Photoshop Alternatives One simple example was providing a few alternatives to Photoshop for a client.  The client was under the impression that they needed Photoshop to resize and crop images to use in their CMS.  After pointing them along to Picnik, Aviary, and Gimp (if they wanted a stand-alone application), they were able to save a quick few hundred dollars.  This was not the first, nor the last, free service that we found to replace a powerful paid application.  Now a company like CWS could never replace Photoshop but for this particular client, these services could do everything they needed and more.

QR Code LibrariesAnother more recent example was clients looking to purchase a service that generates QR codes.  Again the clients did not realize that this was an unnecessary expense thanks to the libraries that are out there to generate these.  After a bit of Googling for the proper terms, I was able to find a few different libraries based the server technologies.  Sometimes we forget that Google is a powerful tool and, before throwing money at the problem, sometimes a good Googling can provide us with a myriad of solutions.

Spending on tech…

Before you go ahead and purchase that latest piece of hardware/software or decide on a web service, why not ask your web designer to see if they have any input.  

You could end up saving yourself a lot of time and money.  These are only a couple of examples but you can see the immediately savings.  Because of our thirst for knowledge we are constantly finding ways to save money, increase efficiency & productivity, and if we can’t find an answer, sometimes we even create our own  solutions  (see LeadSHIFT or ask about our ticketing system in development now).

For our latest app, LeadSHIFT,  we researched quite a few frameworks before choosing one for the backend and plan on porting the app to another to become familiar with its features.  I’ll give a brief overview of the ones we used below.

PHP Frameworks

After spending some time seeing which PHP framework I wanted to use, I finally decided on CakePHP.  I liked the fact that it had been around for quite a while with frequent updates and a strong community behind it.  When choosing a framework, a strong community is incredibly helpful when you run into trouble.  Even simple syntax and naming convention issues were just a Google search away.  I don’t think it’s the fastest framework out there but for an app of this size and complexity it is perfect.  I did run into some problems trying to do some complex queries through multiple tables but once I realized I could just use plain old SQL I easily got past them.

Javascript Framework

I have written about my love of jQuery in previous posts.  jQuery makes the headache of using Javascript go away.  It provided us with a simple way to clear form fields on focus and some pretty neat status effects (similar to Twitter when options are saved).  Whatever you do, make sure your web app works without Javascript enabled.  If you rely on jQuery for your web app to work you will be in some serious trouble when a user doesn’t have Javascript enabled.  Get things working nicely without it, and then maybe add a bit to enhance the user experience.  If the effects don’t add any value or make something easier, you are probably better off without them anyway.

CSS Framework (not really)

This one really isn’t a framework but I use it on every project to make things move a bit quicker on the CSS end.  By default, the majority of tags are marked up with size and margin information and sometimes more in the CSS.  By using the CSS Reset by Eric Meyer you can set all of these sizes, margins, paddings, and anything that might throw things off that are set in the default.  This basically gives you a clean slate in your CSS so you default styles don’t break your layout.

Stay tuned as we get ready to launch LeadSHIFT, a tool for managing leads and referrals for freelancers and small businesses, using the frameworks above.  Does anyone else use these frameworks or have you found better alternatives?  I would love to know in the comments.

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Email

Gmail happens to be my personal email account of choice.  By using filters to automatically tag emails from certain people or to auto-star emails from clients, it provides a ton of flexibility if you are willing to learn its basics.  They provide more space than you would probably ever need and they don’t have a pesky attachment maximum size of a couple megabytes.  Savings = $60.00+

Calendar

Google Calendar is a great full featured FREE calendar that can sync to just about any phone wirelessly (so if you make an appointment on the road, it’s automatically in your calendar when you get home).  Not only do locations, times, and people sync but also reminders if you choose to set them.  Savings = $139.99 (Outlook at Staples, combine with email client below)

Email Client

It’s been my experience that everyone in the corporate world uses Outlook to handle email.  You might as well save yourself the $139.99 for Outlook and use Mozilla’s Thunderbird that offers all the functionality that I’ve needed.  Guess what?  You can also integrate your Google Calendar.  Savings = $139.99 (combine with calendar above)

Word processor, Spreadsheets, Presentations

Microsoft Office has been the industry standard for years but that was before alternatives such as OpenOffice and Google Docs hit the scene.  These alternatives have the same feature-set and can even open Office generated files.  If you don’t want your documents in Google’s cloud, go with OpenOffice which is piece of software that runs on your machine.  Savings = $279.99

Telephone

For those of you that don’t know our office line, 717-798-8448, is a Skype line.  Now we pay $60 to have a number attached to Skype and $3/mo to make UNLIMITED calls to and from the US.  This worked out perfectly when I was working in Costa Rica and I needed to reach clients or they needed to reach me.  Also Skype can make calls for FREE to other Skype users so you could have a completely free solution if you wanted one.  Savings = $383.00 (compared to Verizon phone)

Email Newsletters

Mailchimp happens to be my email service of choice (it sent out this email!).  Their FREE account allows for up to 500 subscribers and a limit of 5000 emails sent per month.  At the moment this is more than enough for our email list.  It allows for great stat tracking and easy signup form generators.  We can see who opens, forwards, clicks, deletes, etc.  And best of all, if someone decides to unsubscribe, the service will take care of this for us.  No need to go through the list one by one.  Savings = $180.00 (compared to Constant Contact 500 subs)

Brand Monitoring

A less well-known, but equally useful, tool by Google is Google Alerts. This allows you enter a phrase (your company name for instance) and it will email you results (you specify how often) when it is found in websites. This is a great way to monitor your brand on the web. You may find other blogs or newspapers mentioning you in their stories. It won’t find the phrase in older pages but from that point on, whenever the phrase is mentioned you will get it emailed to you.  You could also set up Twitter alerts using Twhirl or Tweetdeck to get real-time monitoring on Twitter. Savings = Time

Hopefully this saves you all some money (and some time)!

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Using the amazing project management platform, 5PM, I was able to pull all sorts of information necessary to create our project management status board pieces.  I love seeing when my people add a new progress note or if the “Other CWS Tasks” list gets cut in half.  I know stuff is being accomplished.

CWS Status Board Items

• Tasks assigned to me (via 5PM)
• Tasks assigned to others (via 5pm)
• Progress bars for tasks (via 5pm)
• Events in the next 7 days (via Google Calendar)
• Current time since we don’t have a clock (PHP)
• Current weather and tomorrow’s forecast (Yahoo Weather)
• RSS feeds for Digg, Lifehacker,  Smashing Mag, and Web Designer Depot (probably counter-productive)

Every container is automatically refreshed via AJAX so there is never a reason to manually refresh the page.  Every 30 minutes or so it will do an automatic full page refresh because Yahoo Weather doesn’t like the AJAX request for some reason but, again, no manual page refresh is required.

Why have a status board at all?

Think about how many windows or tabs you have open when you are working.  Think about the time it takes to navigate from 1 to the other and check what might be happening.  Imagine if you could always have a screenshot of the most important things going on regarding your company.  Rather than checking all your tabs, you just glance at your status board and see everyone all in 1 place.

Now if I can find a way to easily import Quickbooks data into this, this will be a super status board!  Any ideas on things to add?  How would you set up your status board?

A couple weeks ago Gary Vaynerchuk (Host of Wine Library TV and super inspirational young speaker, @garyvee on Twitter) posted a link to his talk at the Big Omaha conference on his Twitter stream.  It was about an hour and the majority of it Q&A but after listening to it during my lunch break I felt refreshed and that I could take on any project and was itching to get back to work.  This is not the first great talk from a conference that I have seen on a Twitter stream.  I also follow Tim Ferriss (author or 4 Hour Work Week, @tferriss) and he always posts his talks at his conferences.  With my work/soccer schedule I can only get to so many conferences but by following certain people on Twitter and certain blogs you can get a lot of the footage from them.  No you will not get every keynote and lecture but you will still find some amazing content.

I would highly advise you all subscribe to Twitter and start following some industry leaders out there if for nothing more than pure inspiration.   I am sure that we have all been there in jobs, whether it’s corporate or entrepreneurial, where you hit that wall and can’t find any creative juice or drive left in you.  Go out there and find a talk or TV spot with Gary or Tim and within a few minutes you will find yourself recharged and ready to take on whatever is in front of you.  There are tons of other people out there to follow but I find great information from these guys in every blog post or talk.

1. Skype
2. Syncplicity
3. Google Chat
4. Blackberry (As a modem)
5. Thunderbird
6. WordPress

Skype – Since before CWS was founded in 2006 we were using Skype.  Skype is a free VOIP solution to speak to other Skype users for free.  Skype also has a multitude of services that CWS takes advantage of.  SkypeIn associates your Skype account with an actual phone number that anyone can call.  For about $30 a year and and an additional $3 a month to make unlimited calls to and receive from the US.  This is perfect for CWS considering just about all of our clients are based in the States.  So here while the company is being run from Costa Rica I can still receive and make calls just like I would at our home base in Pennsylvania. 
USEFULNESS GRADE: A

Syncplicity – I had put off backing up data online for a multitude of reasons. One of these reasons being that most services charged you per computer. Considering our office has at least 2 computers running at any given time and usually 3 or 4 when working in the main office this would be expensive. After scouring the Internet I came across Syncplicity. Not only did they support unlimited machines but they also had an option to sync your folders between machines. This is exactly what I was looking for since a lot of work is completed away from the office and before leaving and after returning I would always have to manually sync at least 3 computers. Thanks to Syncplicity it knows when files have changed and reflects the most updated files across all machines. It even has some versioning in case you delete something or prefer a previously edited version. 
USEFULNESS GRADE:  B+

Google Talk – Google talk is basically a stand-alone program of the chat used in Gmail’s web interface.  This way you do not need to be logged in to Gmail to chat with your contacts.  We use Google Talk to communicate with some of our designers/developers as well as an outlet for clients to get in touch with us immediately.  We are not always on but it can replace a phone when you only want to get a quick answer to something.  Again a free utility that definitely serves a good purpose for business as well as personal communication. 
USEFULNESS GRADE: B

Blackberry – Now I am only going to mention 1 facet of the Blackberry but I have found it quite useful. It is possible to tether a Blackberry phone to a laptop and have it function as modem. This has been very beneficial when meeting clients somewhere without an Internet connection or when you don’t want to pay $10/hour to use the Internet in an airport. Granted the connection speed is quite slow but you can still view web pages on a laptop screen instead of a phone. This has saved more than 1 meeting in the past.
USEFULNESS GRADE: B

Thunderbird – Now like the Blackberry, Thunderbird alone is a fantastic application but I want to hone in one aspect it. Thunderbird is an email client similar to Microsoft’s Outlook. The main attraction is that it’s free. The power of Thunderbird is with it’s add-ons. With the correct combination of add-ons (Lightning and Google Provider) you can have a full-blown email and scheduling application that syncs with your Blackberry wirelessly. Schedule a meeting on the road on your BB and it is synced to your Thunderbird by the time you get back to the office and vice-versa. Make appointments and meetings in Thunderbird and a short time later you will see them in your BB’s calendar. Technology is a wonderful thing.
USEFULNESS GRADE: A-

WordPress – Finally where would we all be without WordPress. WordPress is a very popular blogging platform that is endlessly customizable. It is open-source so you are free to tweak anything and everything you want in the code. Companies have built themselves on customizing WordPress installations for a myriad of things. This CWS blog is built on WordPress with some heavy CSS editing but otherwise unchanged. I decided to set up a personal blog, www.mymovableoffice.com, to blog about living in Costa Rica for 3 weeks and it has gotten some fantastic buzz. The site is less than a month old and I am already getting about 15 visitors a day.  Granted that is nothing special but nothing else we have working on has gotten this much attention.  There are plugins for everything imaginable and I took full advantage of them (Google Sitemaps XML, NextGEN Gallery, All-in-One-SEO Pack, and more).  The reason I chose WordPress as a platform because of how easy it is to use, how quickly it can be set-up, and how much control I can get over the system.  Like I had mentioned before in a previous, starting this company blog has help double our traffic.
USEFULNESS GRADE: A-

Does anybody else out there have any good tools to help them work remotely?

I would like to mention the importance of conferences for someone in the web/tech world here in this post. I was fortunate enough to attend South-by-Southwest (SXSW) last year and had an unbelievable experience. I was able to listen to the big-wigs of the industry speak at various panels and key-notes. I was even lucky enough to speak personally with Tim Ferriss (4 Hour Work Week, author), Frank Warren (Post Secret, creator) and Tony Hsieh (Zappos.com, CEO). The most important and beneficial parts of the conference were the time between the lectures and panels. I was able to meet, network, and speak with so many different kinds of people surrounding, not only the web world, but film and music people as well. I was able to relate to them with similar interests in anything from running a company to how the new Nokia cell phone could stream live video to the web. I was also fortunate enough to bump into a college classmate of mine, Rob Sandie, that turned out to be the co-founder of the amazing web video service, Viddler.com.

This year I am proud to say that I will be attending the Web 2.0 Expo in NY in September as well as SXSW again in March also. I will be representing Briz.com, the social networking site for businesses, at the Web 2.0 expo and CWS at SXSW. Stayed tuned for a full feature on Briz.com in an upcoming post. I hope to see you all in NY in September.

Here is where podcasting has completely changed my life and my business. I have found a podcast for almost every facet of my life and business. So if you find yourself stuck in a boring commute, download some of these podcasts. From current web design news to reviews of the latest indy movies and upcoming videogame releases…you can find what you want from one of these.

Boag World

THE BEST WEB DESIGN PODCAST! I wish I found this before I started my company. Hosts, Paul Boag & Marcus Lillington, have a vast knowledge of the web industry and business. Running a web design firm, writing contracts, getting more work as a freelancer, conferences, being a pop-star in the 80s, etc. That list could go on forever. Thanks to their recommendation I attended the SXSW conference last year and because of the experience I will return year after year now.

Diggnation

The Diggnation podcasters are the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, and his old co-host from TSS (The Screen Savers from Tech-TV), Alex Albrecht. Let me say that these 2 guys are hilarious. I catch myself laughing out loud at their antics while they discuss some of the most popular user submitted stories of the week. Funny guys and it’s refreshing way to look at some current events of a tech focus.

TWiT

The acronym for This Week in Tech. I liked Leo Laporte on the TSS (The Screen Savers from Tech-TV) so I downloaded 1 episode and was not disappointed. He goes over the biggest tech industry news as well as some of the smaller tech news you might not hear on the news. Listen to 1 episode and I promise you will take something away that will help you later. This can be anything from a new productivity web service to where you can get oversized pockets sewn on shirts.

Totally Rad Show

Hosted by 3 young guys (Alex Albrecht, Jeff Cannata, Dan Trachtenberg) with hilarity always on the tip of someone’s tongue. This is more of a guilty pleasure. Movies, TV shows, videogames, comic books. These three guys give very in depth opinions of things above. They do a great job describing each topic while not spoiling anything. No Country for Old Men, The Mist, Avatar, Pushing Daisies, Joss Whedon, Watchmen, COD4: All things I probably would have missed if not for TRS.

Also I easily laugh the most during this one. So many greate quotes.

“If you had an unlimited budget and effects gurus to help you, what would you dress up as for Halloween?” – Viewer question

“The wave from The Perfect Storm” – Dan

Priceless

Watch Haunty Daunty Episode … email question is around 43rd minute