Web designing is a demanding process. As digital marketing and e-commerce expand at a lightning pace, businesses emphasize on differentiating themselves from competition, and it begins with a unique and appealing website design. That means more opportunities for designers and at the same time, greater challenge to balance the quality of Web Design Services with allocated time and money.

Courtesy Mobile App Development Companies in India, dozens of powerful, flexible web apps are available today to handle each stage, from moodboard to prototype, thus streamlining the design workflow. Such tools skirt away designers’ frustration of redoing the same part from the scratch, allowing them to work on three or even more iterations instead of toiling hard on one.

There’s no absolute yardstick to label an app or the other as the best, however, certain tweaks and addition of specific features could make one tool better suited for a particular task. Here is a list of five apps, each focused on one specific stage of web designing, which can make the job a breeze.

Canva

Whether your client shares a wordy brand guide or a vague idea of their aesthetic requirements, you can use Canva, a simple drag-and-drop tool, to create at least two to three moodboards without too much workload.

Moodboard is an extensive collection of images, typography and branding, you propose to your client at the very first stage. Canva, powered by millions of images, photo filters, icons, and hundreds of fonts, hands an intuitive tool to even non-designers to customize pre-existing moodboards in a matter of minutes.

You can try out Canva business tier for free for 30 days.

Balsamiq

Balsamiq is simplistic wireframing mockup software that lets you drag and drop images and leave notes alongside your designs. It has an edge over other wireframe tools as it allows multiple editors to work on a project although it lacks real-time collaboration feature.

One of the key reasons why companies like Apple, Skype, Zappos, and Tesla have been using this web app is that it ditches unnecessary features to keep the process of site blueprinting simple, focused and ultra-productive.

Free trial is available for 30 days.

Affinity

To begin with, Affinity bagged Apple’s “App of the Year” award, which justifies it being on our list. It is a powerful, reliable and fast graphic design tool that works in the Mac environment.

Affinity’s interface resembles that of Illustrator or Photoshop, but it does way with less frequently used tools such as the Pucker Tool, and the Bloat Tool.  It’s ideal for those seeking high precision in drawing vectors, and more importantly, you hardly see it crashing.

You can lay your hands on Affinity with a one-time payment while a free trial is available for 10 days.

Justinmind

It’s a relatively new web app that shot to fame courtesy some of its user clients, such as IBM and Adobe. It comes handy at a very crucial stage- the HTML prototyping. Justinmind features UI libraries packed with more than 1,000 UI elements ready to be tested to check if the design will work smoothly.

This kind of prototyping tool involves the client feedback at the right time – just before the coding begins – thus allowing the designer to timely incorporate the suggestions, which saves both time and money later.

One thing I love about Justinmind is that it lets you export and share the design and also save for future projects. Unfortunately, it isn’t available for free trial.

Evernote Web Clipper

The job is not done once you are through with the core stages of design process. You need to gather feedback on design and act on it for further enhancements. Evernote Web Clipper efficiently automates this part of the process.

Web Clipper is essentially a research and bookmarking tool that doubles up as a means for gathering feedback. It integrates smoothly with the browser and lets you easily trace anything you have saved from the web. It’s better than bookmarks for its ability to save, tag and comment on page.

Web apps cannot be a substitute to your craftsmanship and prowess at designing but certainly they can take off a lot of unnecessary load that accompanies the process. As you get familiar with more and more tools, you tend to organize the tasks better and extract better results without stressing too much on input.

An aspect of designing often masked by other core functions is the relationship with clients. If you are using web apps for designing, you would know these tools simplify communication of technical details with the clients, encouraging better participation from both sides. After all, your designs will align with the client’s vision only if the exchange of ideas and feedback is at a comprehendible level.

Author Bio:

Anurag Gupta is a budding entrepreneur with stakes in WeblinkIndia.net an acclaimed Web Designing & Development Company, headquartered in India. He also happens to be a keen writer, sharing insights, tips, and tutorials on subjects related to the ever evolving landscape of Web Designing and Development.