Digital Resources for Learning, Non-profits, and Businesses

Types of Resources Included in This Collection

There are so many websites, “experts”, and companies out there on the Internet claiming to be sharing exactly what you need to be successful in digital marketing, that it’s easy to spend years learning without feeling confident in your abilities. While I’m not going to claim to be an expert, I’m glad to share some of what I have learned so far in school and on the job and hopefully some of it will prove useful to you.

I’ll be sharing a variety of lessons, ideas, and tools that I’ve found, mostly of the free variety, but when paid, definitely worth the investment if it fits your use case. I do not necessarily totally endorse every aspect of each third party tool or resource I link to, but I try to explain why I do support something when I do.

Resource Categories

I generally break up resources into categories based on the tactic or discipline of work involved. Some examples include digital design, web programming, technical writing, and lead generation. You will see the full list below.

Digital Design Resources

• Ellen Lupton’s Graphic Design: The New Basics is a design book that would be a great introduction for anyone just starting out to grasp a lot of the elementary theory behind digital design
• Ellen Lupton’s Thinking With Type is another print resource turned website that would be a great starting point for anyone who wants to very quickly level up their understanding of typography
• Adobe’s Color Wheel tool, which was called Kuhler when I first started using it in college, is a nice resource for quickly grasping color theory and relationships, and it helps you build a color palette pretty easily too
• GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, which I used in school to avoid paying for Adobe’s Photoshop and I still use it at my current job instead of the CS5 version of Photoshop they offered
• Inkscape, the free and open source vector graphics creation and editing program that I use instead of Adobe’s Illustrator, which I admittedly hardly use due to the changing nature of my job responsibilities, but which I also find quite handy for small tasks when needed
• Diagrams.net (previously known as Draw.io) is a free wire framing and diagramming tool that works pretty well for beginners and is free to use and download projects to Dropbox, Google Drive, and other personal cloud storage options

Website Design, Development, and Publishing Resources

• WordPress.org is the currently most popular content management system (CMS) available today, especially for beginners, although it is almost necessary, especially for younger folks, to have someone teach or lead you through setting up and using the first several times if you’re totally new to it
• GeneratePress is a free and relatively easy to use theme for WordPress that happens to be my favorite. It has a lot of essential features like a small footprint, good CSS, and decent starting options found in the Appearance > Customizer menu within your WP dashboard once installed. I also use the GeneratePress Premium version and their GenerateBlocks plugin, but it isn’t necessary to use those in every use case
• Atom, the open source text editor owned by GitHub is my favorite for writing code because of how lightweight and customizable it is (you can literally hack it and change the CSS), but I also sometimes use Visual Studio Code, which is a closed-source, more fully featured (almost IDE) text editor, if you need that sort of thing. I especially like how Atom has a community package to allow center-wheel scrolling
• SiteGround is my favorite web hosting provider because of their low-cost options and easy to use tools for managing WordPress. It was a lifesaver when my previous hosting solution had several failures due to a planned migration that seemed to never end, and I had to get a client’s email back up ASAP…