Productivity tools for your business
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A look at productivity software which makes your life easier.
There can come a point in the development of any business when you find yourself a little bit disorganized, especially if you are juggling multiple projects at once. Fortunately, there are a number of great productivity tools available, many of them free, that can help you stay organized. exp design uses the following tools every day.
Contact Management
Highrise
Web-based contact management software. It is free for managing up to 250 contacts; to manage more or add features, it starts at $12/month. We use it to keep track of leads and clients. The alternative is to simply add new leads in to an email program’s address book, but that doesn't allow tracking of any supplemental information about the leads.
Highrise can track the usual name, address, and phone information, but also keep notes on people and companies. When a new contact is entered, it stores a record of what was discussed. It's a great tool, and really couldn’t be easier to use.
Project Management
Basecamp
Offered by the same firm that makes Highrise, Basecamp offers simple but powerful project management. Free to use for single projects, the software breaks a project down in to clear components like To-dos, Milestones, and Messages.
It's quite valuable for the To-dos alone, as it will set up task lists associated with projects. Anyone can add a To-do to for someone else to any list. It's just as valuable for clients on larger projects, as it lets them see the progress of their project.
Web browsing
Mozilla Firefox
An alternative to Internet Explorer, the standard web browser that comes with Windows-based PCs. Firefox is better than Internet Explorer in most every measurable way: it has more features, is more secure, easier to use, and of course it's free. Besides just browsing the web more efficiently, though, Firefox can be extended through various add-ons.
A number of add-ons can be used to help troubleshoot web design, but there are hundreds available for everything from RSS Feeds to posting directly to a blog.
Visual communication
Yugma Webconferencing
Free as a basic version, Yugma allows you to broadcast your computer screen to session participants. This is great for demos of web software, tutorials, and other tasks where you need to see what someone is doing on their computer in real time. In the free version at least, the screen updates lag by second or two, but its quite sufficient for many presentations.
Image managment (not the PR kind)
Picasa Photo Manager
Picasa is another free tool from Google. It indexes large numbers of photos, creating a variety of views. It also interfaces smoothly with Google Albums, the photo storage and sharing site. If you need minimal editing capabilities but an easy way to view, organize, and search your photos, this free software is worthwhile.
SnagIt screen capture tool
Easy-to-use, Windows software for making screen captures. A screen capture is just that, a capture of your screen at a certain point. We often use them often to illustrate things for clients, and sometimes we'll ask clients to make screen captures, add annotations (arrows, text, etc.) and email them back.
Words are sometimes insufficient for explaining what we want, but a visual example, however rough, is less likely to be misunderstood. In addition to grabbing an entire visible screen, this tool will also take a full capture of an entire web page—it auto-scrolls the page and gets the whole thing.
If you do a lot of back-and-forth with people about how a web page or a document should look, try a copy of SnagIt.
