Tools for Web Designers and Site Maintenance
Color palettes, image optimization, favicons, and the recurring small tasks behind building and maintaining a website.
The visible design work — layout, typography, the big creative decisions — gets the attention, but a lot of a web designer's actual week is smaller, more mechanical tasks: optimizing an image before upload, generating a favicon, building a mockup to show a client. None of it is hard, but it adds up.
Color systems, not just single colors
A cohesive palette and a matching gradient save the back-and-forth of manually picking complementary colors by eye, especially useful when starting a new project's visual identity from scratch.
Color Palette Generator Gradient Generator
The favicon nobody thinks about until launch
It's a tiny detail, but a missing or default favicon is one of the more noticeable signs of an unfinished site — worth generating early rather than as an afterthought.
Favicon GeneratorImage optimization before it becomes a performance problem
Unoptimized images are one of the most common, avoidable causes of a slow-loading site. Compressing and correctly resizing images before they ever get uploaded is a five-minute habit that prevents a much bigger performance conversation later.
Compress Image Resize & CropShowing a client what something will look like
A design mockup in a realistic device frame communicates a concept far better than a flat image file when presenting to a client who isn't going to visualize it themselves.
Mockup GeneratorA robots.txt and sitemap generator is worth running on every new site before launch — it's a five-minute technical SEO step that's easy to forget entirely if it's not part of a standard checklist.
Recently added
A handful of newer additions round out the design toolkit: a color contrast checker for accessibility checks, a font pairing tool with curated heading/body combinations, and visual generators for box-shadow, border-radius, and CSS clip-path — the small CSS details that used to mean digging through documentation.
Color Contrast Checker Font Pairing Tool Box Shadow Generator Border Radius Generator CSS Clip-Path GeneratorA worked example: a launch-week checklist
Imagine a five-page site for a local bakery going live on Friday. On Monday, pick a base color and generate a palette, then paste the chosen hex values into the HEX / RGB / HSL converter so the CSS and the design file use the same numbers. On Tuesday, run the heading and body colors through the contrast checker; body text on a cream background often fails at a lighter brown than you expect, and nudging the lightness a few points can fix it. WCAG AA asks for a ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal-size text, so test the real pairs rather than judging by eye.
On Wednesday, compress and resize the hero photos. A 4 MB camera photo is rarely needed at a 1,200-pixel display width, and shrinking it is the easiest speed win available. Thursday is for the favicon, the robots.txt and sitemap, and one device mockup for the client to approve. Friday morning, do a final pass of the pages on a phone.
Mistakes designers make with small tasks
- Choosing a palette first and checking contrast last, which forces a repaint of the whole design.
- Uploading original, uncompressed photos and relying on the browser to scale them down.
- Forgetting a favicon at more than one size, so tabs and bookmarks look inconsistent.
- Publishing a sitemap that lists draft or test pages.
Each tool runs in the browser and Professional Tools include 10 trial usages a day, which covers a typical project day, while Premium Applications such as the Robots and Sitemap generator include 2. For a launch crunch, a day pass lifts the cap.
Watch: the CSS and color tools above
The color converter and the contrast checker, with a short walkthrough for contrast testing.
HEX / RGB / HSL Converter
The complete set:
See the full Web Designer toolkit