5 Tools That Every Web Design Agency Should Use to Boost Productivity

It’s no secret that web design projects often overshoot their deadlines. Design do-overs, tiny details that take way longer than anticipated and never-ending email exchanges are characteristic of most website projects.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

If you want to unlock scalable business growth, your web design agency must maximize efficiency. Once you do, you’ll be breezing through projects and be able to take on more clients easily.

In this article, we’ll give you five powerful tools to create more efficient workflows, boost your agency’s productivity and deliver projects on time.

Let’s roll.

1. Duda

Duda is a web design platform to help your agency easily create detailed websites at scale. In addition to website building, it offers you team collaboration and client management services to smoothen and expedite your workflows.

Here are a few of its features that will save you time and money.

A) Templates

Duda comes with tons of ready-made templates so that you can avoid creating pages from scratch. This speeds up individual projects, but there are additional benefits too. Once you find and edit a template that can work for different projects, or if you’ve built an especially versatile one from scratch, you can save it and use it across your organization for future projects to create websites at scale.

B) Custom Blocks

Duda lets you assign, build and save custom blocks of pages, called “sections,” in shared libraries. These blocks can be utilized in multiple client projects to build and customize designs at scale. This saves you time, as you won’t have to start from scratch and create new elements.

C) Collaboration

You can customize everyone’s access rights and add outside collaborators such as client-side team members into your project workspaces. Letting them publish their own content while leaving you design feedback with pinned comment threads allows you to work alongside your clients to create an end product that they’re genuinely happy with. As a result, you’ll drastically reduce the time wasted in do-overs. 

D) Custom Analytics Reports

Duda lets you send clients custom, agency-branded analytics reports to show them how their website is performing, and the reports are deployed on an automated basis. Now, you can concentrate on actually doing project work rather than spend time explaining things to them.

2. Mockplus

Mockplus is a comprehensive prototyping tool that will help you deliver detailed wireframes for your web projects in no time. Here are some of its features.

A) Quick Design

Mockplus gives you over 3000 icons and 200 components to simplify your prototyping process. Just drag them into your canvas to create a prototype for your design projects in minutes. As you’re using pre-designed components, you’re not wasting time creating them yourself.

B) Simple UI

Unlike other wireframing tools, Mockplus’s UI is incredibly easy to use and hardly takes any onboarding time. This cuts down on employee training time so that they can immediately start working on projects.

C) Instant Feedback

Mockplus can instantly send notification emails to team members whenever a project needs to be reviewed. This helps you get quick feedback and address issues rapidly.

3. ClickUp

ClickUp is a popular project management tool that’ll instantly boost your team’s productivity. Here are a few ways it will help you work faster.

A) Priorities

ClickUp lets you add priorities to all your tasks to ensure that your team always knows which tasks are most important. As they can easily see what’s urgent, they won’t waste time attempting relatively unimportant tasks. For example, designing the hero section of the homepage is more important than deliberating on what elements should go into the footer. 

B) Critical Path

ClickUp can calculate your web design project’s critical path to determine the tasks most vital to a project’s completion. With the critical path, you can identify which tasks aren’t critical to a project’s completion and de-emphasize them to save time and meet deadlines.

C) Custom Statuses

ClickUp comes with custom statuses to let your team instantly know what stage a project is in. This eliminates the need for manual follow-ups and review meetings as everyone’s kept in the loop. When comparing project management solutions like ClickUp vs Monday, this feature stands out as a valuable tool for efficient project tracking.

4. Slack

Slack is one of the world’s most popular messaging apps that can help you communicate quickly. Here’s why it helps boost productivity.

A) Instant Feedback

Whenever someone needs feedback on a project, they can message their team on Slack for an instant response. For example, if there’s a question about the color of a CTA, you can quickly message your team for instant feedback. 

B) Powerful Search

Slack has a powerful search feature that helps you save time and effortlessly find any important messages and files that were sent a while back. For example, if your client searches for an icon you sent her a month back, she can simply type in its name, and Slack will pull it up instantly.

C) Guest Accounts

Slack lets you add guest accounts to your messaging channels (they’ll only have access to the channel they were added to). This helps you collaborate with clients and work on projects together. 

5. Timecamp

Timecamp is a time-tracking tool that can help your employees make better use of their time. Here’s how it works.

A) Time Tracking

Timecamp lets your employees track the time they spend on particular projects or tasks. This makes it easier to identify how much time they’re spending on each client as well as on specific activities such as designing a menu. For example, if a developer is taking too long to create a wireframe, a manager can talk to them and figure out why that’s happening.

B) Invoice Generation

Timecamp can automatically generate invoices for clients based on the time your employees have spent on their tasks. All you have to do is set the rate and the tool will do the rest. This makes invoicing – a tedious, time-consuming task – a piece of cake!

C) Monitoring Remote Teams

Timecamp can monitor what websites remote employees are accessing during work hours. This can help managers identify if they are actually working or wasting time on unproductive activities like social media.

Conclusion

Web design projects don’t have to be that stressful! 

The right combination of tools and processes can make a huge difference to your agency’s productivity. Consequently, you get more satisfied clients and increase your profitability. 

What other ways can you think of to boost your agency’s productivity?

Featured image by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash