How much time do you spend on designing websites? For those of us who pay the bills through web-dev, or even the occasional freelancer looking to break into web design, these seven time-saving tools can allow you to spend less time on tedious, repetitive tasks so you can devote more time to writing content or marketing your services.

Using a Free Theme For Your Site Design

If you’re not keen on creating your own custom-coded site framework, you’re in luck: apps such as WordPress and Drupal offer thousands of great-looking, free themes that instantly tackle the most time-consuming part of designing a site; the theme process. If you haven’t looked at the official WordPress theme repository, it’s recently been updated with a better sorting algorithm, and the addition of premium themes. Likewise, the Drupal community is constantly creating new themes that rival those that could potentially cost a few hundred dollars when commissioned through a freelance site.

Time Saved: Depends on how long it takes you to create and splice the design in Photoshop. For us, it takes anywhere from 4 hours to a few days.

Creating a Theme Framework in PHP

Even if you’re not using WordPress or Drupal, you can save time by styling your site by using a theme framework, such as Smarty (which lets you cache parts of the design to even faster loading). Still think theming your site is too hard? We’ve got you covered in an upcoming post series that explains how to create a dead-simple, lighting-fast skin framework in PHP.

Time Saved: While the initial time spent creating the framework may take a few hours, the time saved on each new project is invaluable. Not to mention the speed in which your sites will load, and the time required to maintain them once they’re live.

Screen and Video Capturing with Jing

If you’re still capturing screenshots using a combination of “Print Screen” and PhotoShop (or GIMP, even MS Paint) then the latest screen-casting software that is available will blow you away. Enter Jing, the free image and video capturing program from TechSmith. After loading, Jing places a ‘Sun’ icon on your desktop, which can be dragged to any edge, awaiting a single click which brings up a simple editing window. Enter text, place arrows and with one more click, your screenshot or video is sent on its way to the free image/video hosting site Screencast.com, or to a FTP server if you so choose. Jing offers a ton more options if you’re willing to configure it through an easy to use UI.

Time Saved: About 2 to 3 minutes per screenshot, on average. For videos, it can be invaluable based on rendering time and other variables.

Using a Cross-Browser JavaScript Library

Remember the time when a simple AJAX function was a dozen lines of browser sniffing and error fallbacks within try/catch calls? Thankfully a plethora of JavaScript libraries have sprouted up that and are able to do cross-browser AJAX, animation, and DOM manipulation with a very minimal amount of code. Now you can replace document.getElementById(“formButton”).style=”display:none;” with $(“#formButton”).fadeOut(“fast”); to create a nice fade effect. As an added bonus, sites like Google even encourage you to use their hosted version of jQuery, which saves seconds on your sites loading time.

Time saved: Quicker sites, and who knows how many hours saved by not needing to code and test your own animation routines.

Sorting Out Your Tasks With a Todo List or Time Management Program

Your latest design spec may seem complete, but where do you begin? For newcomers and even the occasional freelancer, it may seem overwhelming. Everyone can benefit from a well thought out todo list, and sites like Unfuddled and Backpack allow you to simply input a list of tasks, sort them by priority, and then cross them off one by one as they’re completed. More advanced services provide deeper analytics, and display the amount of time spent on each specific task. This process can really speed up the time it takes to plan, develop and push your site live by allowing your creative process to focus on tasks at hand, rather than time management.

Time Saved: Depends on how well you get by reading and following through logical, well-planned lists.

Testing Your Web Design in Multiple Browsers

While the top four browsers on the market are each finally able to render a standards-based site correctly, don’t forget about the millions of people still stuck with older software, such as Internet Explorer 6, Netscape, or older versions of FireFox and Opera (which don’t support AJAX and CSS as well). For any designer looking to serve as wide a audience as possible, cross-browser layout testing has become quick and painless, and as simple as entering your URL into a site such as BrowserShots. Gone are the days of installing a dozen out of date browsers just to see if your JavaScript menu behaves correctly.

Time Saved: Hours from each design: no installing multiple browsers, no waiting for each site to load.

Using a Free Stock Photo Site to Quickly Decorate Your Posts

When first visiting your site, the average readers attention span is around 8 seconds, and according to Akamai, the crucial first four seconds of page load will determine whether 75% of all visits will bounce off your site (presumably, back to Google or the referring page). This is why it is important to have a quickly loading site and to engage your readers quickly in order to grab their attention. The use of free stock photos can make or break a site for first-time visitors, and fortunately there are thousands of high-quality, free stock photos that you can use from sites such as the Stock Exchange (not to be confused with any financial market sites). Keep in mind that the images you use should allow embedding within your site, and are relevant to your content.

Time Saved: Multiple hours per blog post or page, depending on how you research for relevant images.