Archive for Essential Tools
Essential Tools Featuring WordPress Designer Rebecca Diamond
Posted by: | Comments
Are you ready for the long weekend? I know I am! But, before I sign off for the weekend (ok, who am I trying to fool, I will be online at least a little bit), I want to introduce you to another super talented WordPress designer, Rebecca Diamond of StudioPress and Rebwebdesign.com. Rebecca became such a fan of Brian Gardner’s StudioPress themes, she actually works full time for StudioPress these days.
Rebecca’s must haves for online success:
- Gmail – after a disastrous Thunderbird crash in which I lost a year’s worth of archived email, I now route everything through Gmail
- CoffeeCup Direct FTP – it can edit php and html directly on the server. For $40, it was a lot less expensive than one of the more well-known FTP/editing clients out there, so it’s what I learned on. It’s worked so well that I’ve never switched it for another program!
- Photoshop – Goes (almost) without saying!
- Favorite WordPress Plugins – Dynamic Content Gallery, Genesis Simple Hooks, and Gravity Forms
- Tweetdeck / Twitter – again, a business given these days. Plus it’s fun to catch up on little snippets of everyone’s life!
- Skype -it lets me be in contact with clients around the world, travels with me, works on my cell phone – I love it.
- PayPal – for fast, easy and convenient client billing
- And for collaborating on big projects I like Action Method Online. It keeps everyone in the loop much better than a huge email chain cc’d everywhere.
Thanks for being part of this series, Rebecca, and for sharing a tool that is new to me – Action Method Online. I love learning about new tools for productivity!
Subscribe to the Essential Keystrokes feed so you don’t miss a single Essential Tools feature. If you are interested in sharing your essential tools for business, drop me a line at cpolanosky [at] gmaildotcom.
Essential Tools featuring Tammy Lenski
Posted by: | CommentsThis week’s Essential Tools series features Dr. Tammy Lenski, conflict management specialist, author and consultant who also happens to be a very successful blogger (at Conflict Zen). Tammy is also the co-founder of the Mediation Business Summit virtual conference, where I will be speaking in September on the topic of website essentials for small businesses.
Like many small business owners, Tammy’s business has to be ready to run from anywhere – on the road, in a client’s office, in a home office or anywhere she happens to be that day. As a result, the majority of her business is run in the “cloud” (here is a great article from one of my essential tools, FreshBooks, with 3 Reasons Your Business Needs to Run in Cloud).
In her own words, Tammy’s essential tools for running a small business in the cloud…
I default to tools that I can use cross-platform from wherever I am (I travel a lot for business), so I prefer the cloud (with good backup mechanisms) and apps that have companion iPhone apps. These are the ones I use every day:
Highrise: I use it for client relationship management and as my task manager — all emails to and from clients end up here, as do notes from client calls and visits, along with documents. I can tell in an instant what I need to do next for a client or project and I can give my assistant access for when clients call and I’m not in the office.
Dropbox: I have several MacBook Pros and an iPhone and want to spend zero time remembering to sync. Dropbox takes care of it all for me and I can get any files I need from wherever I am. It’s saved me in a pinch more than a few times!
Evernote: I use it for, well, everything. Hotel and flight confirmations, notes for speeches, screen grabs of websites I like, gardening ideas, you name it. It really is my external brain.
WordPress with StudioPress: I love the ease and extensibility of WordPress and customize my sites myself using Brian Gardner’s terrific, powerful themes as the design foundation.
Google Voice: I work all over the place – office, home, hotel rooms, on-site while visiting a corporate client. Google Voice helps make me accessible, sends me my messages as texts for quick reviewing, and automatically knows to send business calls to voicemail during evenings and weekends.
Google Apps for Business: Mostly use Gmail and Calendar, both syncing to my iPhone.
Chrome: It’s light and fast and since I do so much of my office work using the cloud, it’s a timesaver, even with the Mac version still in beta I’m loving it.
Thanks Tammy for giving us a glimpse into your business and how the sky (I mean the cloud) is limit!
Subscribe to the Essential Keystrokes feed so you don’t miss a single Essential Tools feature. If you are interested in sharing your essential tools for business, drop me a line at cpolanosky [at] gmaildotcom.
Essential Tools of ProBlogger Community Manager Lara Kulpa
Posted by: | CommentsI have said it before, but will say it again… one of the reasons I love my Essential Tools series so much is that it gives me a chance to reconnect with and learn more about my favorite Internet Pros. This week is no exception! ProBlogger Community Manager Lara Kulpa and I have been “running in the same circles” since our b5media days, but I had never really had a conversation with her – until today – and it was like we had known each other forever. We are both total geek girls with way too many similarities to mention.
As the community manager for Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger forum, Lara spends a lot of her time answering questions, working on ways to make the ProBlogger community more beneficial for its members and doing interviews. She is also the Assistant Editor at TwiTip, runs Ginkgo Consulting and has niche blog sites of her own, too.
Lara’s essential tools for online success include:
- Skype – Since Lara is based in the US and Darren and another board moderator are in Australia, Skype is absolutely a critical piece of her communication tool set. She also uses Skype when doing interviews for its built-in recording capabilities.
- All things Google. Lara is a self-proclaimed Google addict. From Google Docs to Gmail and everything in between, Lara would be lost without the big G. She did share a cool feature in Google Labs that lets you create email “canned” responses that are incredible time savers if you find yourself needing to send the same responses frequently.
- WordPress is her blogging and web development platform of choice.
- When it comes to coding, Lara is a girly girl (like me) and wants everything neat and pretty! She uses Edit Plus in conjunction with FileZilla FTP for truly efficient file management. She can open files from within Filezilla to edit directly in Edit Plus. Once the edits are made, the file is save and returned to the server via Filezilla.
- And for graphics, Lara is a Photoshop fan.
Thanks Lara for the opportunity to reconnect and get a glimpse into what you use to manage your very busy and successful online world!
Subscribe to the Essential Keystrokes feed so you don’t miss a single Essential Tools feature. If you are interested in sharing your essential tools for business, drop me a line at cpolanosky [at] gmaildotcom.
