I’m always looking for tools that can give me a leg up on design, and I find that choosing a good color palette is one of the hardest and most subjective parts of designing a site.

It’s a funny time to be alive. We haven’t yet reached that part of the technology singularity where rogue nanorobot clouds disassemble us all into carbon dust (bad), or where we transfer our consciousness into massive sentient spaceships and colonize the stars (good?).

After reviewing WordPress’s page builders in depth, I’ve found that Beaver Builder is my clear favorite, because it caters to people who want to do things right. Case in point: the Beaver Builder team have made it easy to add custom CSS styles to Beaver Builder elements. As with any front-end system, you can do a lot more with Beaver Builder if you understand CSS, and the software encourages this rather than trying to overcompensate for it.

Color inspiration is a big, practical part of web design, and ColorHexa is the best tool for it I’ve seen in a bit.

Here is some very useful information on an oddly outdated-looking page. It gives device widths for a range of iPhones, iPads, Samsung phones, and so on.

“What color is that?” You’ll be asking this question a lot if you’re a WordPress developer, or a four-year-old. If you happen to be a developer, you won’t have an all-knowing adult to answer you.

This analysis of the WordPress economy came across the Advanced WordPress Facebook group earlier, and I really like it. Key points for me include:

Typography is maybe the cornerstone of attractive web design, as I like to remind myself with the screenshots I took of highly reputable websites like the New England Journal of Medicine converted to Comic Sans.

I’ve wanted to brush up my graphic design chops for quite a while—not to the point of actually becoming a graphic designer, but of more confidently standing in for one on projects that don’t need a full-time designer’s involvement.

Paletton is a free, simple web app for creating all kinds of color palettes based off any initial color. I’ve found it super-helpful for steering me toward tasteful color decisions—for individual elements, components, or whole sites.