What Your Website Can Be
A guide for those who want to know what's possible.
Imagine you are building a car. You probably aren’t doing much more than conceiving the idea and then finding suppliers for all the bits and pieces. This page highlights our favorite suppliers of templates, gizmos, and other web effluvia.
Website Designs: Start Here
There are exactly 1.345 gazillion website designs available at any given time. Whatever message you’re trying to convey, someone has probably built a nice looking site that expresses it. Here are our favorite template providers.
TemplateMonster.com
These guys have an enormous selection that’s easily filtered and easy to preview. Their templates include better and more expressive design characteristics than anybody. At $65 or so per template, they're not cheap, but if you’re hiring us we’re going to pay for that anyway. However, be warned. These templates often show areas that are designed but not functional, like search boxes. Also, they seldom include drop-down menus. We liked TemplateMonster so much we started an affiliate relationship with them and receive a commission on the sales we bring them.
ThemeForest.com
I really want to like ThemeForest, but at the end of the day, I have yet to buy a template from them. They're still worth a look though, especially if you’re after a modern look or CMS Theme. These templates are much harder to browse, but once you do get to a live demo, you can often see it in a few different colors. The sites typically lack the built–in personality of Template Monster but they do often include loads of functionality. If you liker modern, spare design, they’re not to be missed.
SEO, SEM, and Analytics
How to get Found, measure your results, and repeat and improve.
Google Keyword Selection Tool
No sense doing SEO or SEM for keywords nobody is searching for. This tool will tell you how many searches there are for any given keyword or key phrase.
Google Analytics
You probably already know this, but Google’s free analytics tool will tell you exactly how many hits each page is getting, where they're coming from (both geographically and referring site) even what search phrase sent them there if they’re coming from Google Search or Adwords.
Rank Checker
How do you know if your search engine rank has gone up or down? This plug–in for Firefox is just the thing. It’ll give you your position on Bing, Yahoo, and Google for any list of keywords you select. Save the results in a spreadsheet and rerun the report periodically to see if you’re going up or down.
Link Diagnosis
How many backlinks do you have? More importantly, how many backlinks do your competitors have? And from where are they coming? Link Diagnosis will help you get a feel for how much work you’ll have to do to get to the top.
Xenu’s Link Sleuth
Google will punish you for having broken links on your site. The easiest way to find broken links? Download this (alarmingly cheesy looking) little program. What it lacks in slick interface it makes up for in elegantly simple functionality. Surprisingly, this is the industry standard. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Google’s own blog
and Matt Cutts’s blog
Accept no substitute. These are the ne plus ultra source for current news regarding SEO. Whatever else you’re reading, the author of that is reading these, if they know what they’re doing.
In No Particular Order
CodeCanyon.com
A solid collection of useful widgets at reasonable prices
DynamicDrive.com
Loads of useful scripts, tools to generate favicons, gradients, and more. And it’s all free! A word of caution though, not everything on there works with all browsers. Be sure and preview the demonstration area in the browsers you are targeting.
Website Spellchecker
We use this religiously at the end of every project. Amazing the stuff you won’t notice is misspelled.
Google Properties
Google is like the web’s own kindly, wealthy aunt. For web building, their Calendar, Picassa, YouTube, Google Docs (like Word), and Google Docs (Like Excel) Survey Form are incredibly easy to use and embed in any website.
Salsa Labs CRM
CRMs are Customer Relationship Managers. It’s basically a tool for attaining and retaining customers, constituents, members, etc. The Salsa Lab website templates are pretty terrible so don’t use them. Instead, have us use their handy built–in .asp to turn the template of your choice into a Salsa integrated site.
HostMonster.com
We’ve been using HostMonster for hosting our site and many of our clients’ sites. They’re cheap, have pretty consistent up–time, and have good customer service. HostPeek offers an interesting comparison. Note: We like Hostmonster so much, we created an affiliate relationship with them so we can get a commission on the clients we bring them.
HostGator.com
According to Hostpeek, this is the fastest host for Wordpress sites. As an added bonus, they're Texans! Austin Web and Design is a HostGator affiliate as well and we receive a commission on the business we bring them.
GoDaddy.com
GoDaddy's strength is they’re really set up to help non–technical people handle their various needs. They’re not the very best value, but their excellent service makes up for it.
jQuery Plugins
There’s a dizzying array of things you can do with javascriprt, and jQuery plugins make them accessible and therefore cheap to implement. Browsing this page won’t be very useful for the nontechnical, but I’d be remiss not to include it.
Constant Contact
Probably the most popular broadcast e-mail tool out there. If you're doing an e–mail newsletter or any other e–mail marketing, you won’t go wrong here.
Paypal
Want to sell something or collect donations, but bit have a full–blown shopping cart? Paypal will give you a buy–now button or even a basic cart tool for free. The fees aren’t exactly competitive ($0.30 per transaction plus 3%), but unless you expect to be rakin’ it in, that’s nothing.
iStockphoto and Stock.XCHNG
Stock photos and illustrations. Stock.XCHNG is free, but you get what you pay for.
