Free Resources for your Website!

Good quality images are important for your website as it helps with the aesthetics. It is always best to take your own images if you have the resources and they will be unique to you and your business. However, we know this is not always going to be the case so luckily there are many free image libraries around that you can use and download images for free.

Remember you can't just use any image on the internet as there will probably be Copyright on them and you would either need permission from the photographer or purchase them.

These are licensed images available for public use, so you don’t need to worry about copyright or credit issues.

Image libraries:

• Unsplash: This is a fantastic stock photo library offering over 3.5million free images for you to use. You can even donate to the creator if wanted. It's owned by Getty Images

• StockSnap: Find stock images from a wide range of categories: business, travel, tech, people, food, and more. They offer beautiful, high-quality stock photos for just about any use you can think of - including commercial usage - for free.

• PicJumbo: A free stock photo site by designer & photographer Viktor Hanacek. It all started when all regular stock photo sites rejected his photos due to "lack of quality". People have downloaded more than 2,500,000+ pictures from picjumbo and now it's one of the best sites with free stock photos featured in the biggest online publications.

• Pixabay: Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing royalty free images, videos and music. All content is released under the Pixabay License, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist - even for commercial purposes.

Choosing the typography/fonts for your website and brand is a crucial element for any individual or business. You can spend many hours scrolling through the thousands of fonts available trying to decide what will work for you. Many choose different fonts for headings and standard text for pages to maximise the aesthetics of your website.

Font libraries

• Google Fonts: This is a fabulous resource for Free fonts that you can be use across all mediums including web fonts through to print and graphic design. There are thousands of fonts available here allowing you to test the font by typing a word or sentence to view what it looks like.

• Dafont: Typefaces are an essential part of any creative project, and DaFont offers a great resource for designers who want to have access to high-quality free fonts. Apart from standard serif or sans Serif types there's also unique categories like medieval letterforms that can be fun experiment with!

• FontSpace: An impressive collection with tens of thousands of free fonts in various styles and collections. Many are licensed for commercial use. FontSpace is made up of thousands of unique font creators who contribute to the foundry all the time.

• FontStruct: This is a great tool allowing you to create your very own fonts, perfect for logo creation. With FontStruct you can easily create fonts using geometrical shapes. Once you're done building, FontStruct generates TrueType fonts, ready to download and use in any application.

Using icons are a great way to highlight areas of your website or create a symbol for a service you offer helping save space, and convey information quickly, and not be limited to one language.

Icon libraries:

• Iconmonstr: is a free, monstrously big and continuously growing source of simple icons run by one creator. Created by Alexander Kahlkopf, a senior designer from Germany with over 20 years of professional experience in icon design.

• Captian Icon: Captain Icon is the go-to place for all your icons! They offer over 350 of them, in various categories. You can zoom into each one without losing quality so they are perfect if you need high resolutions or just want to see what an icon looks like up close.

• Icons8: 1,198,700 Free icons that match each other. Large icon packs of over 10k icons, so you can find visually consistent icons for all your designs.

• FreePik: Helping you bring ideas to life through icons and other creative resources. Offering the best high-quality content: illustrations, photos, icons, mockups, and presentations templates

• Udo Icons: The Udo web builder platform has thousands of icons available as a standard option for your website to use freely as you see fit. Easily select an icon directly from your text editor and resize it, changing the colour to suit.

You will need a website builder to create all the above features for your new website. There are many website builders around and all have their positives and negatives and levels of expertise required.

The main decision we believe is around whether you have the skills to create a website or are you looking for help to do so. Many start the process of building their own website then generally become frustrated and give up due to time constraints or it all just becomes to hard.

Website Builders:

• Udo: A web builder platform that we have designed and developed internally. It is a powerful and easy system to use with loads of functionality to choose from. Whether you want a simple brochure-style website or a complex eCommerce website, everything is modular without the need for any plugins. No coding is required as it is all drag and drop click and edit technology and is fully Google search engine friendly. Our model is more about helping get you started and online then showing you how to update and add content.
  We Create - U update - We support

• WordPress: Is possibly the most well-known web platform in the market and was built for blogging although many also use it for website creation. Most sites are template based and rely heavily on plugins to work properly which you may need to pay for. WordPress is a popular platform, especially with designers hence you may need to understand some coding.

• Wix: This site builder uses a drag-and-drop editor and has ready-made layouts that allow you to create a website in minutes, making it handy for beginners who don’t need a lot of customisation options.Wix's optimisation is also better suited for desktop viewing. Keep that in mind if you want to prioritize responsive web designs or mobile users and it is hard to come back from if you break the design.

• Squarespace: This is a popular platform for business needs, especially among SMBs and entrepreneurs. Many opt for Squarespace because of its friendly user interface and pleasing visuals. The free plan isn't as flexible as the other options on this list, so you'll need to pay for most of its plugins and advanced features. Again it can be hard to come back if you break the design.