This month we are focusing on three trends within a bigger website design trend – different navigation menu styles and features. So many projects are featuring interesting navigation patterns right now as there’s a focus – and almost push and pull – on navigation that feels more consistent between devices.
The choices you make when selecting a typeface have more impact on your design than almost any other decision, so it’s good to have some options at hand.
Having the ability to envision a tastefully designed website (i.e., the role creativity plays) is important. But being able to actually build it more often than not depends upon the tools available, including recent developments and improvements in web design tools and resources for designers and agencies alike.
Every month we gather together a selection of the most exciting websites from the preceding four weeks.
There are hundreds of new tools for designers and developers released each month. We sift through them all to bring you the best.
In this month’s edition, productivity and AI combine to help you do more faster for more reward. Sounds great, right? Enjoy!
Privacy laws change every few months as more and more states add their regulations to the already hefty set of obligations. It’s almost impossible to keep up. Termageddon is an excellent service that keeps up for you, updating your policies when required.
Pangea is a new way to find work on the top product design teams. Register your profile and make yourself available to 1,000+ startups ready to hire through the service. It’s free to join, create your page, and pitch to top startups. Once you’ve been hired, set your own rate and terms, and bill through the platform.
Designing emails is a headache — who wants to layout pages with tables or stick to system fonts? Mailmaker is an excellent app that solves the problem by letting you design emails in a simple drag-and-drop interface.
If you’re one of those people that sees their work and life as a holistic whole, then you need to check out Digital Brain, a productivity system built on Notion that allows you to track, manage, and improve the performance of every aspect of your life from personal goals to product launches.
WunderUI is an excellent UI kit for designing dashboards in Figma, Sketch, and Xd. It features 200+ templates, more UI components than most designers will ever need, and a consistent set of styles. Flexible layouts, smart assets, and a dark mode variation make it fully responsive.
AppSpector is a remote debugging tool for iOS and Android apps. You can use it to conduct real-time monitoring, review historical bugs, and track down problems from anywhere in the world without needing direct access to the device.
There are many AI image generators, but Mage is one of the best. It uses multiple AI models to return the most inventive, realistic, and original AI-generated imagery possible.
If you lose too much time obsessing over the crypto market or doom-scrolling social media, then you need Hyperfocused. It’s a neat little menubar app for macOS that restricts the files, apps, and websites you can open (until you toggle it off).
InsightBase is an exceptionally helpful AI-powered app that lets you ask natural language questions of your database and get answers back fast. You don’t need SQL or any knowledge of database structure. Just ask anything you need to know.
Breveto is a beautiful writing app for macOS that lets you write long and short-form text, from essays to shopping lists. It’s super-easy to organize your content, which makes it ideal for writing web copy. Plus, it has AI built-in to help you polish your text.
There isn’t much as important as getting paid for freelancers, so a good invoicing app is a must. If you’re looking for a no-nonsense solution to keep your professional finances in good order, then check out Bookipi, an invoicing and document solution ideal for freelancers and small businesses.
Rangeen is an excellent color palette generator that can help you find the perfect colors for your next project. You can generate colors from ColorGPT, pull them from album art, or grab them randomly. You can save and export palettes and even check them for accessibility.
Fixel is a free font from MacPaw. It uses variable font technology to make it flexible and useful in various scenarios. It is designed to work well with large volumes of text but also has some interesting details to make it visually interesting at larger sizes.
Oppflow is an all-in-one content marketing app that uses AI to deliver the best content for your target audience, just set once and generate over and over. It remembers everything you’ve approved to boost its performance next time and uses innovative tasks to streamline workflows for different team members.
Dart is a project management solution that uses AI to schedule the work needed so that you can focus on building. It saves time and avoids the endless grind of product dev by efficiently getting you over the line. It works across all departments, from design to development, sales, and management.
All three of the website design trends here mimic something bigger going on in the tech space, from a desire to have more real connections (handwriting) to nods to social media (stickers) to models that are rooted in artificial intelligence. Every one of these design themes is more than a technique; it carries a tie to the greater world around us.
Here’s what’s trending in design this month.
Sometimes it’s the little things that help set a design apart. One of those little things is an element of personalization that looks like someone added something special to the design just for you to ensure that you know what it’s about.
Right now, that go-to element is something in a handwritten style – circled text or words, an underline, or a font with a handwriting style. The commonality is that the element is perfectly imperfect and looks like it was added at the last minute to help you understand the design or content.
Each of these examples does it somewhat differently but with equal impact.
Envisioning Justice uses a pen stroke around the brand’s name in the copy. This could have been done with a logo, but the double circle line feels more important with added impact. That line continues below the scroll as well with a drawn arrow to help you follow the copy. (It’s used a few times.)
Joris does something similar with a yellow circle around “brands” in the main display copy. There’s a nice touch of animation here where the hand-drawn yellow line extends with a mouseover. This little unicorn is highly engaging and grabs your attention.
Zoey uses a couple of hand elements to create a combined effect here. There’s the marker style for “empathy” in the headline with a yellow underline. The brand mark also uses a yellow drawn “o” and a bit of a rough descender on the “y.” All of it comes together with a nice overall effect that isn’t too much but has just enough to keep you looking at the design.
You can thank social media for this one. Sticker-style icons almost randomly placed on the screen are popping up almost everywhere.
This is a carryover from both digital stickers that are popular on social media posts and stories and real-life stickers that are on everything from laptops to water bottles. This digital element has a tactile feel because you can imagine it in reality, kind of crossing the digital life-real life divide.
It’s also a light and fun way to play with color, typography, and text elements that might not go together otherwise.
Letter Set Lab uses a big sticker-style element for its branding and in the center of the screen to introduce the website.
Readymag uses sticker elements of well-known brands to draw you into their tool. This is a prime example of how stickers pull together a lot of things that could otherwise be a bit of a mess with so many colors and fonts.
Frank Reichard uses animated stickers for his portfolio to create visual interest. Each sticker bounces onto the screen and then finds a static landing spot. The only miss here is that each one isn’t interactive. (Wouldn’t you like to know more about that cute dog?)
Much of the conversation about everything in the tech and marketing spaces centers around artificial intelligence. Are robots about to take our jobs?
These projects use AI-inspired models to highlight that they are forward-thinking. What’s interesting is that so many of these models look incredibly similar. There are other commonalities with this website design trend as well:
The challenge with this trend is that many of the AI models seem to look similar. (Why are so many female figures?) And what does AI look like? There’s an odd humanization happening in these designs to make the computer models into people, but not so much so that they are real. This may be a design element that we continue to struggle to figure out for some time in the future as these projects grow in popularity.
Here’s a look at the three examples.
AVA-X uses the least human-looking model to highlight their business, which is AI-based. She spins and moves with scrolling like a mannequin.
Mugler has a more glass or liquid-like AI model for the company that does NFTs. Again the model is in the background and not super clear; she’s human but also very robotic.
Locomotive uses actual people but with digitization that makes the video reel feel like a scene from a sci-fi movie. The mix of reality between AI and reality is interesting and feels like the right vibe for this company, what they do, and how they are trying to position themselves as forward-thinking.
How often do you look at website designs and think about what may have influenced them? Often website design trends are visual representations of the world around the designer at the time. Design and art as far back as you can go have these ties.
The beauty is that this connection is what makes something super trendy. The challenge is that it can also date the aesthetic if the element or idea fades quickly.
If you are looking for the best multipurpose WordPress theme you might feel the need to clearly understand what “best” means. On the other hand, you shouldn’t worry about that too much since you don’t have to drill down to selecting a single multipurpose WordPress theme at the exclusion of all others; and the reason is this.
Multipurpose themes are flexible WordPress templates. You can use them to create almost any kind of website imaginable.
There are hundreds of WordPress themes available in the online market, many of which are multi-purpose. A fair number are best-sellers you can use to create a corporate website, eCommerce site, personal blogging site, or a portfolio.
In this post, we’ve narrowed a list of potential candidates down to what experts will agree are 10 of the best Multipurpose WordPress themes of 2023.
While you should have little difficulty in selecting one you believe will best suit your needs, you can’t make a bad choice.
When a multipurpose WordPress theme can claim 250,000 satisfied customers, there must be a good reason. In BeTheme’s case, there are several. BeTheme gives you all the tools, options, and flexibility needed to create most types of websites, any of which is capable of matching or beating the competition.
A few highlights:
Click on the banner to find out more about each of BeTheme’s 40+ core features.
When the Pro team said ‘Out with the old and in with the new” they meant it. Pro will lift you out of your website design comfort zone and set you down in an even nicer one.
Here are a few things you can look forward to with Pro, the big sister product to ThemeForest’s fastest selling theme of all time:
Click on the banner and see for yourself everything that Pro brings to the table.
This aptly named multipurpose WordPress theme features a wealth of design options and customizer settings coupled with layout choices, navigation options, and dynamic template functionality.
In short, Total has everything needed for blogs, businesses, online stores, forums, portfolios, and then some.
The following key features will help you build your dream site(s) with Total.
Total is responsive, speed optimized, and SEO-friendly. Click on the banner to get a better idea of what this popular multipurpose theme could do for you.
TheGem, a versatile multipurpose WordPress WooCommerce theme, offers unlimited customizations, plenty of design & marketing features, an extended library of 400+ pre-built designs, and fastest loading times.
You’ll love the 5-star user support, as have 70,000 others.
Sales figures can be a legitimate factor in choosing a WordPress theme. Avada, with 750K+ sales that make it the #1 best seller of all time obviously has a lot going for it. Everyone from first-time WordPress users to professional web designers have fallen in love with Avada.
One reason? This top-selling multipurpose theme makes it so easy to create an amazing website — and fast too, thanks to the following features:
Avada is responsive, optimized for speed and eCommerce enabled.
Uncode is a pixel-perfect creative WordPress theme designed with attention to flexibility and performance. It is also one of the top selling themes of all time on the Envato market with more than 100,000 sales to date.
With Uncode at your fingertips you can easily –
Blocksy is innovative, fast, Gutenberg and e-Commerce ready, and more importantly, a WordPress theme for any project. Blocksy is the ideal companion when you need to build a high class website in a short time.
For example:
A White-label option is available for agencies.
Build your unique site using the most beautiful creative multipurpose theme of the decade. 44,000+ customers have already done so and more than 2,000 have submitted 5-star reviews.
Creating an award-winning site with Kalium involves 3 easy steps, 1) choose a pre-built starter site, 2) install it with 1 click, and 3) live edit it. Naturally, there is an abundance of tools to help you along the way, that include:
One thing you have to be careful about when selecting a theme is to ensure you will have complete control over the content of your website. Litho is a multipurpose Elementor theme that does exactly that, as do the other themes on this page.
WoodMart offers and all-in-one WooCommerce solution. This WooCommerce WordPress theme does not require plugins to create a state-of-the-art eCommerce store. A quick check of the website will convince you of that.
Woodmart comes with –
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When your website is the digital storefront for your business you want it to perfectly represent your brand. It should not only look great, but offer a seamless user experience as well.
That is what each of the 10 multipurpose WordPress themes in this article is capable of doing. You really can’t make bad choice. But with a little extra thought you should be able to select the multipurpose WordPress theme you will be most comfortable with.
Read More at Transform Your Website with These 10 Multipurpose WordPress Themes for 2023
Web design agencies face a lot of obstacles in closing the deal with new clients. One of the most common ones is the argument that business owners make:
“Why do I need to pay you to build my website when I can just do it myself?”
White labeling your website builder would be one way to close that argument, but that’s not the only reason agencies should be white labeling their website builder platform. The right white label solutions can boost brand awareness, productivity, and profitability, among other things.
How exactly do you know what the right one is?
Below we’ll look at 11 features that your white label website builder should include if you want to maximize your results.
A white label website builder is basically a website builder that digital agencies can customize with their own branding and offer it to their customers as their own website and product.
Using a white label website builder enables agencies to focus on growing their business while offering website-building services to their customers without investing in building their own platform.
Typically with website builders, their branding is everywhere. The top-left corner has their logo. The domain name is theirs. Even the email notifications that come from the builder are branded.
A white label website builder, on the other hand, gives agencies the ability to mask the builder’s branding and replace it with their own logo and visual branding. There are a number of advantages to doing this.
A white label solution can help you:
While the basic concept of white labeling holds true across website builders, it’s not always implemented the same way. So finding a website builder that includes the right white label features for your agency is critical.
This means you’ll need to examine the white label functionality as well as the website builder when choosing which one to use.
Here are all the features to consider as you search for the perfect white label website builder for your agency:
Start by looking for a website builder that enables you to transform the user interface into one that’s fully branded to your agency. The goal isn’t just to cover up the logo in the top toolbar. You should be able to mask all of the builder’s branding.
For instance, with Brizy Cloud, you can change the builder name, add a custom logo, switch the Support and About links to your own, add custom domain names & more.
You can also customize the visual branding on the login screen as well as in the email notifications that go out to your clients from the website builder. For instance, after a new client signs up or you create an account for them, they’ll see your agency’s name and branding in the emails sent by the platform.
This will enable you to present the website builder technology as your own.
When it comes to Brizy Cloud, in particular, we’ll complete this entire process for you. Over the course of several days, we’ll talk to you about your business, its goals, and gather all the information we need to visually rebrand the website builder for your agency.
Just sign up for the White Label agency plan and we’ll get you up and running with a branded website builder in no time.
Another area of the builder that can be masked is the URL. You can do this at the dashboard level as well as the editor level.
With Brizy, your clients wouldn’t see the brizy.cloud domain anywhere inside your website builder. Instead, they’d see your agency’s name (or whatever you wanted to call your builder). In this example, our custom domain is called “Eunixa”.
Replacing the builder’s branding with your own branding will lend credibility to your agency. It will also serve as a constant reinforcement of your branding as clients go into the builder to manage their website.
Your website builder should be able to expand as your agency and client list does. Brizy Cloud’s Agency plan, for instance, comes with 100 workspaces — that means 100 dedicated spaces for 100 client projects, be they websites, landing pages, or special features like stories or pop-ups.
Your website builder should also empower your clients to grow their digital presences. If there are restrictions on how much traffic their site can receive, how much content they can store on the server, or what sorts of sites they can build, they’re inevitably going to run into issues with it.
If you want to make the website creation and maintenance process easier on everyone, scalability is a must. This is especially important if your agency designs ecommerce websites. Growth is an inherent part of the ecommerce business model and so you need a white label website builder that can support that process.
Many website builders today try to pack way too much into a small space. It might be nice to have all those bells and whistles if you ever need them, but most of the time, they just slow you down.
Feature-packed website builders can also be problematic for clients. If you want to empower clients to manage their website’s content, the builder has to be easy to use and require no technical knowledge to master it.
So finding a website builder that abides by the same principles of minimal web design that you use in building their websites is a must.
A drag-and-drop editor should come with all the building blocks you could ever want to quickly piece together your content.
A white label website builder, on the other hand, should give you the ability to choose which building blocks are visible. That way, you and your end users aren’t having to waste time sifting through dozens of block options.
Only the design elements you need are visible. By fine-tuning the builder at the elements level, you’ll make it more relevant and easier for everyone to use. That goes for your clients as well as the web designers on your team.
Different website builders do certain things better than others. Some are inherently great platforms for blogging. Others are good for constructing small business websites.
But if your agency builds websites for a wide range of clients, you need your white label website builder to be good at as many things as possible. For example:
Each type of site requires very specific functionality. So having the ability to add that functionality without having to depend on 3rd party solutions is crucial.
You can even design a multilingual website with ease (without depending on 3rd party, expensive translation solutions).
You can use white label website builders for a number of purposes. You can build and host your client’s site or online store with it. You can resell the website builder technology within a platform of your own. You can also create and sell websites through the platform with the integrated billing solution via Stripe.
Regardless of whether you’re the one building the websites or one of your customers, it would be beneficial to find a builder with an ample collection of pre-made designs.
Brizy Cloud, for instance, offers over 150 pre-made multi page website templates…
and two block kits with more than 750+ pre-made blocks.
Pre-made designs speed up the web design process and give you a beautiful and responsive framework to customize. But there’s another benefit of having all these assets at your disposal.
If you plan on using a white label builder to resell, you can offer the website builder for free. Then charge a premium to anyone who wants to unlock the hundreds of Pro designs available.
One of the reasons why people choose SaaS website builders over open source content management systems is the hosting component.
With SaaS website builders you don’t have to worry about hosting (limitations, uptime and more), security certificates (SSL), loading speed (Content Delivery Networks), updates and incompatibility issues that inevitably arrive when working with open source CMS systems and plugins.
That said, the best solution is a white label website builder without limitations that takes all the pain away and lets you focus on growing your business.
For example, Brizy Cloud white label site builder users can check on server status for outages.
Brizy can also back up its claims when it comes to matters like security and speed. All sites receive SSL certificate encryption. Plus, Brizy’s CDN offers faster-than-average page loading speeds.
In addition to offering unlimited storage and bandwidth as well as security and speed tune-ups, look for white label website builders that help with the technical upkeep of your sites. Specifically, see if you can find one that automates software updates and website backups.
You know that your clients aren’t going to want to deal with them nor will many even know how to manage them. And, let’s face it, you have better things to do with your time.
So if you want to ensure that the sites you build stay in good shape, find a website builder that includes technical maintenance as part of the deal.
Agencies already have so many platforms they bounce between on a daily basis — email, marketing platforms, CRMs, accounting tools, etc. It’s a lot.
If you want to make things a bit easier to manage when it comes to the project side of things, look for a white label site builder with project and client management tools.
Within Brizy Cloud, for instance, agencies can create up to 100 workspaces.
These workspaces give you dedicated areas to store all the projects you’re working on for each client.
In addition to project management tools that help you stay better organized, the Brizy white label site builder also works as a client management solution. And if you plan on reselling the website builder, there are billing tools included to streamline that process as well.
All of this will be easy to manage from your accounts management dashboard.
Under the Clients tab, set up all your web design clients as free users. Then invite them as team members to give them access to the corresponding workspace you’ve set up for them.
You can also resell the website builder. You can do this using the included billing solution via Stripe. That will let you bill your clients monthly or yearly and create a stand alone revenue stream where your clients build the websites for themselves and you get paid for it. You’ll have your own Brizy Cloud.
You can offer free and premium plans as a reseller. For those who upgrade to your Pro plan, setting up a payment processor within Brizy Cloud is easy. You have the option to integrate with Stripe’s payment processor.
As a bonus, we’ll give you a series of white label videos that you can use to create website builder documentation for your users.
Being able to offer this type of DIY support — on top of any hands-on support you offer via your Support channel — is a great way to encourage users to choose your Pro plan. It’s also a good way to turn one-time website clients into loyal clients who look to you as a trusted partner.
Want to keep your web design clients from seeing which website builder you’re going to use to create their site? You should.
A high-quality white label website builder will do more than just enable you to replace the builder logo with your own branding. Robust white label functionality will empower you to improve your agency’s productivity and profitability.
If you’re curious about what this excellent tool can do for your agency, book a free demo of Brizy Cloud today.
It’s time to stop worrying if AI is going to take your job and instead start using AI to expand the services you can offer to clients and the skills you can add to your résumé.
There are thousands of AI-powered apps out there that can take over your grunt work, and fill in the gaps where your own experience is weak. Take a glance through this list, you’re sure to find something that will make your workday easier, more enjoyable, and more profitable.
Remember that argument that designers should know how to code, or at least understand how code works? Not anymore. You don’t need to fall back on templates or frameworks, GitHub Copilot will write bespoke code for you.
Copilot is frighteningly powerful. Simply type the code you want into your favorite code editor as comments, and Copilot will write the code you need. It works best when deployed on short snippets like functions. And it works with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and practically anything else.
Cranking out branding day in and day out can kill anyone’s creativity. There are only so many times you can try and sell a client on pink, only to have them choose the blue again.
If your portfolio is starting to look a little samey thanks to its color choices then you should look into Khroma, an awesome little tool that applied machine learning directly to you, to discover the colors you like best. You’ll still have to sell them to your clients, but at least you’ll have plenty of options.
If you’re one of those designers who creates an advert, only for the client to ask you to “throw in some copy”, then you need a tool like Writesonic.
Writesonic is a GPT-4 powered writing app that is powerful, and flexible. It works great for short passages of marketing text. It even takes a pretty good stab at website copy, so you can stop nagging your client for content, generate something for them, and get on with the design work.
Sometimes what you really need is a proof-of-concept or a functioning prototype to take to testers. Building one can be challenging, and hiring a dev team too early can be ruinously expensive.
Debuild is an amazing AI tool that can build web apps in minutes by using AI to generate SQL and React components. It’s a superb way to get going with a functional app that just needs its UI designed.
At this point, we’re all sick of designing with Open Sans and Lato. But finding a good font pairing that works just as well can be tough unless you’re a typography expert.
Fontjoy is a handy tool that generates font pairings using AI. All you need to do is tell it whether you want more or less contrast, then hit the “generate” button.
Ever ask a client for a product shot, only to receive a quick snap they took on their cellphone? Clients rarely have professional-grade images available and assume designers can just fix up images in Photoshop.
You don’t need to bother booting up PS thanks to Vance, an excellent AI-powered app that polishes photos for you. It can sharpen, denoise, upscale, enhance, and retouch images in any way you need. It’s especially handy for upscaling images.
One of the most time-consuming parts of the design process is testing. It’s not enough to ask your friends, and full-on UX studies are beyond the budget of most projects.
VisualEyes is a game-changer for UI designers. Using AI it analyses eye-tracking to study your designs and lets you know what’s good enough, and what needs more work.
Designers that need to generate longer text, for blogs, or social media posts, should check out Jasper. It’s an advanced AI writing tool that does a good job of generating content.
Jasper delivers one of the most human-like writing services, which is to say it’s less robotic than most of its rivals. You’re still going to need to spend time editing the text to make it sound less cold and less formal. But if you have the time to polish, Jasper will give you a head start on content.
Designing emails must be one of the most tedious jobs a designer is tasked with. Not only do you have to engage readers quickly, but you have to do it in a medium that is 15 years behind technology on the web.
Postcards is an excellent solution that uses AI to turbocharge your email-building process. There are mobile-friendly templates, drag-and-drop editing, plus integration with most major marketing platforms, all backed with AI intelligence.
Illustration is one of the most time-consuming side jobs designers are asked to do. Happily, there are lots of AI-powered apps that will tackle this most onerous of jobs for you.
Perhaps the most promising illustration tool is Midjourney, which is still in beta but still manages to deliver exceptional results — especially if you need a realistic portrait of an elfin woman in a floaty dress. (Don’t blame the tool, blame the prompts!)
