Must-know websites and tools for content creators

Today, creatives can no longer only excel in their fields — be it writing, designing or filmmaking — to be successful. 

Financial literacy aside, writers, designers, and even video producers now tend to be grouped under the umbrella of content creators, where it is necessary to have at least some basic skills from the other creative disciplines. 

Picking them up will definitely take time; Skillsfuture-subsidised courses give fantastic opportunities for these. However, thanks to the Internet, there are countless tools online that do make the job easier at least until the skills are sharpened.

Graphic design platform Canva.com is a bonafide miracle worker. Although the go-to design software remains to be Adobe Photoshop, Canva is a far superior choice for non-professional designers due to its relative ease of use and low price of free.

Even for the design-inclined, there are plenty of templates available to be inspired by. Perhaps the best feature is how teammates can easily edit and work on designs together.

Need a resume that stands out? Canva. Need to create eye-catching social media posts? Canva. Need to create or edit images or thumbnails to be used on websites and videos? You get the gist. 

Use the website long enough you will see traces of Canva by content creators everywhere.

DaVinci Resolve is another free alternative that can match the capabilities of paid software. It is similar to Adobe Premiere Pro — the main editing suite taught by schools — and while Resolve offers a little less in terms of features, they are more than enough for the casual video producer. 

Similar to the tradeoffs between Photoshop and Canva, the depth of features often sacrifice ease of use.

With the software and with a bit of learning, non-professionals can stitch together videos that will leave professionals questioning why they spent so much money with Adobe.

Say goodbye to embarrassing grammar mistakes once you are equipped with Grammarly. 

Whether it is writing articles, emails or social media posts, Grammarly helps spot spelling, grammar and punctuation errors, and makes it easy to replace them with suggestions via a simple click. 

Being an AI writing assistant, however, does have its limits. As seen in the example above, Grammarly tends to be unable to recognise context, either missing out on corrections or giving unnecessary suggestions. 

The software definitely helps but it should not spare anyone from good ol’ proofreading.

We all know about the plethora of Google Chrome extensions that do wonders for productivity but it seems far less known about the add-ons for the Google Suite — that is, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. 

For content writers spending most of their time on Google Docs, some extremely helpful add-ons include OneLook Thesaurus, a built-in thesaurus to aid with writer’s block, and Doc Tools, which makes text formatting a breeze.

It’s a site that seems obvious enough but we tend to forget that the video streaming website can be more than just for entertainment. 

There is a near-endless stream of educational content about everything under the sun. Picking up a new skill has never been easier than now — so much so that they can be far more productive and effective than attending schools and courses. 

It seems that it’s exactly because these opportunities and resources are so easily accessible that there is no excuse to only be honed in on one area of content creation other than time and effort.