The Best Website Design Software for Web Designers

Wix is a popular online website builder, offering a range of plans and products. The free version has the Wix brand, limited storage space and bandwidth, but moves to the more popular plan (unlimited) and there are no Wix ads. All the core editing features are intelligently designed and work more like a native app than an average website builder. However, technical support seems a bit slow and limited in some respects.

Adobe Dreamweaver is a long-standing application that allows you to code the design of your website directly, without having to know too much about programming. The software works through a combination of visual editing and HTML editing, which means that it shouldn't have too steep a learning curve for most users. It is also compatible with the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) to work with HTML5 elements and CSS grids, plus there is support for Git. Weebly is another online CMS, this time aimed at people with little or no coding experience, by providing easy-to-use drag-and-drop tools to create a website.

Weebly also offers users the ability to create online stores using existing templates to work with its simple website building framework. The number of themes available for Weebly is somewhat limited, but the layouts are clean and professional looking, plus there are options to customize accordingly. In addition, the themes are adaptable and have built-in SEO, analytics and even a function to serve ads directly to Facebook. Adobe XD makes it essential web design software for creatives.

In short, XD is the complete package when it comes to prototypes, and there's even a free version capable. However, the different ways to get XD get a little complicated. Weebly does what it does very effectively - providing easy-to-use templates and e-commerce options for everyone. Less is definitely more with Weebly, and while you have a limited number of templates and themes to choose from, what is there is a good range of clean and clear options that have enough room for customization and keeping creatives happy.

You can try a free version of Weebly for the restricted use of its features. Webflow is another web-based option that's perfect for beginners who want to create a quality website with minimal effort. As is common with the best web design software, there is a very easy to use drag and drop approach to creating a Webflow website, using many of its well-thought-out templates. Pattern Lab is a frontend workshop environment that can serve as your hub and helps you create, view, test and display your user interface components.

Understand, however, that this is not a production-ready framework. In reality, you don't create websites with Pattern Lab; you create design components and systems which in turn will allow you to create prototypes and finished websites much faster and more consistently. Bootstrap is one of the best and oldest frameworks that help you avoid further reinventing the wheel and instead create sites quickly and evenly. Originally created by designers on Twitter to create consistency between its internal tools, Bootstrap is a free and open source framework aimed at responsive, mobile-oriented front-end web development.

Now maintained by a small team of developers on GitHub, Bootstrap allows you to use HTML and CSS templates for web-based content such as forms, buttons, navigation and more. You can also use JavaScript plug-ins. Bootstrap comes with excellent documentation which isn't that surprising because ultimately Bootstrap isn't so much a framework as it is a methodology - making it great way to keep up with best practices and accessibility. Sublime Text 3 is also very flexible with a wide range of plugins available making it suitable for any type of web design project and any level of web designer from novice to veteran. Squarespace is a perfect solution for web designers to design professional websites with best-in-class web templates. It provides best-in-class web templates that you can easily customize to meet your creative and professional requirements.

And if that doesn't help you find the template that best fits your business you can answer automated questions after which Squarespace will automatically select some templates that fit your requirements. In addition it allows you to create intuitive portfolio designs through customizable galleries and password-protected pages plus it offers full control over image editing including cropping and resizing images.