Ever since I saw a man get an entire shoe box full of eight track tapes at a garage sale years ago for a nickel I've kept an eye out for good deals. In the web design world, it's not often that you can find a great deal or a shortcut that can help you get a job done with less effort. Discovering these gems can make your day/week/month/year, depending on what project you're working on. And if you can find some freebies that do the job, then you have truly struck gold, my friends.
Designers of all stripes are now willing to share high quality templates, buttons and other goodies that they never would have shared 10 years ago. Sharing is now good for business, whether it's good resources, contacts, tools or just useful content. There's more good stuff out there than ever--if you can find it. We've been scouring the intertubes in search of some valuable stuff to save our fellow designers some time and energy. Here's what we turned up--hope it helps
- 90 Web 2.0 Style Buttons from Spoon Graphics - If you need a quick RSS feed, button or badge, these free downloads can save you the time of whipping one up from scratch.
- FREEPSDFILES.NET - the name says it all here, but this isn't some rinky dink website that gives away a bunch of .psd files that look like they were designed by a 7th grader, there are a lot of genuinely useful elements here. If you're creating a graphic that needs a hand drawn arrow, rather than do it yourself, select from one of their collections like the one here
- 10 Free Professional Website Templates PSD Files from Catswhocode.com - Sometimes you just need a starting point. If you're firing up a quick website for a band or a small ecommerce site these templates from the folks at Cats Who Code can be a good first step.
- 20 Awesome Business Templates from PSD Collector - Not every business will evoke an inspirational epiphany. To be honest, some businesses just aren't sexy. That doesn't mean the site won't end up looking fantastic, but if you're working on a design for a business that puts you and most everyone else to sleep, the templates assembled at PSD Collector might be the remedy for a creative doldrum. These twenty templates run the gamut from straightforward business designs to more outside the box concepts. Check them out here.
- Don't forget your SEO! Screaming Frog's SEO Spider Tool gives you an immense amount of useful SEO information and the free version will crawl up to 500 pages of your domain for free. This is one of the most powerful SEO tools around and it's amazing what they offer for free. Run a crawl with the Screaming Frog and get feedback on client and server errors, inbound and outbound links, redirects, duplicate pages, meta data errors, robot .txt and much more. This is a great tool to help with a quality check once a site goes live. Highly recommended.
Again, there are a million other free resources out there to help you do your job better, these are just a few that caught our attention. If you have further suggestions, please feel free to share.