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Tools to Make Your Job Easy
Cut Corners, Save Time and Money
Using Effective Tools. Not only are some of the ‘famous names’ incredibly expensive, but they’re often overkill for what a typical Internet marketer needs to do. It’s worth asking yourself whether you really do need to spend $500 for a graphics editor like Photoshop or web site builder such as Dreamweaver. In addition to being hugely expensive many of these top-end products can be very difficult to use without extensive training and considerable patience over a protracted period of time. So what are the alternatives? As a replacement to Photoshop you could take a look at GIMP and PhotoImpact. Both are considerably easier to use than Photoshop and, at less than $100 for PhotoImpact (and totally free in the case of GIMP), you will be making a considerable saving. My personal favorite is PhotoImpact as I feel it offers everything I need from Photoshop and several additional features that make creating attractive web graphics a lot quicker and easier than its more costly competitor. It always amazes me when I watch someone use Photoshop that it seems to take them five minutes to do something that would have taken less that a minute to do in PhotoImpact. The end result seems to be exactly the same so why I’d want to take five times longer to do the work is a mystery I’ll never quite comprehend. Another alternative that’s popular with Internet marketers is Paint Shop Pro which isn’t free, but is much cheaper than Photoshop. I’ve not used it myself for many years, but people I know who do use it say it’s much easier to figure out than Photoshop. If you need to write articles, ebooks or anything else, you can’t beat OpenOffice for value for money. In many ways it is easier to use than Microsoft Word and it has several cool features that you won’t even find in Word, such as the ability to create PDF files. Oh, and did I mention that it’s completely free? As far as alternatives to Dreamweaver are concerned I must confess that it’s hard for me to be impartial. As the publisher of XSitePro I couldn’t recommend anything else, could I? However, I will take a few sentences to justify my reasoning. XSitePro was designed from the ground-up by Internet Marketers for Internet Marketers, whereas Dreamweaver is a design package aimed at people who design web sites for a living and as such it needs to be a ‘Jack of all Trades’ rather than finely tuned weapon created especially for people wanting to start a successful online business. The aim of XSitePro is to allow you to spend time working on your business rather than working on your web site. Rather than spending day after day trying to figure out how to build a web page, our aim was to cut down the development cost by a significant amount so that you could get on with other jobs such as marketing, key word research, and selling. We realize that running an online business isn’t about turning yourself into a full time web site designer; there’s much more to running a successful online business than just building web sites. Also, there are LOTS of features in XSitePro that you won’t find in any other web site development tool. For example, to insert Google AdSense ads in XSitePro you just right click and select the appropriate option. You can even customize the ads right inside the software without ever having to visit your AdSense account. Try doing that with Dreamweaver! And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Anyway! Enough about XSitePro. Let’s take a look at some other alternatives. I mentioned Open Office’s ability to generate PDFs, but if you want a dedicated alternative to Adobe’s own pdf builder you can’t go far wrong with the excellent PDF Factory Pro. This excellent tool is used by many of the largest companies in the world, and for very good reason. It makes generating high quality, highly customizable pdfs very easy. The same company also sell a package called Fineprint, which I’ve used for many years. It’s like a front-end for all your printer drivers that allows you to do clever things like multiple pages on a single sheet, page numbering, watermarking, duplex, etc. It’s completely printer independent so it doesn’t matter which printer you use. If, like me, you have several different printers attached to you computer, you will really benefit from having a single interface rather than having to deal with the vagaries of each different printer driver. Finally, there are valid alternatives to Outlook you know. So many people use Outlook because it’s what they know, but as e-mail clients go there are some serious challengers that can be much more appropriate for Internet marketers. One definite contender is The Bat from Ritlabs. I’ve used The Bat since 1999 and wouldn’t want to use anything else, as it is so feature-packed that there’s absolutely nothing I’ve not been able to make it do. Even after nearly ten years of using the software I am still regularly discovering new and exciting features and as far as viruses are concerned, you’re far less likely to catch one with The Bat than you are with Outlook.
Hopefully, the above suggestions will have
given you some food for thought as far as alternatives to the
big names are concerned. Do check some of them out as you might
be very pleasantly surprised, and it’s always a great feeling
treading your own path. About Paul Smithson - Paul Smithson is the founder of Intellimon and the driving force behind the best-selling XSitePro web site development tool. Since graduating in Business Strategy and Direct Marketing from two of Europe’s leading business schools, Paul has set up five multi-million dollar companies, one of which is now owned by the BBC. His areas of expertise include business strategy, e-commerce, on-line and off-line marketing, software development, and maximizing the potential of on-line businesses.
Source: http://www.xsitepro.com/tools-to-make-your-job-easy.html | ||
