Here is my personal toolbox. I’m always on the lookout for new tools and resources that allow me to increase my efficiency and broaden my horizons. Whether it be software tools, web services, or books, everything that is listed here I personally recommend.
The first thing you need to do when setting up your website is to register your domain name. There are plenty of registrars out there, but I don’t think you’ll find a much better deal than what Namecheap has to offer. A cleverly simple dashboard, a comprehensive knowledge base, and great customer service, at a great price. What else can you ask for?
Ok, so you’ve settled on a domain name. The next step is renting some storage space to host your website, and what a better way to go about this than using a cloud-based service? Cloudways allows you to up or downgrade your server on demand, clone your website, automate backups, perform quick restoring, and much more.
There’s just no way around it, if you want to manage your own website and maintain your blog while having limited to no knowledge about programming, this is the answer. WordPress is free to download, use, and modify and there is an infinite amount of themes and plugins available for you to further customize your website.
Right after you install WordPress, you should start looking for a WordPress theme that fits your style. These are carefully designed sets of page layouts, fonts, color palettes, page templates, etc. that will make your website stand out instantly. Themeforest offers a huge array of themes, organized according to purpose, functionalities, and characteristics.
No one can possibly be on top of every social media platform 24/7, that’s why you need to prepare content in advance and use a smart scheduling tool. Postplanner makes scheduling your Facebook and Twitter campaigns a breeze. It provides you with a content finder, link shortening, Canva integration, post recycling and several other useful features.
The best way to turn your visitors into followers is to give them the option to subscribe to your newsletter. That is where ConvertPlus shines. This WordPress plugin provides you with customizable subscription forms, popups, headers, footers, slide-in forms, in-line forms, social plugins, and opt-ins. Not only is it functional, but also very easy on the eyes.
If you plan to start a newsletter, you should focus on writing great content, not organizing countless contacts. While most e-mail marketing tools charge you per subscriber, Sendinblue charges by mails sent, which means you decide how much you invest. It comes with an e-mail designer, plenty of integrations, drip campaigns, and marketing automation.
Computer-Assisted Translation tools, also known as CAT tools, are pieces of software that increase a translator’s efficiency and accuracy. They enable easy access to translation memories, termbases, and other aids that allow translators to focus on what they should. When it comes to CAT tools, Trados Studio has been the industry standard since the very beginning.
PDFs are designed to be easily shareable and to protect content from being altered, which is exactly why editing them can become a challenge. It gets even worse when we need to extract content from scanned PDFs or pictures. Luckily, through a combination of PDF editing tools and optical character recognition (OCR) Finereader saves us quite a few headaches.
Why type when you can dictate? With the aid of voice recognition software, most of us can produce written content up to two or three times faster than with a keyboard. When you are typing more than a couple of thousands of words a day this can make a huge difference. Dragon Naturallyspeaking helps you become more productive and prevent hand injuries at the same time.