Believe it or not, you don’t need a big budget or graphic design skills to start a blog. There are many online resources that can help you start a blog from sites that provide you templates, royalty free images, icons, to in-depth tutorials. The challenge really lies in how you utilize all of these sites to create a great looking blog. Here are some of the best web design resources to help you design and build your blog.
1. WordPress
WordPress is one of the most beginner-friendly and straightforward platforms you can use to build a site. The best part is that WordPress actually provides you an immense amount of themes that you can use to build out your site. That means you can take a website design that’s already built and customize it with your own text. Every category from business, fashion, travel, to food can be found in their database.
2. Freebbble
As you build out your site, you’ll start to want to customize it with unique icons, relevant images, color palettes and other design accents. With Freebbble, you won’t have to hire a graphic designer for these accents. This free resource provides you everything you can imagine for your site. If you combine Freebbble’s offerings with a template or theme, you can easily transform a generic design into your own unique site.
3. Coolors
A big part of making your website unique is the color scheme you use. It can be tough to choose a color when there are so many palettes to choose from. Coolors is a color scheme generator that can help you create palettes in seconds. You can also browse over hundreds of thousands of palettes that are already made. So if you’re looking for that perfect shade of blue with a green undertone, Coolors is the resource to use.
Looking for ideas for your blog design? The best way to get your juices flowing is to look for examples of well-designed sites. The Best Designs is a website that showcases website designs. You can search for designs by colors, category, industry, etc. This is not your average website portfolio. This is a collection of websites that have been recognized for outstanding design.
If you want to spruce up your content, the best way to do it is to add relevant images. Buying individual images or subscribing to stock photography websites can be quite expensive. Fortunately, sites like Stock Up provide a countless number of stock photography that you can use for free. You’ll be surprised at the amount of high quality images and photographs you can find.
The font you use is very important to the success of your blog. There’s no way around the fact that certain fonts just are more readable than others. At the same time, you want to use a font that distinguishes your site from all the others online. Font Squirrel is the perfect tool to help you find a unique font that also has high readability.
7. Flat Icons
The flat design has become popular recently. What’s more, the design approach really works well for icons. If you’re in need of icons for website buttons, content, design cues or online tutorials, Flat Icons will be an invaluable resource for your project. You’ll find a large variety of icons which you can add to your logos, infographics, user interface, etc.
8. CSS Nectar
CSS Nectar is another great source of design inspiration for your blog or website. You’ll be able to browse many different types of sites such as blogs, eCommerce, business sites, corporate sites, and so much more. One of the coolest features of the site is the fact that you can browse websites by country. That will give you a deep look into how people are approaching design all around the world.
9. W3Schools
While most website builders and content management systems are built so that beginners can start building websites without any knowledge of code, it’s still important to get familiar with HTML and CSS. You will still need to learn how to use these languages if you ultimately want to build a site that’s exactly to your liking. Everything you need to know can be learned from w3schools. There are also tutorials for javascript and server side languages which will be helpful if you want to build things like plugins and other add-ons for your sites.
These are a small collection of some of the best web design resources online. The best part about this collection is that they are completely free. You don’t have to hire a graphic designer or web developer to create your own site. You will be able to easily find great web hosting resources online as well. You’ll be surprised at how professional and well-designed these icons, images, vectors and templates are. With a little bit of effort and imagination, you can use these resources to build an outstanding looking site or blog.