Resources

Better Proposals

Sales Proposals Made Simple for Creatives and Service Businesses

Writing proposals should be simple. Now it is. No formatting or spending hours making it look professional. Just write what you like and type in your pricing. Everything else is automatic.

FlowMapp

FlowMapp is online planning tool for creating a visual sitemap that will help you effectively design and plan a better user experience for your website and collaborate with all participants in web development process.

Quickfile

A great, free (for smaller users) accounting package for small business

ConvertFox

Integrated live chat, email marketing, user automation and marketing automation for websites

MailChimp

There are a number of free / freemium email list programs.  For me, Mail Chimp wins due to the freemium offering of a 2000 subscriber list and 12000 emails per month for free being the best of the bunch. I also like the tone of the site.

Magemojo

If you’re looking for a specialist Magento host, Magemojo are well worth a look.  Their USP is that they exist to serve the Magento market and as such their hosting setup is wholly geared towards making your Magento site run quickly and securely.

Their hosting packages are lightning fast.  By transferring to Magemojo, without making any other changes, I saw page load times halved on one Magento site. In addition they offer a free migration service to transfer an existing Magento store onto their hosting.

The support team are fast and knowledgeable.  I have contacted them on many occasions and average response time is 5-10 mins, usually with a solution. Their Magento knowledge is also at a very high level, meaning that support requests are going to people who are specifically associating your problems with a Magento installation.

As an example I have asked them if they can make a copies of Magento sites onto a staging sub-domain for me, and they have come back and said it’s done and ready to use in…hang on I’ll log in and check… 1 hour and 5 minutes.  For 3 sites.  If that’s not good response time I don’t know what is.

Magemojo have their own, easy to use admin panel in place of cPanel and I don’t have any complaints about it.  Any issues and you get a support reply in minutes anyway.

I’ll stop gushing now.

Siteground

Decent, well-priced and easy to use.  Support is always quick to respond to any issues as well.

Siteground also allow you to create staging sites quickly and easily. As should always be the case for major updates to live sites, the updates should first be tested on a staging site before being pushed live.  Sitegrounds staging sites can be created within a couple of minutes, and when the changes have been made and tested they can be pushed to the live site easily.

Siteground also have a simple and free service that let’s you set up Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates for any of your sites – a must in modern web design.

Magento

Magento (Community Version) is the daddy of open source eCommerce programs at the moment. On the plus side it’s incredibly versatile, secure and extendable.  On the downside it can be slow on the wrong hosting platform, extensions and themes can be expensive and learning to code it yourself can be a steep learning curve.

WordPress and WooCommerce

There are a number of free eCommerce plugins available for WordPress.  WooCommerce is robust and most major WordPress themes include Woocommerce integration.

Adwords Keyword Planner

A free keyword research tool the Adwords tool can be used for you basic keyword research and to find variations on your keywords.  If you want more detailed information about longer tail keywords it’s worth investing in one of the paid tools, but initially this tool is perfectly capable.

Rankinity

With Rankinity you can quickly get a visual representation of your website Internet visibility.

Real-time check of hundreds of keywords in multiple search engines including local search by countries and cities allows you to estimate your standings, reveal weaknesses in your promotion strategy and make necessary adjustments. And with detailed reports and automatic analysis of competition you will find the real effect of your SEO activity.

BufferApp

A great app for Twitter and Facebook that allows you to add updates to your buffer, and BufferApp will release then at preset times.  That way you can spend a few minutes at the start of the day filling your buffer and your updates will be released at the optimum times.

Hootsuite

Manage all your social profiles, promote your brand, generate quality leads, and increase website traffic — all from one easy to use tool.

Better Proposals

Sales Proposals Made Simple for Creatives and Service Businesses

Writing proposals should be simple. Now it is. No formatting or spending hours making it look professional. Just write what you like and type in your pricing. Everything else is automatic.

Evernote

Evernote is one of the modern web apps that has brilliant interfaces for pretty much every platform, and enables account syncing, so you can take notes on your phone and when you get home your notes will be waiting for you on your computer.

Integromat

Integromat is a great task management tool in the same vein as IFTTT and Zapier.

Each of these services will do a job for you, but I found that Integromat is the one that had the right functionality at the right price point.

Plutio

Intuitive and comprehensive project management tool. Everything you need from tasks and files to conversations and invoices in one place.

Todoist

My favourite to-do list.  Use the free version to try it out. For me it’s the best out there and I’m happy to pay the minimal fee for the full version.  It also has Android and iPhone apps so you can keep your tasks up to date on the move.

Toggl

With Toggl you track time in real time. You never lose a minute of your billable time. If you forget to switch it on, then enter time later on. Organise your time by projects or tags, and mark it as “billable.”

Track Duck

Let your colleagues or clients leave feedback right on a website or image file. Bug tracking has never been easier! Every new comment has a screenshot recorded automatically with a link to the exact page and technical details like browser version, OS and screen resolution.

ConvertFox

Integrated live chat, email marketing, user automation and marketing automation for websites

Craft CMS

Craft CMS gives you the backend tools to build powerful, fast, secure sites.  It’s very much more developer focused than WordPress.  Craft down’t have a large ecosystem of free and premium themes available like WordPress does, so it’s a case of building the frontend from the ground up. However this results in sites that are lightning quick as they don’t have all the bloat you often get in WordPress sites.

FlowMapp

FlowMapp is online planning tool for creating a visual sitemap that will help you effectively design and plan a better user experience for your website and collaborate with all participants in web development process.

ManageWP Orion

Manage WP have recently upped their game with the release of Orion, their new and improved WordPress management software.

I’ve experimented with Manage WP, Infinite WP, Main WP and several other management tools and Orion is now top of the pile.

You create an account with Orion, and register the login details of your WordPress sites within the admin area.  A small plugin is installed on each site as the interface between Orion and your site.  ManageWP then tracks everything that’s going on in your WordPress sites including and allows you to:

• Update your installations (WordPress version, plugin and theme)
• Manage and approve comments
• Manage Users
• Monitor securityand performance
• Check page statistics

There are also premium tools within the system to automate nearly everything.

Toolset for WordPress

Toolset is a suite of plugins that extend WordPress to allow creation and display of custom post types and taxonomies as well as many other functions.

Track Duck

Let your colleagues or clients leave feedback right on a website or image file. Bug tracking has never been easier! Every new comment has a screenshot recorded automatically with a link to the exact page and technical details like browser version, OS and screen resolution.

Transport API

WordPress

For anyone building a website, whether it’s a blog, a business site, a portfolio site or an ecommerce site, WordPress is the perfect place to start.  Beginners can get started quickly with minimal fuss, while more advanced users can unlock incredible versatility with the range of themes and plugins.  And best of all, it’s free.

WPML (WordPress Multi Language)

WPML makes it easy to build multilingual sites and run them. It’s powerful enough for corporate sites, yet simple for blogs.

You might also need to provide different content for different regions using the same language such as USA, UK, Australia< Canada, New Zealand. WPML can handle that. For each page you can choose whether to have a master page that controls it for all languages / regions, or whether to enter different content for each region.

Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is a visual builder plugin for WordPress that comes with its own starter theme.

Divi Theme

Divi is the flagship theme from Elegant Themes.  It’s a top choice for just about any site and is now my go-to theme.  The advantage Divi has is that it has a sensible price to license for unlimited sites for ever.  Expensive for a single site but after building 3-4 sites with Divi it becomes very cheap for a full-featured theme.

Updraft Plus

Gives you peace of mind for your WordPress websites.  The free version is good and adequate for most sites.  For business critical websites or multi-site networks it’s worth investing in the Premium version.

WP Toolset

Toolset is a brilliant and multi-faceted set of tools for customising WordPress sites.  The Toolset consists of a number of plugins that add incredible functionality to your WordPress site.

Toolset’s main components are:

WP Types – Custom Post Types, Custom Fields, Custom Taxonomies, Custom Taxonomy Fields.  Build any type of site with whatever post types you want.

WP Views – Allows you to create custom content templates, archive templates etc. and apply them to specific post types.  Views gets even more powerful when you use it to create custom filtered searches for your data.

WP Layouts – Adds layout functionality. To be honest the layouts are not the best part of Toolset and I usually use a trusted theme instead.

WP maps – Adds map functionality to your views and layouts.

WP Access – Create custom user groups and set access levels for each group.  Useful for building sites with members only content.

WP Cred – Frontend forms.  Another useful tool for adding customisations to your sites.

WPML (WordPress Multi Language)

WPML makes it easy to build multilingual sites and run them. It’s powerful enough for corporate sites, yet simple for blogs.

You might also need to provide different content for different regions using the same language such as USA, UK, Australia< Canada, New Zealand. WPML can handle that. For each page you can choose whether to have a master page that controls it for all languages / regions, or whether to enter different content for each region.