5 Valuable Web Development Resources

Web design and development is a constantly evolving field and that change means you need tools and resources that you can rely on.

Building and maintaining websites that properly service both the client and the end user can be a complicated endeavor. Therefore, you want to have a strong foundation of web development tools ready to assist you in getting a project up and running. Here are five of the most fundamental web development and search engine optimization resources you should be utilizing.

Google Analytics

The basic goal of a website is to act as a digital storefront, a repository of all the information necessary for a business to make their presence known on the Internet. Whether the site wants to generate leads, increase awareness or sell products, the underlying aim is to get visitors to your website. Google Analytics offers you unparalleled insight into who is visiting your website, what they are doing once they get there and how they connected with the site in the first place. 

Important information such as the bounce rate for the website as a whole and for individual pages, how long users tend to spend on areas of the site and the path users take through it is easily accessible thanks to this powerful data management and digital marketing tool. Google Analytics lets you know which pages resonant with visitors, what referral links are bringing in users and what times of day result in the highest traffic. All of this is accessible through an intuitive and clean user interface.

The best part is that Google Analytics is free for the standard version and you get access to Google’s massive cloud infrastructure to ensure your website’s data is organized and up to date. Google Analytics enables you to make smart and informed decisions about every aspect of your site and business.

Google Fonts

How a website looks and feels is critical to how well users respond and engage with it. When people read your site, you want the experience to be immediately informative and pleasant. Nowhere is this more obvious than with the choice of fonts. Google Fonts is a library of 916 free licensed fonts that allow you to pick the perfect fonts for your website.

Thanks to the interactive web directory, sorting and browsing this vast library is simple and effortless. Google Fonts is easy to integrate into any web project. With the ability to be used in over 135 languages, organizing and streamlining the typography of your website has never been so easy.

Google Search Console

It is important to be able to see how your website is performing in search results and being able to access the tools you’ll need to adapt to the changing world of web development. Luckily, the perfect, free resource to accomplish these goals exists. Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, gives developers the power to track every aspect of a website. 

Google Search Console enables you to easily index every part of your website, check for coverage issues such as crawl errors, and maintain the site without worrying about it impacting the search results. Google Search Console also keeps you abreast of any potential security issues and whether your pages or site has been hit with a manual action, Google’s way of penalizing the search rankings of sites they suspect of spammy or suspicious behavior. It also offers to evaluate how your site performs on a mobile device so you can be sure that users have a good experience regardless of what device they are using.

Google Tag Manager

You’ll want to know how effective your site is and what visitors are doing, so setting up marketing tags and tracking pixels is of the utmost importance. Thanks to Google Tag Manager, you can easily implement and manage all your existing and future tags in one accessible location. Tag Manager makes tracking and analyzing the effectiveness of your site and the actions of your users much easier than it would be otherwise and without any need for developers to directly modify a site’s code. And best of all, it’s free.

Lorem Ipsum Generator

A site’s layout is critical to producing a smooth end user experience. In particular, knowing how the future text will look enables you to design web pages that are attractive and draw attention to the right areas. A Lorem ipsum generator allows you to quickly and easily place dummy text to see how a page will end up structured while you create the content that will eventually fill the page. This will save you time and energy in the long run while building web pages.

Web Design and Development Made Easier

Designing a website and then making it flourish is not a simple task. A lot of work has to go into how it looks, how it runs, how it ranks and how people will interact with it. You’ll want as many web development resources as possible to make the process smoother and more streamlined. The aforementioned tools are all free to use yet powerful in what they allow you to accomplish.

Featured image by Emile Perron on Unsplash