Craziness and Useful Tools

Posted On: 2014-11-16

And you thought that adult online was crazy? I was going to say thank god it's Friday but we're well beyond Friday and only now can I can finally find time to breath.

It has just been one of those crazy week's when nothing seemed to work, everyone wanted their work done yesterday and all my body and brain wanted to do was curl up somewhere and regain some sanity.

The week started off with food poisoning and finished with a totally dead battery in our SUV and in between we had mainstream clients who had totally unreal expectations ... would-be contractors in mainstream who thought I was a gullible fool ... and PayPal dropping a bomb on all small businesses who run online shops.

Fortunately I have a partner who can sometimes put things in some sort of perspective for me and help me see that I don't have to get every problem solved in the next 24 hours.

Now I can look back and have a bit of a laugh about some of the events of the last week but at the time things were a little different. I mean, the last thing I needed in the middle of all that was a contractor who wanted to charge me $8k for a couple of hour's worth of work ... simple coding work.

Perhaps he knew that I was on a really tight deadline or maybe he just thought that I had no real clue about what it would take to make a WordPress theme totally responsive but in the end he didn't get a cent out of me and I did the five minutes worth of work myself.

As for PayPal and all those online shops that we've built for clients ... well I have another week and a bit to convince those clients that we need to disable the SSL 3.0 protocol in every shop and they're going to have to pay to have my team do it for them. That may be a struggle because we still find that so many small business people over here seem to think that everything involved with the Web should be free.

But that's enough of my griping. It's Sunday ... we've been for a walk ... we've consumed plenty of coffee and now it's time to kick back and get some of our own work done. But before I go there are a couple of things I want to tell you about.

One is an interesting website called Buzzsumo and of course you'll find it at buzzsumo.com. This is a content search site and it allows you to see what topics or keywords are generating the most interest at the moment.

There are some paid plans on the site that will give you a lot of information and there is also a free plan that won't not give you as much information but it will still let you see what topics are generating a lot of interest. When you have that sort of information you should be able to join in the "conversation" and use it to your advantage in marketing your products.

If you use WordPress for your sites have you ever wished that you could add WordPress widgets to your posts or pages? Well now you can with a plugin called "amr shortcode any widget". If you're a little code-challenged you may be facing a minor learning curve to get it to work for you but it's not hard to learn and it will give you a lot of added functionality.

While we're talking about WordPress plugins, Standout Color Boxes and Buttons is another plugin that is well worth using. As its name suggests this plugin will help you add colored content boxes and buttons to your WordPress pages and its really simple to use. Add a little color and you'll attract the surfers' attention.

And if you're building a really big site based on WordPress then look for a theme that includes Fusion Page Builder. Avada is one theme that I know that has Fusion included and it gives you way more functionality that you'll ever use. It might cost a few dollars but then not everything on the Web is free and something this good is worth paying for.

Finally let me tell you about a free online image editor. You can find it at online-image-editor.com. I found it because one of my clients needed an animated GIF. They were all the rage once but these days they are less popular and I had almost forgotten how to build one. Fortunately the Online Image Editor walked me through the process .

Even if you don't need an animated GIF you will still find this site useful because it will help you add layers to your images as well as text, frames, round corners and even a few twinkling stars if you really think something like that will help you sell your products.

It's probably not something that you would use if you have a lot of images to work on but if you need something special for a header or a main image then it should work for you.

And that's it from me ... I'm off to work on my own projects today and try and prepare myself for the start of another crazy week tomorrow.