Attention small business owners: if you’re anything like us, then you’ll want to take advantage of these insanely practical and FREE tools to help make your website look 10x more professional. This post isn’t sponsored in any way. We’re simply ~obsessed~ with each of these tools and use them weekly!
If you’re looking for quick and easy ways to help make your website (and social media posts) look more professional, look no further than these 3 free tools – no design experience required!
1. Canva
Meridian Creative is team Canva all the way! While other software programs, like Adobe, are popular among designers for creating social posts and website graphics, we simply feel that Canva is much more time efficient for us and offers more than enough customization options to give our graphics a custom design.
Use it to create quick social graphics, website banners and graphics, marketing materials, and more ~without~ having any formal design experience. Canva offers hundreds of gorgeous templates you can use for any social media platform and for anywhere on your website that needs a custom size graphic that matches your brand.
We also love to recommend Canva to any clients looking for a quick and efficient way to implement their new branding into their social media graphics without a huge learning curve. You can easily use your brand colors, upload your logos or custom fonts, and access your designs via their mobile app—um, say less.
While Canva does offer a paid Premium version, there’s still plenty you can do with the free version. It’s a great free tool to help your website stand out and look more professional.
2. Unsplash / Pexels
Don’t have a fancy camera or a professional brand photographer on hand? Don’t let that hold you back from clicking publish on blog posts or your DIY website! Unsplash and Pexels each offer thousands of high-quality, professional photos you can use for free on your website and social media posts. Not only are they stunning and creative photos, but they are incredibly diverse and inclusive! Using professional stock imagery over DIY photos will always make your website look 10x more professional—trust us.
We love to use both sites when searching for professional stock imagery if brand photos are not an option for our clients. While we always prefer to use custom professional photos on client sites, we can almost always find beautiful stock imagery that closely aligns with the brand we’re working with on Pexels or Unsplash.
Since we also work in the creative space, we wanted to note that these gorgeous, royalty-free images are provided by incredibly talented photographers and creators around the world. While you certainly do not have to, feel free to say ‘thank you’ by donating directly to them or giving them photo credits wherever you choose to use the image(s). Their name and information will be provided every time you download an image.
3. Grammarly
Writing and grammar are not for everyone and that’s OKAY! Just install the Google Chrome extension for Grammarly, create a (free) account, and it will automatically catch mistakes in your writing when adding DIY content to your website, emails, and more!
Using poor grammar throughout your website will inevitably make you look careless and unprofessional. That may sound a bit harsh, but it’s a bigger deal than you may realize to potential customers. We use Grammarly daily as we work, especially while writing content for client sites.
Not only does it catch spelling mistakes, but it’ll let you know if a comma is out of place, you’re missing a word, or if your sentence structure simply doesn’t come out grammatically correct. To be honest, Grammarly is highly underrated for how practical, easy-to-use, and essential it is for businesses. Don’t miss out on this awesome tool!
Trust us when we say each of these tools has been a total game changer for our business and our client websites! Do you use any of these already? Are we missing any? Let us know what free tools you’ve been using to make your website look more professional so we can keep adding to the list!
