I was reorganizing my toolbars yesterday, and I grouped together the pieces of software that I use most frequently for my web design business. I thought it would make a good post of some “best practices” software. It made sense to add on a few online services that have been important to my business, too. Without further ado:

Development

Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver is both a text editor and a WYSIWYG editor for web pages. Since I just use the text editor, there are a lot of free pieces of software I could use instead. The feature that I have never found anything to compete with Dreamweaver on is FTP management. For every site I edit in Dreamweaver, I define an FTP connection to the remote server and define a directory on my hard drive to store the files locally. Any changes I make are to the local files, but a simple checkbox allows me to automatically upload the file I’m working on to the server whenever I save it. This functions as an automatic, real-time backup system. That may not work for everybody, but I love it. Before Dreamweaver, I could spend 20 minutes beating my head against the keyboard trying to figure out why changes I was making to the code weren’t appearing on the web page. Those episodes always ended with me realizing that I hadn’t uploaded the new code to the web server and lamenting the unnecessary time and frustration.

Adobe Photoshop
A long time standard for many design endeavors, Photoshop covers almost anything I need to do for web design. (Honestly, how often do you need vector images on a web page?) The program is complex enough that it would be fruitless to attempt to sum up its virtues in this short space. What I will say is that looking back I can’t believe I ever created an image on a computer without the use of layers, and I’m so glad we’ve moved past that.

Sizer
Some applications are so simple and so useful, that it makes your jaw drop. When it’s free, my goatee actually drags on the ground. Sizer allows you to quickly resize browser windows (or any application window) to any dimensions that you’ve preset. Whenever I want to check how one of my pages will look in different screen resolutions, I right click on the title bar and select “800 x 600”. Automagically, the window is 800 pixels wide and 600 pixels high. Sizer is also extremely useful in creating screenshots of web pages because I can make sure that all captures are taken at the same dimensions.

Administration

AllNetic Time Tracker
If I really wanted to, I could keep track of the hours I spend on various projects with a pen and a spiral notebook. So Time Tracker could definitely be considered a luxury. At just under $30, though, I feel like it’s a bargain. You can create any number of tasks and subtasks. The killer feature with Time Tracker is that it monitors when you are active. If you begin working and forget to start the timer, a few minutes later you’ll get a message from Time Tracker asking if the time you’ve been spending should go towards a particular project. With a click of the mouse the time is retroactively added, and you can proceed. Similarly, if you come back to your computer to discover that you walked away without stopping the timer, the date and time you stopped working is stored in temporary memory. With another click of the mouse, the open time record is adjusted. Do other time tracking software packages offer this same functionality? Honestly, I don’t know. I found AllNetic’s offering and liked the features and the price, so I stopped looking.

Quickbooks
While the initial setup does require a little effort, Quickbooks greatly simplifies my bookkeeping. The ability to create recurring invoices that can be emailed directly to your customer is absolutely perfect for the quarterly bills I send my web hosting customers. Quickbooks is also “approved” by accountants everywhere. I like the idea of my accountant Tod being able to tell me exactly what reports he’ll need to figure out my taxes and where they are located in the software. If I was using anything other than Quickbooks that may not happen. Mostly I like the day-to-day time savings, though. I can email a project quote to a client in a few minutes with Quickbooks. My pervious method of bouncing back and forth between Excel, Word, and whatever email client I was into at the time took much longer.

Services

Vonage
I’ve been extremely happy with my voice over IP service from Vonage. It took a few days to receive my router through the mail, but once it arrived I was setup in less than 10 minutes. I’ve been using the service for a little over 6 months and have never had any problems with call quality. (Of course, any VOIP package depends on the quality of the internet connection your ISP provides.) I am also a big fan of being able to log into a website to do basic things like controlling call forwarding and checking voice mail. It is so much faster to do online than dealing with automated phone calls.

Vista Print
I’ll be the first to admit that I barely scratch the surface of Vista Print’s offerings. Over the past few years I’ve ordered several versions of business cards and return address labels from them, and that’s it. For a sample of their print quality, you can order a set of free business cards (you still pay shipping). You choose from a restricted set of templates and the back of the card has the Vista Print logo, but you do get a good idea of what their physical product looks like (always a realistic concern when ordering things online). I was pleased enough with the quality and price that I ordered “real” business cards from them when the time came. I downloaded a Photoshop template file that had the correct dimensions and guidelines already in place. It was simply a matter of dropping my logo and contact information into that file and uploading the result to Vista Print’s site.

Surpass Hosting
I discussed in a previous post the advantages of hosting the websites you design. Using Surpass’s reseller program, that’s been painless. Individual sites are controlled with cPanel and all of the accounts that I manage are controlled with WHM. I was familiar with these products before I became a customer of Surpass, so that did have an effect on my eventual decision to go with them. Update: I can’t in good conscience recommend Surpass as the best possible hosting solution since I’ve only evaluated such a small percentage of the available options. What I can say is that it meets my needs.

Sorry that this post is up a little later than usual. I seem to have contracted a head cold, and I’ve been doing some extra sleeping in the last 24 hours.

filed under: Running a Business