Tools
Below you will find a list of 41 carefully selected tools and services that I’ve used over the past 14 years as a freelance web designer and internet entrepreneur.
If you find something useful, I hope it will server you well. In the future, I will be writing a post or creating a short video to share my experience with each tool.
In addition to the tools below, don’t forget to check out my FREE Pro WordPress Web Design Blueprint Course!
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Featured in: Paid Tools
AnalyticsWP
AnalyticsWP is a lightweight, feature-rich, and GDPR-compliant website analytics plugin for WordPress. If you care about your users’ privacy and find Google Analytics overwhelming, you’ll appreciate how AnalyticsWP simplifies everything. It delivers all the essential traffic insights you need to grow your site—without the clutter. One standout feature I especially love is its seamless sales tracking integration with SureCart!
Featured in: Paid Tools
NordVPN
Why oh why would I recommend NordVPN? In this current climate, privacy and security is of paramount importance. Especially if you performa a lot of activities online for your business. I’ve used NordVPN for as long as I can remember. I love their service and transparency and therefore recommended them 100%.
Featured in: Free Tools
WordPress Opensource
New to WordPress? I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about it. WordPress powers 43% of all websites on the internet. For good reason too. It is, in my opinion, the best foundation platform for building a website or application. More over, it’s completely FREE! Not to be mistaken for WordPress.com, that’s something else entirely for a different audience.
Featured in: Free Tools
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is without a doubt the most used eCommerce solution for WordPress. I’ve used WooCommerce on many personal and client website projects. It is not the best solution out there, although 3.6 million users will probably argue with that. It is, however, FREE for the most part. Don’t forget to check out my WooCommerce course modules included with the membership.
Featured in: Paid Tools
BugHerd
BugHerd is the perfect tool if you are building websites for your clients! BugHerd is a powerful feedback and bug tracking tool created for designers, dev teams, and project managers. Save time by not having to second guess what clients are looking for, with direct feedback you can work seamlessly through your projects and meet your deadlines quickly.
Featured in: Paid Tools
Breakdance
Breakdance is an exciting and super user-friendly page/website builder theme for WordPress. Created by the original creator of Oxygen Builder, Breakdance is fast becoming one of the most popular visual website design tool for WordPress.
Featured in: Paid Tools
WPGridBuilder
WPGridBuilder is a plugin designed to help you create advanced grid layouts with real-time faceted search and filtering features. This very page uses filtering facets created in WPGridBuilder to help you filter tools by pricing modal and category.
Featured in: Paid Tools
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a complete social media, blogging, and marketing scheduling and calendar tool. It comes with a host of features including a task manager and social analytics. I started using CoSchedule in 2018 and continue to do so today.
Featured in: Free Tools
W3 CSS Validator
A super useful tool for checking and validating your CSS code and snippets. You can use this tool to crawl a URL, enter some code, or upload a file.
Featured in: Free Tools
CSS Tricks
CSS Tricks is one of the oldest resources sites for web designers. The perfect reference site for HTML and CSS code snippets. What every you’re looking for, chances you’ll find it on CSS Tricks!
Featured in: Free Tools
Clippy
A useful and inspiring CSS clip-path generator for creating interesting shapes and borders for your website elements.
Featured in: Free Tools
HTML Color Codes
A copy-and-paste color palette tool for UI designers. Let’s you copy HTML, Hex, RGB and HSL color code values with a intuitive color picker.
Featured in: Free Tools
uiGradients
Powerful and fast color gradient generator to help you create some truly awesome backgrounds for your website. Be warned, this tool can get very addictive 🙂
Featured in: Free Tools
Tints + Shades
A simple tool that you can use to enter the Hexdecimal color codes to generate tints and shades for your web design projects.
Featured in: Free Tools
Ionicons
Beautifully hand-crafted open-source icons for web and app UI. If your design workflow is old school and you like writing code, this is for you!
Featured in: Paid Tools
Hexometer
Hexometer is a 24/7 website health and SEO monitoring service for website owners. Features include uptime monitoring, user-experience monitoring, performance and security monitoring.
Featured in: Paid Tools
Fiverr
Believe it or not, Fiverr was the first platform I ever used to start selling digital products, way back in 2012. With their reasonably low fees, it remains to be a great platform to get started on. Whether you’re looking to sell digital products or a service, I recommend trying out Fiverr.
Featured in: Paid Tools
Sellfy
If you are starting your online venture as a content creator and want to sell online without having to set everything up from scratch, check out Sellfy. Sellfy is a complete e-commerce platform for content creators and small businesses. Sell both digital and physical products.
Featured in: Paid Tools
CSS Hero 5
Whether you use a website builder plugin or generic theme, CSS Hero will empower you with real-time visual design features to help you customize your website on a whole new level. I started using CSS Hero with Oxygen a while back. This is an underrated plugin that is great for beginners.
Featured in: Free Tools
MDN Directory
Online directory of resources, references, and coding guides for devs. If you are learning web design, MDN is a great site to have in your bookmarks.
Featured in: Free Tools
Local WP
LocalWP is a powerful desktop application for creating and developing WordPress websites on your local computer. This ideal if you are not ready to create a LIVE website or just want to test or learn something new.
Featured in: Paid Tools
ACSS
ACSS is another popular add-on plugin that works with page builders like Bricks, Oxygen, and now Breakdance. It is one of the few add-ons I recommend, and I use this on Van Marciano Pro.
Featured in: Paid Tools
BricksForge
If you’re looking for a great add-on plugin for Bricks, check out BricksForge. BricksForge lets you create animations and effects in Bricks, as well as a host of other cool things.
Featured in: Paid Tools
LearnDash
LearnDash is a premium learning management system plugin for WordPress. I use LearnDash here on Van Marciano Pro to create and manage all of the course content, topics, modules, and more.
Featured in: Paid Tools
WPCodeBox
WPCodeBox is a useful and feature-rich code snippets management plugin for WordPress. It works seamlessly with page builder tools like Bricks and Oxygen.
Featured in: Paid Tools
Siteground
I use and recommend Siteground website hosting for a few reasons. It is affordable and their technical support is very good. I can say this because I’ve been a Siteground customer for almost 10 years!
Featured in: Paid Tools
Oxygen Builder 6.0
Oxygen Builder is my favorite visual design tool plugin for WordPress. I started using Oxygen back in 2018 and it has been a big part of my success online as a content creator and freelance designer.
Featured in: Paid Tools
Bricks Builder
Powerful visual web design theme for WordPress. I started using Bricks back in 2022, coming from the Oxygen realm. I continue to use Bricks in many WordPress projects today.
