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Five Favorites for WordPress (premium edition)

When you’re starting out as a WordPress designer, it’s tempting to start spending money on anything shiny that might make your job easier. The mere act of investing in a book, software license, or online course can make you feel like you’ve accomplished something just by virtue of your purchase. (Ask me how I know.) But it’s smart to hold off and spend your money where it can best go to work for you in providing value to your clients.

I’ve talked before about five favorite tools for freelancers, and now I’d like to focus on five tools specifically for WordPress that I’ve found to be worth the investment. Each of these is a premium plugin or other tool, and these are affiliate links. That means I receive a small commission, but I share out of love, not greed. Seriously – I wish someone had recommended these tools to me when I was getting started. Could have saved a lot of money on shiny things.

WP101

WP101 makes life easier for everyone. For you, for me, for your clients. It’s a series of professionally produced video tutorials on the use of WordPress, and it covers the very basics (how to insert an image into a post) up to the more complex tasks like installing plugins and themes. As a designer/developer, you can get a monthly subscription for just $19/month that will allow you to install the videos on unlimited client sites.

The easiest way to use this plugin is to set up the videos either on a demo site or on your client’s site while you’re still in the development process. It saves you and your client time, because your client can be working through the tutorials while you’re building a fabulous new website. Check out a sample video at WP101Plugin.com.

Genesis Framework

When I first decided to redesign my own website, I happened upon the Genesis Framework for WordPress because I was a regular reader of Copyblogger and I’d seen it mentioned there. The framework allows me to quickly and efficiently customize a WordPress site based on one of StudioPress’ many different themes or to easily build my own child theme.

The best thing about the Genesis framework—and this is particularly helpful for new freelancers—is the community of developers, designers, and users. The StudioPress support forum is a great place to go when you’re ready to try something new and want to check ahead of time to make sure it will work, or you can’t quite get things set up the way you’d like. There’s also one-on-one support available for basic theme questions. I’ve learned so much from the Genesis community and have tremendous respect for the various developers and designers who use it. If you’re fairly new to working with WordPress, this is a great place to start.

The framework itself is $59.95, or you can get an individual theme plus the framework for $79.95.

When I was starting out, I chose to invest after a few months in the Pro Plus All-Theme package so I’d have lifetime access to all of themes (current and future) that StudioPress offers. I like having all of the themes at my disposal so that if I see something cool that one theme includes, I can check it out and figure out how to implement something similar as part of a theme for a client. Yes, it’s a lot of money to plunk down, but I think it’s worth it. If you just want to start out with the framework and one theme, you can then upgrade to the full package later with your initial purchase credited towards the price of the package.

Gravity Forms

Just buy it.

Maybe that’s too blunt. But—you really will not regret investing in a Gravity Forms developer’s license. Anything fancy-schmancy you need to create, form-wise, for a client? You can do it with Gravity Forms. Simple ordering of products, managing an email signup form, registering members of a group, creating a poll, it slices, it dices, it fricassees. Get. Gravity. Forms. A developer’s license is $199/year and includes tons of add-ons that will transform you into a form-creating superstar.

Soliloquy

My goodness, are there a lot of slideshow plugins out there. So many options.

I like Soliloquy for three reasons:

It’s responsive, so it doesn’t go nutso on a moblie device.
It’s easy to figure out, so clients won’t be confused when they try to update their slideshows.
It was recommended to me by my super-WordPress-genius friend Brandon Kraft, so I know it’s good stuff.

You can see an example of Soliloquy in use on this slideshow. A developer’s license is good on unlimited sites, forever and ever, and it’s $99. (An individual site license is $19.) The developer of the plugin comes out with frequent cool add-ons and provides great support. I’ve tried other slider plugins, but this is the one I recommend.

Backup Buddy

Yeah, you heard me! Backup Buddy!

Heh. Just a little non-funny database backup plugin humor there.

Backup Buddy is a lovely plugin that takes the hassle out of three things:

Back up your sites and your clients’ sites – you can create a backup manually before making changes to a site, and schedule daily (or however frequent) backups to the storage location of your choosing – including new cloud storage included with the cost of the plugin.
Restore a site if something goes wonky.
Move a site from one place (wherever you’re developing the site) to another (wherever your client is hosted). SO easily.

It’s got other features, too, but those are the biggies. A developer’s license is $150/year and lets you use it on unlimited sites. Your clients will love knowing that you’ve set up their sites to be automatically backed up, and you’ll love how easy it is to set things right if something goes awry.

Related: Chris Lema makes an excellent argument for why plugin prices are too low. Another reason to invest in these tools now. And, as Chris argues, if you think about it in terms of time you’ll save and value you’ll bring to your client, you’ll make your money back in short order using these and other high-quality WordPress plugins.

This post is part of the Five Favorites linkup hosted each week by my lovely friend Hallie Lord. Next time, I’ll be talking about 5 Favorite FREE WordPress plugins, so stay tuned!

Target a Segment of Your MailChimp List with Gravity Forms

Two powerful tools you can use when creating a collaborative site are Gravity Forms (affiliate link) and MailChimp. Gravity Forms is a supercharged form-building plugin that allows you to customize forms like a rock star…a rock star who has an internship at a form customization company, or something. MailChimp lets you send email campaigns in bulk and provides you with a robust mix of statistics to see how effectively you’re communicating with the recipients.

Let’s look at how these two could work together if you were building a collaborative site and wanted to find out more about the contributors to your project. Note – this isn’t an exhaustive tutorial of either Gravity Forms OR MailChimp; just showing this particular technique. You’ll need to have, at minimum, a Gravity Forms Business License (currently $99/year) to utilize the MailChimp add-on, or you can talk to me about setting this up for you on your site if you don’t want to fool with it yourself. I’m going to assume for the purposes of this post that you’ve already installed the MailChimp add-on for Gravity Forms and have created an account.

Start with a Survey in Gravity Forms

Here’s what we’d like to do. We’re going to poll the contributors to our new website to see what kind of contacts they might have. We’re doing this is so that I can use as my example question this classic children’s recording:

Ah, early 70s children’s television. Good times, good times.

So – first we’ll create our poll in Gravity Forms. Here, I’m going to let people check off more than one response, but you could use other types of responses (radio buttons, a dropdown, etc.) if you’d prefer.

Create a Matching List in MailChimp

Keep that tab open in your browser, because we’ll come back to Gravity Forms in a minute, but hop over to MailChimp. Create a new list in MailChimp that will correspond to your Gravity Form.

After you’ve created your list, the next step is to create groups within that list. When you view the subscribers for the list, you’ll see a heading at the top for Groups.

Here’s where things get amazing.

Create Groups in MailChimp to Filter Communication

Sometimes, you’ll want to send out an email bulletin to all of the contributors to your website – for that, you can use this MailChimp list we’re creating that has ALL of the respondents to the form. But sometimes, you just need to get information to a particular segment of the list. Creating groups allows you to do so with ease.

We’re basically going to mimic the form we already created on our own site via Gravity Forms.

Later, when it’s time to create an email campaign, we can send to a segment of our list instead of to all of the subscribers.

This capability is so useful – you could set up a newsletter for customers based on their past orders, or for blog readers based on their interests, or for your neighbors based on their tolerance for Sesame Street. The possibilities are endless. Here, we’re going to match our list back up with our Gravity Form.

Tie Your Gravity Form to MailChimp by Matching Fields

Now that we have a list set up in MailChimp with particular groups, hop back over to Gravity Forms and click on the MailChimp add-on. (Here I assume you’ve already got that set up – if not, here’s an overview of using Gravity Forms with MailChimp.) All we need to do is match the fields between our two forms. First, choose the relevant MailChimp list.

Once you’ve selected it, you’ll see that it pulls down the fields and shows how they can be linked to the corresponding fields in MailChimp. Note – if you do this step BEFORE creating the groups in MailChimp, you won’t see the full list of fields because there won’t be anything to match them to yet.

Now all you need to do is make those connections. Gravity Forms will automatically create conditional steps as you’re going through the fields. That’s code for “magic happens to make it easy to not mess up the groups.”

Work your way through all of the fields until you have it set up the way you’d like.

Save it, and you’re done!

Why bother?

So – why fool with this, if you’re just working with a group of, say, 25 contributors to a project? Well, I like using MailChimp rather than just emailing people in bulk (always with the BCC field) for two reasons.

Give people just the information they really need. If you’re working on a group project, and you throw a ton of information at the contributors that they may not actually need, they can quickly feel overwhelmed and burned out on the project. Using groups for email communication reduces this tendency.
Get feedback about how effectively you’re communicating. MailChimp will show you what percentage of recipients have opened each email, and you can even view a particular subscriber’s activity. Now, I wouldn’t suggest you go crazy following up with people – “I see that you opened my last communication at 3:43 AM and I wanted to point out that healthy sleep habits are the bedrock of happy worker bees.” But if you see that people aren’t even opening your emails, you know that you need to work on better communication with your group members.

Hope you find this helpful! This post is part of a series on building collaborative websites based on a talk I gave at WordCamp Austin, so if you’d like to stay updated about more posts in this series and other WordPress goodness, you can do so via MY MailChimp Gravity form, which is right there below this sentence. Thanks for reading! Any questions?

Get Yourself A Team: What Your Collaborative Website Needs

Next time you think you want to take someone out, don’t get yourself a good squad. Get yourself a team.

I think we can all agree that Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith was talking about websites here, can we not?

So – you’re going to get yourself a team. But remember – we love it when a plan comes together. What should factor into your plan when you’re building a collaborative site?

What’s your motivation?

When you assemble your crack commando unit, you may do so as part of a professional venture of some sort – meaning, you’re going to be paying the contributors. Or it may begin as a labor of love, with everyone pitching in out of shared support for a particular cause, hobby, or interest.

Adding compensation to the mix adds complexity to the project, since you’ll need to keep close tabs on how your contributors are carrying out their roles and how that affects their payment. But even if you’re working with an all-volunteer group, you still need to keep your team motivated.

A good leader helps team members use their talents and recognizes them accordingly, whether that’s through a paycheck or a personal email with specific feedback. Over the long term, as initial enthusiasm may give way to time constraints and other projects, it’s important to follow up with your team members and find out if they have suggestions for improving the way the site is set up, ideas for new topics to explore, or concerns about how things are going. Keeping a regular stream of communication with your team is more important than trying to micro-manage and oversee every detail of what your team is doing.

What are your strengths?

The A Team was such an effective squad because they each brought something special to the mercenary table: a master strategist who broke all the rules, a feathery-haired con man who could talk them out of a tough situation, an insane pilot with mad helicopter skills, and a blinged-up mechanic with a bad attitude.

It may be that your contributors bring a different mix of skills to the table but it’s likely the mix will be just as diverse. Heck, one of them might even drive a sweet GMC van.

Figuring out what each person is good at—and what each person enjoys—should be the first thing you do when assembling a team. Particularly if you’re an all-volunteer operation, it’s important to match people to tasks that they’re best qualified for and find rewarding. A skilled proofreader whose real enthusiasm is for research may eventually resent being stuck with double-checking other people’s pieces for errors and never getting to do original work.

At the same time, make room for people to learn new skills and grow into greater roles on the site. You’ll be glad you did if your traffic takes off and you need to quickly find mentors for new contributors who may not know the ropes.

What roles need to be filled?

What are some specific roles that a contributor might play on a collaborative site? A short list would include:

Writing content
Optimizing content for search engines
Finding images to accompany written content—and knowing when those images can be used without violation of copyright
Creating original graphics, photographs, audio and/or video
Fact-checking articles before publication
Proofreading content – not just for spelling and grammar, which can be somewhat automated, but also for consistency with the editorial “voice” of the site
Managing user submissions to the website, if you’re accepting either suggestions for new content or user-submitted posts
Promoting the site via social media channels
System administration, site hosting, etc.

How big is your team?

If you’re looking at that short list and thinking, “but we only have five volunteers!” don’t fret. But do consider what your priorities are and what can wait until you have more collaborators on board. Save your contributors from being stretched too thin by setting reasonable expectations – original video production probably isn’t necessary unless that’s the primary focus of your site, for example. I’d say a bare-bones team needs to include someone who’s good with the “under the hood” stuff, someone with an eye for graphics and a basic understanding of How Not to Steal Images, a good writer who gets the basics of SEO, and a detail-oriented person who can proofread and make sure you’re not playing fast and loose with the facts.

On the flip side, if you have a website with, say, 50 contributors, consider breaking up the organization into smaller teams to cover different topics or different periods of time. It’s going to get harder for you as the leader to keep up with all of the content on your site, particularly if you’re all volunteers. Breaking a large site into smaller teams also means you won’t have to spend a lot of time managing personality conflicts or other problems that can start with poor communication.

How much time do you have?

It’s very rare that your pet project is someone else’s pet project—unless you’re both highly motivated and can make a sustained commitment to the site. If you’re the leader and you’ve got an amazing vision for where you want the site to go, your enthusiasm can be contagious. But it takes more than enthusiasm to power a long-term project. Consider how much time you can realistically donate to the site—then double that (if you’re me, at least – I always seem to dream up new “features” for projects I’m passionate about, and it’s easy to fudge the numbers on how long it will take me to finish them).

Then think about how much time you can ask your contributors to donate. Of course, if we’re talking about a professional website with full-time staff, that’s a different situation, but here I’m speaking mainly to leaders of volunteer projects. At first, everyone’s going to be excited and ready to pitch in, but as schedules get crowded and people get busy with other stuff, it’s normal to see a decline in commitment. Be realistic about your expectations of people’s involvement—and for those who are going beyond the call of duty, provide them with regular, specific, and positive feedback to let them know how much you appreciate it.

What’s your plan?

This is the big question you need to answer after you’ve thought through everything else so far. I’ll be talking more on this site about a specific WordPress plugin that helps you implement a workflow for your site and manage team members. It’s called Edit Flow, and I pity the fool who’s building a collaborative site without it.

WordPress superstar Suzette Franck gave a very thorough overview of Edit Flow at a recent WordPress event and I encourage you to check out her slides, which include detailed screenshots of the plugin.

Does it all come down to you?

Everyone loves to feel important, but consider this—if you, like Hannibal and the rest of the A Team, are arrested for a crime you didn’t commit, what will happen to your site? Have you made it all about you and your daily, down-to-the-letter supervision of every piece of content on the site? Or have you built a strong team that can weather the storm if you have a family emergency, or are traveling, or are given an opportunity that will affect how much time you can devote to the site?

If it’s truly a labor of love for you, build your site on a strong foundation of communication between team members, organized workflow, and people who know how to do what YOU do.

Five Favorites for Freelancers

Getting started as a freelancer is no small task, whether you’re replacing your full-time job or setting up a part-time business. When I began learning web design a few years ago, my resources were…quite limited.I was using a 10-year-old version of Paint Shop Pro that crashed when I created more than seven layers in an image, working with our TV for a computer monitor while I sat on the floor in front of our coffee table, and trying to spend absolutely no money whatsoever unless I positively had to. As a freelancing setup, it left a bit to be desired.

Now that I’ve gotten more established as a designer, I still try to stick to a tight budget for my work expenses. Here are five tools I consider worth investing in, particularly if you’re just starting out.

Planscope – Project Management

I discovered Planscope via Brennan Dunn, who also wrote Double Your Freelancing Rate. It’s a sleek, simple system for managing projects and communicating with clients.

I really love having all of my communication about a project in one place, and I’d tried various alternatives – setting up my own system, using notebooks in Evernote, relying on labels in Gmail. Planscope makes it easy. You can break a project into individual tasks, group those tasks into milestones, and automatically notify your clients as to your progress on each task.

The especially nice thing is that clients don’t really have to log into Planscope themselves, although doing so does allow them to see how you’ve divided up the elements of the project and give you more detailed input about their priorities. But if you have a clients who prefer to handle communication via email, Planscope allows them to stay up to date and make requests by simply replying to automatic email notifications.

One of the things I really like is that I can easily send a screenshot via Planscope without having to save it as an image first; I just hit CTRL-Alt-PrintScr, then CTRL-Alt-V to paste it into a dialogue box. It’s simple steps like this that make it such a user-friendly site.

Planscope is $24/month for individual freelancers and has plans for small agencies on up. It integrates with several other sites (Freshbooks, Harvest, Toggl, and more) to make it easy for you to streamline a project from start to finish. I highly recommend it, particularly if you’re new to freelancing and find it a bit overwhelming to know where to start.

Adobe Creative Cloud – Design

Life would have been so much easier if this had been around back when I started. I’m jealous, beginning freelancers of the world.

Instead of spending months fiddling with numbers to figure out WHEN I could FINALLY afford to get Photoshop, I could have been paying a relatively small licensing fee each month for the entire suite of Adobe products.

If you already own a previous version of Adobe Creative Suite, perhaps this isn’t the best option for you, but if you’re just getting started, it’s an amazing opportunity. Adobe was in the news yesterday after announcing that they’ll no longer be providing their products as a suite you can purchase for a one-time fee and will only be making updated versions of their software available via Creative Cloud subscriptions. Many people were upset about this change, as you can see in the discussions on these articles:

Adobe Creative Cloud: What You Need to Know – Justin Seeley clarifies how the subscription model works and how this will affect both new and established users of Adobe products.
Adobe Kills Creative Suite, Goes Subscription-Only Instead: – fair overview from LifeHacker with extended discussion in the comment section of how this new business model will affect Adobe’s user base.
Mashable has an interview with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen on the reasoning behind this decision and the company’s confidence going forward that Creative Cloud will bring more innovation to more designers – and possibly cut down on people’s use of pirated versions of the software.

Personally, I have found the Creative Cloud subscription to be tremendously beneficial, because I use several of the products – Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. It will be interesting to see how their pricing model develops and if they eventually offer a “pick five products” model similar to the various versions of Creative Suite that they currently offer. If you’re just starting out, I think this is a great way to have access to this software. GIMP is an open-source alternative if you’re really on a budget, are mad at Adobe, or just want to not have the monthly commitment. The full Creative Cloud subscription is currently $49.99/month, but they offer special pricing deals for those who have purchased Creative Suite 6, licenses for individual products, teams, and educator/student subscriptions.

Typekit – Premium Web Fonts – and soon Desktop Fonts!

I’ve been a subscriber to Typekit for a couple of years now – it allows me to use a wide variety of premium fonts on client websites. For example, this site currently uses four fonts from Typekit: Bistro Script Web, Abril Text, and a couple of versions of Futura. (condensed and regular). I usually don’t go so font-crazy but it felt right.

Google Web Fonts are free, and they’re adding more and more choices, but Typekit fonts seem to look a little more legibile on screen and I appreciate having access to the classics. I’m very excited that Creative Cloud subscribers will now have access to Typekit fonts on the desktop, which is going to make things SO MUCH easier and give me an expanded set of options I can offer to design clients.

A Typekit subscription by itself starts at $24.99 a year for two websites; if you’re a freelance web designer (and don’t have a Creative Cloud subscription) you’d presumably be better served by a Portfolio subscription at $49.99/year.

Toggl – Time Tracking

This is a very basic tool that can tell you quite a lot about how you’re utilizing your most precious resources as a freelancer: your time!

Toggl’s free version allows you to track different tasks as part of an overall project. The premium version ($5/month) allows you to set an hourly rate for each client and other features. It makes it easy to provide clients with a detailed list of what you’ve been working on, and it integrates with Planscope nicely. There’s not much more to say about it because it doesn’t try to be all things to all people! You can use Toggl as an app, via the website, or on your desktop machine, and it will keep up with all your different entries.

MailChimp – Emailing Groups

MailChimp just makes everything easier when it comes to communicating with groups. I’ve used it for business newsletters, blog posts sent via email, and even my son’s Little League team. My next project will be a MailChimp newsletter for my current and former clients, keeping them up to date on software updates, business-building suggestions, and other information they may find beneficial. MailChimp lets you easily see who’s been reading your content and what formats work best for getting readers to pay attention. Best of all for new freelancers, it’s free up to the first 2,000 subscribers.

Speaking of MailChimp – if you’d like to get an update every time I post something new, sign up below! I’ll be writing about business practices for freelancers, WordPress tips and tricks, and new projects for clients. Thanks for stopping by! And you can find more Five Favorites posts as part of the weekly linkup at Moxie Wife, hosted this week at Camp Patton.

If you’re a freelancer, what tools do you rely on the most?