Support tools for website creation and management

The tool of choice for many companies is Slack. In fact, we use Slack for most of our team communication here at Help Scout. We know how powerful a good knowledge base can be for customers, so why not create something similar for internal use? Slab is a multifunctional tool that works as an internal wiki and project management tool. Though asynchronous communication has its upsides, some conversations need to happen in real time, and Zoom is a great tool for those occasions.

You can do voice-only or video calls, and Zoom works equally well for one-to-one and group chats. We like to use Zoom for one-on-ones and team meetings. We also use it for company meetings and webinars since lots of people can dial in to a call without degrading the quality.

You can think of Pitch like a super-charged, web-based version of PowerPoint. With Pitch you can create beautiful presentations or proposals to effectively communicate your ideas. However, the real differentiators are their collaboration features like comments, reactions, and even the ability to do live meetings in the tool to edit together in real time.

We tend to use Pitch to present project ideas or give performance updates. JIRA is the tool we — and many other teams — use to do that. A handful of the tools on this list — Zoom, Pitch, and Slack — are basically paid versions of Google tools. You can create an internal knowledge base of sorts using Google Docs.

If you need to chat in real time, Google Hangouts is an option. Google Slides lets you create PowerPoint-style presentations. Best of all, they come at no additional cost. Here are some extra resources for those who want to invest a little more time and energy into their career development. Support Driven is actually a few different things: They have a job board dedicated to support-type jobs more on that below , and they also have a Slack community for those looking to engage with other professionals.

They even host a conference most years for those who want to connect in-person with other support folks. We strongly encourage anyone working in support to check them out. Press 1 For Nick is a relatively new podcast focused on customer service and customer experience.

They release new episodes weekly, discussing support stories, lessons learned, and best practices you can use to make your own customer support even better. If you come across an episode with a particularly salient message or experience, consider sending it out to your team and setting up a time to discuss it as a group.

The hosts are two long-time support professionals with a lot of great insights to share from their own experiences. Outside of best practices and other support learnings, they also share stories from listeners and cover topics around self-care and general best practices for communicating with customers. The most important resource any support team has is its people, but finding good talent can be difficult.

Below are some different job boards you can utilize when looking for your next new hire. If you are interested in the top digital resources for your next digital build, read on to learn about the essential tools for website design optimization. According to a Toronto based Website design company , when you build a new website design, you need to install reliable graphic design resources.

Graphic design resources are essential to design quality visuals, graphics, and videos for your website. With the top graphics tools, you can design and create various resources and templates. To enhance the quality of your visuals, these resources allow you to access unique fonts, colors, themes, and icons. At the same time, graphic design tools provide an abundance of resources to source stock photos, illustrations, inspirations, and typography.

Once installed, these tools can help you design professional graphics for your enhanced website design. Purchase graphic design resources in order to optimize your website design. DevOps tools are essential resources to optimize website designs. When properly configured, DevOps tools help web design teams accelerate software releases.

These tools combine the efforts of development and operations teams in order to deliver an automated, secure, hybrid solution. Implementing DevOps practice involves working towards the achievement of principles like speed, agility, quality, and security. The best DevOps tools offer an end-to-end solution for your development pipeline. At the same time, platforms are highly available, scalable, and integrated with build tools, servers, and infrastructure management tools.

Consider the top DevOps tools in order to optimize your website design. Platform management tools help you track, monitor, and improve your website design. Platform management can be a complex, challenging process. Digital platform management tools help you ensure consistent operations across all aspects of your website.

Use these tools to optimize data flow from different incoming sources. With high volumes of incoming data, the best management resources help you automating routine tasks.

There are also UI Kits you can download and use to build screens immediately. The extensions and UI kits are all free.

FluidUI is a free online tool that is ideal for prototyping and building UIs quickly. This tool, combined with the library of standard Apple and Google material assets, enables direct editing in your browser. You can also share prototypes via email and share links so that others can review and leave comments on the page. A cloud-based, free illustration tool with similar features to Adobe Illustrator and Sketch.

Vector offers everything you need to get started building complex illustrations, or designing a site or mobile application. That means your team will be able to collaborate and gather feedback without the headache. Although the interface looks a bit outdated, it packs quite a bit of power and is capable of almost everything Photoshop can do.

Marvel is ideal for producing and refining an interface exactly how you want it to appear and for creating prototypes. It offers a truly innovative way for creating pages and enables you to simulate the design via a prototype. There are several integrations available that enable you to insert your designs into the project workflow. There is also an integrated user testing feature , which is still rare in the web design space.

An affordable, easy-to-use WordPress alternative , Wix is a website builder offering free and premium plans. Like WordPress, Wix makes it possible to build all kinds of sites, including stores and blogs, in just a few minutes. But the experience of managing a Wix site will be very different from WordPress. Meaning, Wix takes care of all the technical details around site hosting, back-ups, and security. You can also choose the free ad-sponsored plan, which comes with hundreds of options and templates to choose from.

Originally, Framer was simply a library of JavaScript and a prototyping tool set. It has since evolved into one of the most powerful tools for creating responsive designs. Now called Framer X, this fast prototyping tool enables designers at every skill level to create complex animations and generate code for React components.

This sets it apart from Sketch, although their vector-based interface looks similar. Built originally by the Twitter engineering team, Bootstrap is now the most popular framework in the world for building mobile-first, responsive websites.

There are dozens of features — including a grid system, a series of responsive breakpoints, and a rich components library — that make coding easier and faster. The component library has buttons , navigation bars , forms , headers, alerts, and so forth.

You can simply download the current version of Bootstrap, or load it locally with BootstrapCDN , copy one of the sample templates, and begin customizing. You can also use it to build a Bootstrap website. Visual Studio Code gives you access to a wealth of extensions to expand the functionality of the tool. For instance, you can download GitLive to collaborate with other developers and designers. Website redesigns require a serious investment of time and resources, so it makes sense to consider why you should redesign your website.

Your website is often the first impression consumers have of the business. You want to make it a good one, and fast. Web design practices and elements not only impact the visitor experience — they also impact how search engine bots crawl and then index your website.

You can learn web design best practices through diligent research and practice. By simply looking at your website, visitors can glean insights into how you would treat them as customers. If you thoughtfully include web design elements that make it easier for them to navigate your website, learn about your products, and more, then that indicates they can expect the same thought and care from your customer service.