Essential Web Tools

May 4th, 2007
Developing a website takes a great deal of planning and preparation. Part of that process is making sure that you put together the right tools to support all of your efforts. Whether you’re looking for something to survey your users or to keep all of your project documents in one place – odds are you’ll be find a number of different options. Here’s a list of some of the tools that we use on a regular basis.

Survey Monkey

Surveying your website users to find out what they think about your product/service or how they feel about your website is a crucial and can provide very valuable information. Survey Monkey is the most cost effective and flexible tool that we have used to quickly put together a survey and tabulate the results.

Feedburner

If you’re looking for a way to manage the distribution and subscription to your blog or podcast feed Feedburner is one of the fastest growing tools on the web. Feedburner allows you to promote your blog by publishing your content through various sources, ensures that your feed displays correctly, manages traffic spikes, tracks and monitors usage patterns and trends and can monetize your content by taking advantage of the biggest advertising network for blogs and rss feeds.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets

I didn’t think I’d use this too much when we first signed up for it but it’s amazing how quickly this became an everyday tool. Google docs allows you to build, share and collaborate on documents stored in your Google account. Formatting includes all the basic Word functions as well as version control and export to PDF, Word and HTML.

Clipmarks

If you're like me you have a collection of bookmarks that relate to a number of different projects, on a variety of different topics then keeping everything organized is a bit of a task. Clipmarks is a cool little tool that allows you to select only the content that you want from a page, save it to your profile, post it to your blog or send it in an email. Each clip can be categorized using tags and can also be shared with co-workers or friends. If you're looking for something that will pull all your content together or help you quickly post an article to your blog - Clipmarks is worth checking out.

Drupal

This is one of the most powerful open-source content management solutions available today. Drupal allows individuals and communities of users to publish and manage a wide variety of content. With downloadable themes you can extend the power of Drupal to support e-commerce, community portals, blogs, podcasts, peer to peer networking and much more.