive CSS modules that you can use in every web project.

Accessibility & ADA Compliance

Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA – ADA.gov
The Complete Guide to Making Websites Accessible – Yoyo Design
WCAG 2.0 form fields for Gravity Forms – WordPress plugin for Gravity Forms (affiliate link)
The Inclusion Principle – A List Apart
Quick Reference – Web Accessibility Principles – WebAIM.org
Creating Accessible Forms – WebAIM.org
Resources for Developing a Web Accessibility Business Case for Your Organization – W3C
Accessibility by UserWay – popular WordPress plugin to help with website accessibility; not sure how much it helps, so need to look into further
WP Accessibility – Another WordPress accessibility plug that looks promising. Seems to do quite a few things that are significant, e.g. enabling skip links, enforcing alt attributes for images.
WP Accessibility Tools & Missing Alt Text Finder – WordPress plugin that promises to HELP you make your website ADA compliant by finding accessibility problems on your website. I’ve worked with this one a little and I find it intriguing. It has a tool to live-test issues on individual pages of the site, walking you through each potential issue and showing you where it exists on the page and what might solve the problem.

CMS

SetSeed – The Most Powerful White-Label CMS Website Platform for Resellers
CushyCMS – simple, free, web-based CMS / content editor
Frog CMS – an open source content management system based on PHP and mySQL

CSS

Solved by Flexbox – Cleaner, hack-free CSS
Centering in the Unknown – CSS-Tricks
Button Maker – CSS-Tricks
Horizontally Centered Menus with no CSS hacks
CSS Reset – All the most common CSS Reset scripts in one place, with complete documentation, guides and tutorials.
The CSShark Answers FAQs – Your CSS Tutorial – MaKo
5 Ways to Instantly Write Better CSS
7 New Essential CSS 3 Techniques Revealed – tripwire magazine
Hybrid CSS Dropdowns – A List Apart
Easy Random CSS Backgrounds – SonSpring
Box Lessons – thenoodleincident.com
css Zen Garden – csszengarden.com
CSS and round corners: Boxes with curves – webcredible

Graphic Design / Image Editing

What the Color of Your Logo Says About Your Company – Entrepreneur Media, Inc.
Breaking Bad Habits in Photoshop – Viget Inspire

Resources and Inspiration

January Made Design Resource Library – An amazingly affordable set of digital, instant download resources for web designers. All are under $20 as of this writing; some are under $2. I can’t praise these enough! Especially if you’re stumped by Dubsado as I have been, check out Copy my Dubsado Process | For Service-Based Creative Businesses.
404 Illustrations: Trendy, ready to use images for your 404 page — Kapwing
Snoopy – “a bookmarklet for snooping on web pages. It’s intended for use on mobile browsers (such as Mobile Safari on the iPad) where you can’t view-source to poke around under the hood of sites to see how they’re built.”
Slickplan – “a website planning system,” includes tools for creating sitemaps, diagrams, content plans, and mockups.
FlowMapp – Tools for creating sitemaps and user flows for website UX.
Octopus – Create visual sitemaps and web design estimates.
Font Awesome – The iconic font and CSS toolkit
Genericons – a free, GPL, flexible icon font for blogs!
jsFiddle
jsFiddle: An online playground for your JavaScript, HTML, CSS – TechRepublic
8 Must-have Cheat Sheets for Web Designers and Developers – Web Design Ledger
Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web – Luca Passani
Max Design – Articles
JavaScript, DHTML Tooltips – JavaScript Cross Browser Library – www.walterzorn.com
Dive Into HTML5
24 JavaScript Best Practices for Beginners – Basix – Nettuts+
5 Fun and Practical Htaccess Solutions – Nettuts+
“JQuery for Absolute Beginners” Video Series – Theme Forest
jQuery Tutorials for Designers – Web Designer Wall
HTML, CSS, PHP and jQuery Killer Tutorials – In the Woods

SEO

SEO plan for 30 minutes a day
High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization – A List Apart
Jiggling the Web for Instant Search Engine Rankings – Says what I’ve always said, in almost exactly the same words: “People flogging seo (search engine optimization) services like to wrap it all up in mystical voodoo.”

Backup

Sure, backing things up is mundane, it’s boring, it’s dry and technical, but it is so important!

CrashPlan for Small Business – This has been my cloud backup service for many years. They have gone through some transitions that changed their pricing tiers, and I almost left them because I thought it was going to be too pricy for my single-person, freelance business. But when I changed my CrashPlan service to only cover my work laptop, that made it affordable. Crashplan’s backups give me a feeling of security, knowing I can always revert to a previous version of a file that I’m working on (or folder, or the whole hard drive, if necessary!). Their online documentation has helped me with a few problems, and their support has been excellent when I’ve needed it.
pCloud (affiliate link) – I have had a lifetime license for pCloud for a few years. I love how seamless it is: no thought necessary, just another folder on your computer that you can use to automatically or manually back up your files. It also works on all of your devices (under one plan), backing up your cell phone and table files automatically for you. pCloud also offers added encryption, available as a lifetime license if you want to really stack up the savings on this excellent service!