Articles & Tools: Business Tools

For most clients who need to accept payments online, a full-fledged e-commerce solution is overkill – and it adds a lot of new costs and potential security issues to your project. The good news: there are some great solutions for small and medium-size clients who need e-commerce that are reasonably priced and take the big security concerns off our hands.

In this 18-minute audio consulting session, I discuss the five solutions I use to help designers avoid the biggest pitfall of e-commerce: trying to build your own Amazon.com. I also addressed this question in my recent Designer Q&A Workshop -- check out the recap and audio, which also includes discussion of SEO and social marketing.

Summary: 

• PayPal (4 minutes): We recommend this for clients who need a safe and simple way to accept payments from their visitors, but who don't need a full-featured shopping cart. PayPal is a free and flexible solution that you can use to sell products, subscriptions, memberships and more. Like all these solutions, the actual credit card processing takes place on a third-party server, so we don't have to worry about security. The drawbacks: there can be a bit of a barrier to entry on the checkout pages, because PayPal encourages (or in some cases forces) your visitors to create an account.
• 1ShoppingCart and E-Junkie (9 minutes): These solutions take it a step further, allowing you to provide lots of products, recurring payments, affiliate programs and more through simple links to their hosted checkout pages. They take the security and administration of e-commerce off our hands, and are a popular choice for selling digital products like e-books and subscriptions, though they work for physical products too. They come with a small monthly fee attached, and you can hook them up to PayPal or your own credit card processing merchant account.
• Shopify and Volusion (13:15): These hosted shopping cart solutions are full-featured online stores, so they're a great choice for clients who really do need to replicate the features you'd find on a site like Amazon. They are the most robust of the options here, and they still save us from the security liabilities and costs of hosting our own e-commerce site.

You need them to run your business, but let's face it: software from Adobe, Microsoft and the rest is exorbitantly expensive. So, once you've crossed the threshold into adulthood and piracy is no longer an option, what's a web designer on a budget to do? There are viable alternatives out there -- and many of them are as good, if not better, than the originals.

Web Development with Coda

Coda is an all-in-one web development suite and a great substitute for Dreamweaver. It provides your usual syntax-highlighted code editor, a Safari-based preview window and FTP -- not to mention some advanced features like version-control support and an SSH terminal. The one hitch: it's only available to Mac users. At $99, it's a $300 savings over Dreamweaver CS4.

OpenOffice for documents, spreadsheets and more

If there's one software suite that's been a bane on humanity for its entire existence, it's the buggy and bulky Microsoft Office. Lucky for us, there's a free and simple alternative in OpenOffice.org. It comes with equivalents to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access in one functional, lightweight package and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Combined with Google Docs for sharing and quick online editing, you'll never have to battle with Microsoft Word again.

Dropbox for backups and storage

Storage is becoming exponentially less expensive, and there are tons of services out there that will back up, store and share your files in the cloud. I like Dropbox because it integrates so seamlessly with my file system -- I can just click and drag to my Dropbox as if it's another folder on my machine. It's also great for syncing or sharing between multiple computers, and the full-featured free version comes with 2 GB of storage.

AVG Free for anti-virus

My favorite thing about a new PC is wiping it free of all the software that comes pre-installed -- especially those bulky and expensive virus and spyware scanners. AVG Free is a lightweight replacement that keeps you just as safe without the system slowdown and crazy subscription fees. AVG's site will try to upsell you a little, but even their premium products are a deal compared to the big guys. For the direct download without the sales pitch, grab AVG Free from Download.com.

Skype for your office phone

I first came to Skype for its portability -- I was moving and needed a number that I could forward to my cell phone or a new office. Since then I've become a full-on Skype convert, making and receiving all my business calls through my computer (or the new iPhone app) for a glorious $5 a month. That's unlimited calls in the U.S. and Canada ($30.05/year) and a real phone number in my area code ($30/year) for a tiny fraction of the cost of a cell phone or landline.

My Macbook, with its built-in microphone, becomes the perfect phone, and I can also make calls through my iPhone when it's connected to wifi. Add to that voicemail, call forwarding and all the other chat and video features, and you've got yourself an unbeatable phone service that's painlessly portable and amazingly inexpensive.

And the savings have only just begun: how have you saved money on expensive software and office overhead?

When you're one person running a bustling business, efficiency and organization are the name of the game. That's why Harvest, a fantastic tool for estimates, invoices and tracking time, is the hub and home page of my web design firm. Harvest is a software-as-a-service tool that allows me to create professional estimates and invoices -- and track my time on projects I've signed.

Price: $12/month and up
Competitors: BlinkSale for invoicing, Basecamp for time tracking
Verdict: A fast, professional, fantastic combo of three crucial business tools

Invoices and Estimates

It wasn't long ago that I had to crack open InDesign every time I wanted to generate a PDF estimate or invoice -- it was tedious and added a ton of time to my administrative overhead, which meant it took longer for me to sign a project and I had less time in my day for billable work. Like EchoSign for contracts, Harvest takes all the pain out of estimates and invoices, and allows me to present myself professionally in the time it takes to fill out a quick form.

Once you create your invoice (customized with your logo on a slick template), it's one more click to shoot it off to your client as a PDF wrapped in a professional and personalized e-mail. You can also hook your invoices directly to your PayPal account, allowing for easy online payment and further reducing the time you need to spend on getting paid.

Time Tracking

If you're into tracking your time -- which is a great way to make sure your projects stay on budget and your business stays efficient -- there's no better way than with Harvest's desktop widget. Available for both Mac and PC, the widget allows you to quickly log time for all your projects without booting up your browser or any additional software. Check in to the Harvest site for time reports and budget-to-reality comparisons to make sure you're hitting your target hourly rates for each project.

Harvest does an excellent job of integrating these three tools, giving me a single command center from which to track the financial status of my business. It also hooks into Basecamp, Highrise and (for higher-level accounts) QuickBooks, and the Solo account will set you back just $12 a month. It can get a bit expensive if you need a lot of active users, but it's a great addition to any small business.

• Harvest -- Convenient time tracking, professional estimates and invoices

If you've spent any time in the worlds of productivity and entrepreneurship, you know that uncontrolled meetings are to be avoided like the plague. But when you do need to get a few people on the phone, FreeConference is a fantastic tool for professional, easy and (of course) free conference calling. One of my favorite features: your number and access code never change (or at least mine haven't in years), so you can just add them to your address book for easy access.

• FreeConference -- And remember, keep those meetings small, short and rare!

In my never-ending quest to streamline my everyday tasks, I've got a brand new item on my Mac OS dashboard -- the Give Me a Password random password generator. I generate random passwords for any new accounts I set up on my development server, and in the past I used sites like this one to generate a random string. That worked, but the dashboard widget saves me the steps of pulling up the site and submitting a form -- and it even copies the new PW directly to my clipboard. A click saved is a penny earned -- so I'm adding this one to my productivity toolkit.

• Give Me a Password -- Mac OS dashboard widget

The ever-prolific 37Signals just launched their new service, Haystack, a web-designer listing to help connect clients to designers and developers like us. It's a great site, as we'd expect from the creators of Basecamp, the authors of Getting Real, and the purveyors of pretty much everything innovative in the Web 2.0 world.

Adding my listing was quick and easy, and my portfolio photo was approved (presumably by a human who's sitting there on a Sunday afternoon) in seconds. I'd expect this to be great for SEO and perhaps send a few clients my way eventually -- but it'll certainly be a challenge to get it popular among clients and keep it from being flooded with chop shops like the freelancing marketplaces.

With the 37Signals name behind it, Haystack is poised to do great things. I am sure there are lots of ideas cooking up already to add more to the service -- for now, I'd be excited to hear about any results or new clients that it brings your way.

• Haystack Launch Announcement on the 37Signals blog

I'm a huge fan of simplicity, freedom and getting things done -- my productivity plummets when I feel disorganized or have too much on my plate to decide what to do next. So I've embraced the empty inbox, turning Gmail into my ultimate to-do list and making my days more focused and productive.

The concept: everything in my inbox is an item that requires my immediate action. A question from a client, a bill that needs to get paid, and so on. As soon as I respond to it, it goes into my Gmail archive. As I take care of each item, my inbox dwindles, and before I know it Gmail is a thing of beauty: "No new mail!" It's simple, refreshing, and encourages me to address everything on my list -- if something's cluttering my inbox on a Friday, I might as well get rid of it so I can be a free man for the weekend.

Want to give it a try? Here's how to dive in:

1. Archive everything. I know this seems like jumping off a cliff to some of us -- I had hundreds of e-mails in my inbox when I took the leap. Just close your eyes, select all and click "Archive." It's all still there for you, just a search term away.
2. Attack your spam. When I got started, I was on more meaningless opt-in lists than I'd care to remember. Every time mail from an opt-in list hits your inbox, turn that into an action item too: unsubscribe! And if you find a couple lists that actually add value to your life, they'll be all the more unique when they come in.
3. Hit the labs. Switch on the Send & Archive button in Gmail Labs. It adds a new button that sends your response and immediately archives the conversation -- essentially a "mark as complete" button for your inbox to-do list.

For more on empty inboxing, check out these posts:

• Adding some labels to the mix -- Lifehacker
• Five rules for an empty inbox -- DownloadSquad
• Inbox Zero -- Videos, slides from presentations, and a forthcoming book
• And ever more empty inbox tips -- NYT

One of my big projects lately is reducing my administrative overhead -- all the time I spend writing contracts, creating PDFs and waiting for a signature to come back by fax, e-mail or snail mail makes each project more expensive and distracts me from doing real, valuable work for my clients. I've never been satisfied with my contract workflow, but I think I've finally found the solution: digital contracts and electronic signatures with EchoSign.

Price: $20/month ($15/month paid annually)
Competitors: DocuSign, ContractPal, AgreementExpress
Verdict: Takes the pain out of contracts and gets projects started quickly and professionally.

My contract creation and execution process has always been cumbersome -- I'd edit my template in Office, save it as a PDF, e-mail it to the client, and eventually get back a copy of the signature page by mail or (if I'm lucky) as a scanned and e-mailed image. It took way too long for me to create the contract PDF each time (and back in the day, I had to crack open InDesign too). It was a pain for the client to print it out and scan or mail it -- and don't even get me started on faxes. The signature lag time delayed the start of my project, particularly with new clients, and I was never comfortable getting only the sig page of a 5-page document, which is what clients sent me 90% of the time.

With EchoSign, that whole process goes online and can be completed in a matter of minutes. The signatures are legal and enforceable (perhaps even moreso than my sig-page-only responses), and I never have to create a PDF again. EchoSign allows me to create a contract template with some fill-in-the-blank fields (like Client and Project), then attach a statement of work to the end that's unique for each client -- and I can even import the SOW directly from Google Docs. The world of contract law just got a lot more convenient.

EchoSign's interface is generally very friendly, and it's certainly leaps and bounds beyond its competitors. That said, it took me five or six tries to get a document properly formatted (I uploaded a PDF and placed signature fields through the Flash interface, though you could do the same thing with text tags in your document). That meant by the end of my testing I had more than used up my five free-trial signatures, but once I had conquered the learning curve I had an awesome, fast and easy-to-use contract that I could shoot off to any client in a matter of seconds.

So, if you're in the market for a faster and easier project kick-off, check out EchoSign. It's the last part of my paperwork that I've taken fully digital, and it's already making my life easier and more efficient. Enjoy!

• EchoSign -- Painless, paperless contracts