Resources

Useful websites

Sites I come back to at work: for learning, marketing, design, research and automation. Each with what it is, who it suits and why.

I checked these details on the official sites on 29 September 2026. Providers change their catalogues, so check the official page before enrolling.

Automation

Make

Make

What it is
A visual automation platform that connects thousands of apps into scenarios that run on their own.
Best for
Automating multi-step tasks without code, with a clear view of how data flows.
Cost
Free with paid plans

Visit the official site

Zapier

Zapier

What it is
An automation platform that links apps together through easy-to-set-up "Zaps".
Best for
Quick connections between common tools like email, spreadsheets and forms.
Cost
Free with paid plans

Visit the official site

n8n

n8n

What it is
An automation platform you can run free on your own server (under a fair-code licence) or use as a paid cloud service.
Best for
Teams with technical support who want control over their data or lower costs for heavy automation.
Cost
Free with paid plans

Visit the official site

Marketing

Mohamad's pick

Google

Google Trends

What it is
A Google tool that shows how interest in a topic or search term changes over time and across countries.
Best for
Checking demand before a campaign or product launch, and timing seasonal content.
Why it's useful
The fastest way I know to test an idea against real data before spending on it; sometimes it is enough to stop an idea nobody is searching for.
Cost
Free

Visit the official site

Mohamad's pick

Meta

Meta Ad Library

What it is
A public library for searching the ads currently running across Meta technologies, by advertiser or keyword.
Best for
Studying competitors' ads and creative angles before you write your own campaign brief.
Why it's useful
I look here before any paid campaign: you see what competitors actually run, how many ads they keep live and how they phrase the offer.
Cost
Free

Visit the official site

Google

Ads Transparency Center

What it is
Google's public centre for searching the ads shown across its services by advertiser name or website.
Best for
Seeing what competitors advertise on Google Search and YouTube, alongside the Meta Ad Library.
Cost
Free

Visit the official site

Google

Google Search Console

What it is
A Google service showing how your site appears in search: the queries that bring visits, which pages are indexed and what technical issues exist.
Best for
Anyone with a website who wants to know where search traffic comes from and what is blocking it.
Cost
Free

Visit the official site

HubSpot

AI Search Grader

What it is
A free check that asks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini how they describe your brand.
Best for
Seeing how answer engines describe you today, or a competitor.
Why it's useful
It complements the AI Search Visibility Check on this site: my tool helps you get your site in order; this one shows what the models actually say about you.
Cost
Free

Visit the official site

Design

Mohamad's pick

Canva

Canva

What it is
A browser and app-based design platform for social posts, presentations and print, with a huge template library.
Best for
Small teams and NGOs who design in-house without a full-time designer.
Why it's useful
The free plan covers most needs, and not-for-profits can get most premium features free, which matters when budgets are tight.
Cost
Free with paid plans

Visit the official site

Figma

Figma

What it is
A collaborative design tool for website and app interfaces and clickable prototypes, running in the browser.
Best for
Sketching and reviewing the screens of a digital product with your team before development starts.
Cost
Free with paid plans

Visit the official site

Unsplash

Unsplash

What it is
A library of high-quality photos free to use for commercial and non-commercial work under the Unsplash License.
Best for
Images for websites, decks and posts when you don't have your own photography.
Cost
Free

Visit the official site

Coolors

Coolors

What it is
A fast colour-palette generator for finding, adjusting and saving harmonious colours.
Best for
Choosing colours for a campaign or a simple identity for a new project.
Cost
Free with paid plans

Visit the official site

Google

Google Fonts

What it is
An open-source library of fonts and icons covering 135+ languages, including good Arabic typefaces.
Best for
Pairing an Arabic and a Latin font for a site or identity without licensing worries.
Cost
Free and open source

Visit the official site

Font Face

Font Face — فونت فيس

What it is
A library of 140+ free Arabic fonts to download or use on websites.
Best for
Anyone choosing an Arabic font for a brand, a website or print.
Why it's useful
The site states its fonts are licensed for private and commercial use, which is rare for Arabic fonts. Test a font on your own text and at small sizes before adopting it.
Cost
Free

Visit the official site

Research

Internet Archive

Wayback Machine

What it is
An archive of saved web pages over the years that lets you see how a site looked on an earlier date.
Best for
Tracking how competitors' offers and pricing changed, and recovering old content from your own site.
Cost
Free

Visit the official site

Mohamad's pick

Google

Gemini Notebook

What it is
A Google research tool (formerly NotebookLM) that answers and summarises based on the files and sources you upload.
Best for
Digesting long reports and studies, preparing training material and answering from internal documents.
Why it's useful
I recommend it because answers are grounded in your own sources and show where each point came from, which cuts down made-up answers in serious work.
Cost
Free with paid plans

Visit the official site

Perplexity AI

Perplexity

What it is
An AI search engine that answers questions and cites the sources it used.
Best for
Quick first-pass research on a market or topic, with links you can go back to and check.
Cost
Free with paid plans

Visit the official site

Productivity

Notion Labs

Notion

What it is
A workspace combining documents, databases and tasks in one place.
Best for
Documenting procedures, a team handbook and tracking simple projects.
Cost
Free with paid plans

Visit the official site

Excalidraw

Excalidraw

What it is
An open-source browser whiteboard for quick diagrams and sketches, no sign-up needed.
Best for
Drawing a workflow before you automate it, or a rough sketch of a screen or idea.
Cost
Free and open source

Visit the official site

Build & code

Google

PageSpeed Insights

What it is
A Google tool that measures how fast any page loads on mobile and desktop and suggests what to fix.
Best for
Checking your site, or a vendor's delivery, and comparing performance before and after changes.
Cost
Free

Visit the official site

Mozilla

MDN Web Docs

What it is
The best-known open reference for web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), with a structured curriculum for beginners.
Best for
People learning to build for the web, or checking what a developer or AI tool suggests.
Cost
Free

Visit the official site

Hugging Face

Hugging Face

What it is
A platform hosting thousands of open models and datasets, plus demo apps (Spaces) you can try in the browser.
Best for
People exploring and comparing open models before choosing one for a product.
Cost
Free with paid plans

Visit the official site

Data

Google

Data Studio

What it is
A free Google tool (previously called Looker Studio) for building interactive dashboards and reports from many data sources.
Best for
Monthly marketing or sales reporting instead of copying numbers into slides by hand.
Cost
Free

Visit the official site

Global Change Data Lab & University of Oxford

Our World in Data

What it is
A non-profit site bringing together data and research on 120+ topics such as poverty, health, education and climate, with clear charts.
Best for
NGOs and anyone writing proposals or reports who needs sourced, reliable figures.
Cost
Free

Visit the official site

Career

Mohamad's pick

Google

مهارات من Google

What it is
Google's Arabic-language hub for the Middle East and North Africa, collecting free courses and tools in digital marketing, careers, productivity and AI.
Best for
Arabic-first learners, and NGOs training volunteers or beneficiaries.
Why it's useful
Good, official, free learning in Arabic is rare, and this is one of the few sources: courses from Google itself, filterable by topic and length.
Cost
Free

Visit the official site

Edraak

Edraak

What it is
An Arabic online-learning platform with 300+ free courses in career readiness, technology, business and personal development.
Best for
Young people, job seekers and anyone who needs Arabic-language certificates in core work skills.
Cost
Free

Visit the official site

No affiliate links and no partnerships. Tools are listed because they are useful; paid plans are flagged where they exist.