There is an English expression that says the shoemaker’s son always goes barefoot. Guilty as charged! While we work hard on our clients’ web development projects and websites, it’s often our own site that receives less attention. Recently, we decided to challenge the idiom and redo our corporate website.
Internal projects are always a challenge: who will do what? when to find the time?
Through our journey, we discovered several web development tools and resources that made our project go more smoothly. Most importantly, they saved us time. So, we thought we’d share what we learned.
Useful web tools in the Information Gathering, Planning and Design Stages
awwwards.com: Strictly speaking, Awwwards is not a tool, but rather a showcase of the best designed websites on the internet. We found it extremely helpful for brainstorming, zeroing in on what we liked and didn’t like, and discovering inspiring design.
miro.com: This tool helped ups to organize our initial site map. Miro is a collaborative whiteboard environment, ideal for a team like our own who has always worked remotely. Miro helped simplify the process of agreeing on what information needed to be included in the new site, what those pages were and how they related to one another.
figma.com: How did we live before Figma? Figma is a web-based vector graphic editor and prototyping tool. It is super easy to create wireframes and work on your UI design with Figma, simplifying the process and allowing you to previsualize everything before you start coding.
Useful web tools for Content Writing and Assembly
While we already knew what our core business services are and what we wanted to say, content optimization is key to successful ranking in search engines. These tools helped us to present our content in a manner that better responds to user query intent.
SemRush: this is an old SEO standby of course. SemRush offers and ever-growing set of functionalities, but for content development, we find the keyword magic tool, keyword gap tool and position tracker especially helpful.
Google Entity Extraction: Google’s Entity Extraction API lets you identify topics associated with a search within text as you type. Natural language processing and machine learning are the basis of semantic search: thanks to this, search results are increasingly tailored to the user’s search intent.
Useful webtools for Coding, Testing Review and Launch
These web development tools helped us save time and headaches during the coding and final phases of our project.
WordPress.com: They don’t call themselves the world’s most popular website builder for nothing. WordPress is easy to use, has tons of plugins, is a powerful CMS and it is flexible. Enough said.
Bitbucket.org: Bitbucket is a Git-based code management platform. It gives you a central place where your team can collaborate on their source code, manage git repositories and control workflows. Organization, at your fingertips!
If you have a web development project you’d like to get off the ground, or if you are looking to revamp your existing site, contact All Around.
Creative Developer
Cristina is our Creative Developer at All Around, where she works on coding and designing beautiful and effective interactive sites and web interfaces for our clients. She has extensive knowledge of digital marketing and advertising media design, application development, web tools innovation and photography.
