Best Free and Open Source Web Design Software Solutions

We’re emphasizing the nuances of web design solutions!

The effectiveness of a design combines basic principles like contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity. But these are never standard. These are customized according to the specific requirement. This article illustrates a brief overview of the basic principles, the features and the best free and open-source web design software solutions!

Web Design Principles

A website is designed and developed with a belief and purpose. It fulfills the need to communicate, needs to justify the business, must be optimized, carries a typeface, has colours, images, effective navigation, an effective layout, “F” pattern design, must take less time to load, and should be mobile friendly.

Web Design Elements

A design combines various elements – size, shape, contrast, line, thickness, type, pattern repetition, motif illustration, fonts, textures, graphic concepts and spatial relationship.

Additionally, Drag-and-drop, Templates, Element libraries, Syntax Highlighting, Auto-completion, Plugins and Integrations, Cross-platform support, Collaborative editing, Content Management and Language support.

• Interactive Design: A website needs to have a simple design with an interactive user interface. A user-friendly website needs to be mobile compatible, accessible to all users, must have a well-informed information architecture, well-formatted content, easy to scan content, fast load time, browser consistency, effective navigation, advanced search, custom 404 pages, good internal linking, informative header and footer, various ways to explore content.
• Valid Markups: Websites should adhere to design best practices and have clean code and valid markup. A contrasting colour scheme makes the content readable and an effective overall appearance.
• The Usable Form: The business forms should be usable, allowing users to interact with the site, and very essential to generate leads. It involves making use of correct labels for all fields, following best design practices, having a minimum number of fields, offering tooltip and suggestions, displaying an on-screen message on completion and making use of correct validation.

Web Design Challenges

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Web design applications often pose some challenges:

• Creating something new
• Changing colours and themes
• Copying a complicated layout
• Designing and coding a site using new tools
• Trying new methodologies
• Refining an old design
• Applying UX design principles to your SEO

The new design software is built to croak such challenges, and this can be laid-off to the scope of upcoming web design software solutions.

Best Open Source Web Design Software

An effective website needs to be user-friendly. It is mobile compatible, accessible to all users, well-planned information architecture, well-formatted content that is easy to scan, have fast load times, is browser consistent, has effective navigation, and handles errors effectively. Here are examples of the best open source web design software:

GIMP

GIMP is a free, open-source software to design websites. It is user-friendly and contains tips and tricks for beginners. It makes it easy to produce alterations and revisions that the image requires.

Features of GIMP

• Useful to design the best website
• File handling
• Animation
• Advanced Manipulation
• Extensible
• Tile-based memory management

Brackets

It is a free and open-source source code editor useful for front-end developers. It features hot reloading to view live changes.

Features of Brackets

• Live HTML development
• CSS hinting
• Extracts design information from a PSD file for the convenience of coding in CSS

openElement

openElements is a free and open-source authoring program to design web applications. Professionals use it to write necessary codes, functions, displays. It is lightweight, has built-in functions, ready to use elements, graphics that maximizes productivity. It supports HTML5, CSS3, jQuery and responsive design. It is compatible with XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, Vista. It is completely free to use.

Features of openElement

• Intuitive Interface
• Customizing Tools
• Managed Code
• Page Layers
• HTML5 and CSS3
• Cross-Browser Compatibility
• Multilingual Websites
• SEO
• Web Design
• Customizable CSS
• Free Plan
• WYSIWYG Interface
• Dedicated How-to Page
• Elements

Adobe Dreamweaver

Adobe Dreamweaver software uses HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript. It provides a WYSIWYG interface. It is the defacto software solution for website design. It offers a free trial.

Features of Adobe Dreamweaver

• Integrated CMS Support.
• Intelligent Coding Assistance
• Comprehensive CSS Support
• Developer Workspace
• Multi-Monitor (Windows Only)
• Starter Templates
• Code Collapsing
• Code Themes
• Code Introspection
• HiDPI (Windows Only)
• Syntax Highlighting

Mobirise

Mobirise builder comes with some free and premium HTML themes, templates, sliders, galleries, articles, countdowns, counters, full-screen intros, images, videos, data tables, features, pricing tables, progress bar and cycles, tabs, accordions and timelines. It also provides 4000+ website blocks in free and premium HTML themes.

Features of Mobirise

• No Coding Mobile Friendly
• Unique Styles
• Mobile Friendly
• Unique Styles
• Unlimited Sites

Webflow

It is built upon HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. It is a free design tool that translates your design into clean semantic code that is ready to publish to the web. This software is W3c compliant, does not bring in messy code inline classes. It comes with drag-and-drop site builders. It allows exporting HTML, CSS and images in a handy ZIP file.

Features of Webflow

• It is good for beginners in web design
• Allows building with raw ingredients – drag and drop
• with sliders, tabs, background videos etc.
• Create reusable symbols like navbars, footers, signup forms
• Manage element structure
• Create reusable CSS classes
• Design responsive websites
• Edit and update site content right on the page
• Define your content structure, and design with real data
• Build website interactions and animations visually
• Hosting

Webydo

This design tool offers a free 30-day trial. It allows dragging and dropping elements onto the design canvas to create beautiful custom websites down to the last pixel. It provides content management. It is good to design responsive websites.

Features of Webydo

• Design without code
• Suggest new features
• Report bugs
• Create pixel-perfect responsive websites with unique custom design – launch responsive websites
• Designs are similar to Photoshop
• Designs are SEO Friendly
• Central Dashboard
• White Label Branding
• Client Billing

Google Web Designer

Custom software development companies use Google Web Designer (GWD) as one of the responsive web design service programs to create interactive HTML5 website. This free web design software is easy to learn and use for beginners. It creates cross-screen compatible content, design and builds HTML5 advertisements using an integrated visual and code interface.

Features of Google Web Designer

• Fluid Layout
• Event System
• 3D Authoring Environment
• HTML with Pages
• Publish Directly to DoubleClick Studios
• Integration With Google Drive
• BYOC (Build Your Own Component)
• Animation Modes

In Conclusion: Which web design software should you choose?

Web design tools discussed here are free and open-source. These offer layout, colour, monochrome, complementary and typography as primary features. These focus on the fine arts, research different designs before use, keeps the design simple and intuitive, bring in the best UI/UX design experience, and make the best web designers understand the user interface (UI) basics. We hope this list helps. We use both free and paid versions. Let us know if you want web design services or wish to create a web design software solution.

Hope this discussion on Web Design software will help you in making decisions wisely. Please share your suggestions at info@itfirms.co