Web Design Resources

The resources listed below are recommended by our team. These are actual tools that we use for our company.

Digital Ocean
Elegant Themes
Themeforest

Web Hosting

  • Digital Ocean – The web host we use for all of our websites. It provides all the functionality of other cloud hosting solutions, but at a fraction of the price due to its stripped down user interface.
  • Go Daddy – I used Go Daddy for a few clients and found it to be the most user-friendly of all hosting companies. The company just has a stigma of being too consumer-friendly. If you are a serious developer and you use Go Daddy, it immediately takes away some of your credibility, so I stay away from the hosting company. But I would recommend it for someone new to web development. They tend to have the best pricing for personal web hosting.
  • Host Gator – This was my web host for many years. At first they won me over with their customer service. As the company became more popular, their service started to suffer. For what I was paying a month and the amount of problems I was facing, I expected a lot more. Eventually, I left on bad terms with the company and vowed never to use them again. That’s not to say they haven’t improved. It feels slightly on the commercial side, but they do have some professional services that might be worth checking out if they improve their customer service.
  • IX Web Hosting – When I first decided to make a website, I found this company and decided to give them a try. Things were good for awhile, but as anime3000.com began to grow, they essentially said you need to find another company that can support your traffic. At the time, they did not have virtual servers. Years later when I decided to leave Host Gator, I received a phone call from a sales agent and moved my business back to IX. After a few months, I noticed issues with my website and other performance issues that kept happening. Finally I had enough and moved to Digital Ocean.

Themes and Software

  • Elegant Themes – a subscription service that provides a variety of high-quality themes and plugins for WordPress websites. All of our websites use the DIVI theme from this provider.
  • Themeforest – is just one of the many sites from Envato that provides web designers with templated tools to take their projects to the next level. Before using DIVI, it was our go to source for templates.
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