No matter how very modest you keep your launch, your business has to have a web presence in order to reach the billions of users who access the internet. Otherwise, it may be losing out on a considerable amount of prospective customers. Hence, getting in touch with a web development company is a must to make your business prosperous.

You will have to know what exactly you want your site to do for your business and give a brief to the developers, and they shall be taking care of the rest. However, if you are one of those do-it-yourself types, you can actually built a site on your own, provided you have some idea about web design. Following is a list of web design & development tools that can be used by amateur designers too, like you, without sacrificing on quality.

#1 Web Design Tools Free – Yola:

With Yola you can build a very basic website. All that you need to do is pick a template and fill out a few forms. Once you are done with the outline, you need to fine-tune your website with an integrated editing tool. It has the goods, with which you can dig into the web. Third party services like Google Maps and PayPal, Picnik for editing photos and Flickr for sharing photos, can be added.

#2 Web Design Software Tools – WIX:

With this you can have a nice looking site in no time at all. Its editor is very easy to use and is a ‘what you see is what you get’ type. However, it has got a major drawback, it is based on Adobe Flash, which is not supported by certain mobile devices including the ones manufactured by Apple. If you are fine with this, then you will be happy to know that the tool comprises some of the most sophisticated templates that are easy to customize and fit almost all your business requirements. WIX makes image-heavy sites that are especially fit for photo galleries, which can show clients what your business does.

#3 CSS Pre-Processors Design Tools:

CSS or Cascading Style Sheet is very convenient to write. The syntax is pretty straightforward and easy to understand. But, in case of bigger projects, you may have to manage multiple style-sheets in order to  handle several CSS lines, a situation quite hard to maintain.

This is the point you can start using CSS Pre-Processors, with which you can write CSS in the form of programming with functions and variables, which then can be amassed into a browser-compliant format of CSS. CSS properties can also be used with special rules like @include and @extend. Some examples of CSS Pre-Processors would be Myth, Stylus, LESS and Sass.

#4 Web Design Tool – Task Runner:

This is a common tool used by a reputed web development company. A website making process is essentially repetitive. It comprises compilation, minification, concatenating files, unit testing, browser refreshing, linting, to name a few.

However, with Task Runner, the process can be automated. Some examples of this tool would be Gulp and Grunt. You can instruct these to do a set of tasks and they will do it accordingly.

#5 Free Website Template Engine Tool:

It is simple to create a static HTML page. However, if there are multiple HTML pages to take care of, things can go out of control, creating a mess of a project. These pages share certain common components like Header, Footer and Sidebar. So, if you have to change something in the Sidebar, you need to make the same alteration in all the pages. This is a hassle that can be avoided with Template Engines, like, Handlebars, Jade and Kit. Each of these has its own conventions of writing. For instance, Kit, comes only with import and variables capability which are declared with an easy HTML comment tag. Handlebars and Jade, on the other hand, come with a lot of good features for catering to more complicated projects.

#6 Free Web Design Tools – Jimdo:

With the free version of Jimdo, you can do what an experienced web developer does. It’s this web design software you are recommended to spring for upgrades for the purpose of unlocking some cool features of business, like custom newsletters in order to keep in touch with PayPal stores, page-view stats, customers and password-protected employees-only pages.

#7 Web Development Toolkit for Website Design:

Development Toolkit comprises a number of tools in one app. If you do not find text-based setting in Grunt to be uncomfortable, you can go for GUI app.

Codekit is a similar app that includes Sass, LESS, Jade, Uglify, Siml, Bower, etc.

#8 Synchronized Tools for Testing and Website Design:

If you are building a responsive website, this can be called an inevitable tool. With synchronized testing, you can test your site on multiple devices.

Browser reloading and interactions like scrolling and clicking are reflected across all devices simultaneously, saving you the pain of doing a task again and again.

The tools mentioned here are used by every web development company. You too can use these to make your site, or can of course, hire a company to do the job for you.