10 Tools for Running a Smart Small Web Business
Over the years as I evolved from web production frontline grunt to startup founder to independent consultant, I’ve been exposed to a number of technologies that I now regard as invaluable staples. Here are 10 free or low-cost tools that I highly recommend any small web business invests in to increase their productivity, reliability, and make complex operations much more simple to save time and required manpower.
1) Google Apps
Are you using Google Apps for your domain? Why the hell not. Amongst other things, Google Apps is your email functionality outsourced to Google. That is, instead of using your own web server’s dodgy mail setup, you outsource your mail hosting to Google, and thusly to servers approximately one million times more reliable than anything you could ever afford. And it’s free. And yes, you can still keep the same mail address. It costs nothing, it dramatically improves your mail reliability and spam filtering, and your business will get some neat collaborative tools (calendaring, documents) thrown into the bargain. Note that this is different than simply setting up a gmail account. With Google Apps for your domain, you and your employees will be able to access mail (using the gmail interface) at a domain like mail.yourdomain.com - it’s massively convenient.
2) Amazon S3 / Jungledisk
What’s your current backup policy like? If you are like many small businesses, your backup “policy” probably consists of some clunky old external hard drive hooked up to one of the office computers, that gets “backed up” to whenever someone remembers to do so. Which is never. Don’t wait for a catastrophic emergency to force you to retrospectively rethink your backup policy. Amazon S3 is a cost-effective online storage network (using Amazon’s vast network of servers) that has a far higher level of redundancy than some bashed-up external hard drive that you have kicking about the office. JungleDisk is a simple app that provides a graphic interface for interacting with S3, and also provides idiot-proof scheduled backup functionality.
3) Blinksale
Keeping track of invoices is eye-stabbingly boring. Blinksale makes it less so. Blinksale is one of those great applications that takes a traditionally yawnsome procedure and turns it into a quick, elegant process; invoice creation and basic transaction reporting. Blinksale helps you effortlessly create beautiful-looking invoices for your clients, which they receive via email. They can view their balance with you online via a special url, make payments, and print out the invoices for their records.
4) Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides an excellent set of reporting tools for small operations, and best of all, it’s free. Analytical tools can provide your business with useful data regarding your users’ behaviour, clickstream patterns and help to track important goals and transactions. What are your users looking for? Are they completing the tasks you want them to? Is your latest campaign working as planned? Google Analytics can help you understand these points and more, and help you massively improve your online strategy.
5) MAMP / WAMP
Setting up a server from scratch is not something you’ll want to do often. Sure, for your production server you’ll likely want to set up everything exactly the way you want it to be, but what about your local development environment? When working on your own computer, I highly recommend using a packaged personal web server environment such as MAMP. With MAMP, a simple double click starts a server running Apache with PHP, MySQL and virtual hosts - everything you need to start developing. Sure, you could configure this stuff all by yourself if you wanted, but don’t be a nerd for the sake of it - MAMP provides it all in a simple downloadable, executable format meaning you spend less time faffing with configuration and more time actually using the tools for your work.
6) Skype / iChat
Free overseas calls. Free video conferencing. Multi-user video conferencing in iChat is especially brilliant in group development situations.
7) Openads
Openads is a free and popular open-source ad server and banner manager, which can be used in a variety of ways. It can be used any time you need to collect reliable clickstream data on your website, be it for banners or text links. In addition you can schedule click reports to be emailed to you at regular intervals. It also has a number of more advanced tools such as geotargeting, allowing you to deliver specific content to specific geographical groups.
8) Feedburner
I love Feedburner and use it extensively across all my web assets. Feedburner is outsourcing for your RSS. It is not unusual for the RSS feed of any given site to be the most highly trafficked page on the site - and yet it is, under conventional methods, the most difficult to track usage of. Feedburner provides free analytical tools to help you extract useful data from your site’s RSS usage. Not only this, but Feedburner adds value to existing feeds by providing you with a simple interface to drop-in functionality such as “email this” links on each RSS item, enabling you to potentially reach new users. And finally, outsourcing your site’s most highly-trafficked page to Feedburner means you free up a nice chunk of resources allowing the rest of the site to grow.
9) Unfuddle
Version control is such a crucial part of development that it baffles me as to why it is still such a pain the backside to set up on a remote machine. Unfuddle solves this problem. Within minutes you can set up your very own secure SVN repository, to be accessed from wherever you are in the world. This is great for independents like myself who work from multiple different locations. It also makes adding SVN users, managing projects and getting reports on progress an absolute doddle.
10) A Mac
For “it just works” peace of mind, for a virus-free experience, for the best user interface in any modern operating system. Buy a mac. I switched 5 years ago and haven’t looked back. They also help you rhyme more often.
Hope that was interesting to some of you. Some of these tools I find myself recommending over and over again via email so it made sense to me to put it all into a blog post to direct future inquiries to. Also, for those who are interested, I updated my new about page finally (still not 100% done though).
