20 - Tools We Use In Our Web Agency

Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.

Verbatim text

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Hi and welcome to the WP Innovator podcast, the WordPress podcast for design and web agencies. Let’s make WordPress work for your business. Hi and welcome to episode 20 of the WP Innovator podcast. So today it’s just you and me and we’re unpacking the tools that we use in our web agency. Now, if you’ve not got a notepad, don’t worry. What we’ve done is put a list together for you on the show. Notes via leejacksondev.com Episode 20. That’s the number 20.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So that’s leejacksondev.Com Episode 20. And you can download a nice PDF of all of the tools mentioned in today’s episode, along with a paragraph on what we use it for and a nice link you can click on. All right, let’s rock on. So today it’s just you and me. Now I’m going to talk to you today all about the tools that we use in our agency. So you already know that we are an agency that works with designers. So, so what we will do is when we receive the designs from a design agency, we will then convert that into a WordPress theme and do all of the other work involved in that. So perhaps it might be training, it might be just the build itself or we might even help write up at the very beginning as well.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So that would be scoping the project, etc. So we use a whole wide range of tools and in essence, we’re very similar to a design agency. We use all of the same sorts of tools. We work in a very similar way. The only difference about our own business is that we are quite simply a development resource for the design agency. People listening today, more than likely you are going to be involved in the whole shebang. You’re not only going to be doing the designs, but you’re likely doing all of the coding as well, or you’ve got people in your team that are doing that. Now we’re going to unpack the tools that we are using, which is helping our agency to succeed.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And hopefully some of the tools that I’m dropping today will be helpful for you. And I’m going to talk about how we use each one of them. And we’re not just talking about Internet based tools, I. E. A Basecamp or something, or a software as a service solution, but we’re also going to talk about the software that we use on our computers. And the great news is if you’re a Mac or if you’re a PC, it doesn’t really matter because the tools we use work for both, which is pretty dandy. Now if you are a Linux fan, Ubuntu, Gen 2, whichever it is, then good luck. I think you can use Wine and use most of these applications using Wine, but we’re getting Uber Geek now.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
If you do have Ubuntu, I’m pretty sure there’s some pretty cool tools out there for you as well. Okay, so like I said, we’re gonna unpack some of the tools that we use in our agency that allows us to manage our day to day work, our leads and so on. Now, every agency has something unique to bring to the table and their own specialism. Now there’s enough business out as well. I really do believe that there is enough business out there for us to be able to share our tools, to be able to support each other. And I’d love to find you or even talk to you on the WP Innovator Facebook group. So if you head on over to leejacksondev.com group, that will redirect you to the Facebook group that we have. It’s a private Facebook group and it is full of people like you and like me who are there to help each other out.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Okay, let’s break down the tools we’re going to talk about into sections. The first one is going to be sales, so how do we manage our sales, et cetera. The second one is going to be that really sexy title of administration. But we’re going to throw in communication in there as well. So that’s administration and communication. We’re then going to cover project management, another sexy word. I’m sure that people get really excited or phrase I should say. And then finally, what tools are we using to deliver? So that’s deliver the goods and that includes tools that we’re working with to look at files, look at documentation, etc.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And also to be able to code and deliver the end result. So let’s kick off with sales. Now, it is so important to manage the sales pipeline and I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that you not lose sight of the next few months. So as agencies, we can often move from feast to famine within a heartbeat. Now we win that big project that leads to the feelings of pure elation, the technical side of us. That technician, that coder, just wants to immediately put all hands on deck and start work on the project. So everyone becomes super focused on the delivery and well, sadly balls start to drop in other areas. So when the project is delivered, there’s high fives all around.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Perhaps there’s beer, there’s maybe even some pizza. I would vote for pizza then. No, actually I’d have pizza and beer. And then the reality of looking at the bank and realizing that within two months the money will have dried up on salaries unless you win the next job in that sucks. It really does. I have totally been there before. So you may be super confident in your ability to get another project in to fill that gap, but from my experience and from experience of other agencies, this definitely is an unwise move. The pressure of knowing that there is going to be a hole in a few weeks time is going to potentially lead to poor decisions.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You might agree to something that you would not normally agree to because of the money that’s being put forward too. Now I’ve learned this a few times the hard way. You’d think I’d only learn it once, but I’ve had to go through this a few times, including one project where the money it just looked absolutely amazing. Now the project itself should have only been two months turnaround. Well, it took a year to deliver. So if this resonates with you, then I’d really recommend you go and check out the book the E Myth Revisited. That’s the E. Myth Revisited.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Really, really recommend. Great business book all about the entrepreneur myth and the three kind of characters that are inside of all of us that are all kind of fighting within this business. So go ahead, check that out. That’ll be in the show notes for you to take a look at. But let’s move on. So how do we avoid this feast or famine? So how do we avoid it as an agency? Well, what we have is a visual on our pipeline and we use tools to do this and there’s two tools that we use for this process. So when an email comes in, we’re going to enter that user into a system called Active Campaign. So Active Campaign is a amazing marketing automation tool that people will commonly use for building a list, marketing automation, etc.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
But it also has a CRM built in which allows you to manage new contacts, create deals. These are like opportunities and then set yourself relevant tasks to work through the different stages of getting that deal. The stages as well are visual in kind of a column layout structure which allows us to drag and drop the various potential business through the stages. Obviously hopefully to won and of course at times to lost if that particular project is a no go. So when we get to the quoting part of the deal or the opportunity, whatever your phraseology is, we then crack open our account Software and in this case we use Clickbait, so not clickbooks, sorry, we use clearbooks. So if you are looking for an accounts product, then using ClearBooks is only going to be for you. If you are based in the UK and a couple of other countries, you can check them [email protected] otherwise you’re likely going to need to look at something, say if you’re USA based or Australia based, something like Xero. And that’s actually spelt with an X, E, R, O, that’s an accounts package.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So we’ll talk with ClearBooks, this is what we use. And with ClearBooks we then create a quote. So we’ll have imported the contact details from ActiveCampaign, so that leads come in through ActiveCampaign. We’ve taken that opportunity or that deal through the relevant stages and now it’s got to that point of a quote. We’re going to import the details into clearbooks of the contact and then we will create that particular quote and we’ll issue that with whatever other proposal documentation we might have done. And we as an agency have used some of the amazing information, the amazing documentation as well from Troy Dean, you can check out his previous episode where he talks about what they do, etc. And we’ll make sure we put a note in the show notes to go ahead and check out WP Elevation because they include a whole lot of really cool documentation which are really helpful for putting over a really good proposal, which also kind of gives you that cma, which means cover my ass stuff that will ensure that if there’s going to be any sort of arguments, you know, you’ve got some documentation to, to help mediate any problems that you might have with a client. So anyway, whenever we issue that quote, we also include our terms and conditions of business.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So these are our UK terms and conditions of business and we also make sure that we reference those in the quote email as well. So what this allows us to do is it ensures that we are covered on our business insurance. So our business insurance requires us to have provided some terms and conditions of business so that when that client says, yeah, let’s rock and roll, that there are some terms and conditions which have been sent and can be evidenced to have been sent. Therefore, if things were to go south and Churchwood, it’s not gone south yet, and a court case ensued, then we’d have the relevant paperwork to ensure that our insurance company is going to fund the legal costs. So obviously that’s some sort of self protection and it’s definitely recommended that if you haven’t considered the implications of something going south of the client, go ahead and check out your business insurance and double check what is actually needed for you to be able to get that legal help in those sorts of circumstances. Okay. Now it does provide protection, but also it gives the client, you know, those assurances as well and it improves our credibility as well. We’re not perceived as a tin pot operation, but we’re perceived as a serious business who have procedures, who have processes, documentation, and of course we’ve got the team to deliver.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Alrighty. So when the quote and the proposal have been accepted, we will then use ClearBooks again to convert the quote into an invoice if we need to get a customer signature because there are certain legal requirements for that depending on where they are. We’ll also use signable to send a digital version of a proposal document which they can then click on, read through and then sign digitally, which will also hold up in any kind of legal issues in the future, if that was so required. So that’s signable. If you go ahead, check that out, we’ll make sure there is a link as well in the show notes and that’s for taking digital signatures. But there’s a whole plethora of tools out. We don’t have to use that very often, but thought I’d throw that in there just as a, as a kind of aside there. All right, so depending on the project size then we might have agreed say a 50 or a 25% project deposit structure and then we’re going to kick off the actual projects itself.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So the way we work with our percentages on deposits and we always make sure we have some sort of banked deposit would be for the larger projects. So that’s the larger, longer term, maybe larger financially as well. Projects will take a 25% deposit with agreed 25% increments throughout the lifecycle of the project or something smaller. Maybe it’s a standard theme. Then that would be around the 50% deposit with the rest on completion of the theme. So that’s the sign off of the theme. It’s not actually of the site going live because you will probably aware, as I am aware, that sometimes the client getting all the content together could actually take another few more months. So as an agency we ensure that we protect ourselves from the client taking many, many months to get all of their content together and put it in the website.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now some agencies may already do the content as well. That’s cool. You’re all over it okay, so that covers the two tools that we’re using for our sales process. So that’s when the sales come in and then what we’re doing with those sales and what two tools we’re using then of course we’re going to carry on using ActiveCampaign. We’re going to be using that for ongoing email marketing, marketing automation. For example, the secret plugin list funnel that you may or may not have seen where I’m giving away what’s called a lead magnet which then allows me to take email addresses for the people who’ve filled that in. They receive a free valuable document and I obviously add those people to my list and build that up and then I have other automations included in that. So Active Campaign is so much more than just a CRM.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So what we also do as well as we will move any new clients into a client list and that means that they’re going to receive updates and offers only now and again. We’re not going to spam them but we’re certainly going to make sure that they remember that Lee Jackson Dev exists. It’s really important that people don’t forget about you after they’ve purchased a service and after you’ve delivered. It’s really, really good to keep in touch. Okay, now then we’re going to move on to administration and communication. I know administration doesn’t sound very exciting. Communication definitely is. But essentially in our kind of camp, anything to do with communication is going to require some sort of administration.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I am not going to go into some sort of rap right now. It really felt like it. I think you may have felt that vibe there that I was about to freestyle. I’m definitely not. I’m going to leave that one to the experts. So for the day to day communication at administration we use quite a few tools, many of them I’m really sure you’ve heard of. So let’s, let’s check them out, let’s crack them open. And the first tool, this is an online tool that we use is Google Apps.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now Google Apps is phenomenal. It is super, super cheap. It’s kind of a few pounds, a few dollars per user per month and you can save a bit of money I think by buying for a whole year, etc. And with Google Apps you can manage all of your email using the amazing Gmail interf. I really do think Gmail is amazing. Some people may disagree. I’ll talk about that in a second. And we also use it as well for documentation.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So let’s just talk about email, first of all, Gmail phenomenal. We get tons and tons of room in the Gmail account. There’s something like a 20 megabyte send limit which is pretty cool because we deal with sometimes some quite big PDFs, especially the high res PDFs that might be need to be reviewed, etc. And it’s also very fast. So for things like emailing internally, emails are appearing practically instantly. Also I’m able to give other people access to my inbox. So I have people like Larissa who will come in and daily and regularly check my email, sort things out for me into different folders in order of priority, things that I need to deal with urgently, things that maybe don’t need to be dealt with until further down the line, etc. And those people are also able to add things to my calendar as well because of all the other applications within Google Apps.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So we have email, we’re able to put multiple tags in there. The search facility is so strong that I rarely have to file anything in particular. I can actually just use certain keywords and phrases in the search facility within Gmail and even date ranges, etc. And I’m able to bring up very quickly groups of emails. And there’s also this really cool conversational filter. As default you’ll see all of the previous conversations, so everything’s all grouped as well so you can get the idea of what’s going on. Especially useful if you’re coming in later on in a conversation you’ve been copied in, etc. You’re coming in and you need to read back to find out what’s going on.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s very a very, very useful setup. I’ve got to admit. When I first saw it I found it really confusing. I set it back to the old way and then forced myself over the last year really to get to grips with that conversation view because it’s really good to understand the context of conversations. Now I would recommend you do create folders that you do use the tagging, labeling structure, et cetera. Yes, the search facility is super fast, but also clicking on an existing label to go to invoices is even faster. That is something that I learned at my peril about a year ago when I was trying to find stuff for the account. So now I do have specific labels on emails that definitely need to be stored in a good location.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now with regards to all the other areas of Google Apps, you also have the Google Calendar, you have Google Contacts, and you have Google Tasks. They’re all usable from within The Gmail interface, and they can all then be synced as well with your iPhone, with your Android device. And I also have a Windows Phone. Yes, I know. I’m one of those 2% of the whole world that has a Windows Phone. It’s pretty damn good. I love it, to be honest. But because of the way Google is set up, they’ve ensured that you can also synchronize it with things like a Windows Phone.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I think they. Well, They’ve got it IMAP, but also for the calendars, etc. They have some sort of ICS or export XML file, etc. That can be used as well to sync, so you can get access to all of those pieces of information. So all of that’s brilliant for things like general task management, especially for me. Remember to buy milk, etc. We’ve got the calendar, which is shared across the entire team. I can see what’s going on.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And we’ve also then got the contacts. Again, we can share our contacts as well and keep them up to date and we can also synchronize those contacts as well with some of the other applications. So if you took a look at your account software, it’s very likely that you can synchronize your Google contacts with the application that you’re using. Okay. For the document collaboration side of Google Apps as well, you’ve got pretty much everything you’re ever going to need. There is a presentation tool. You can create a perfectly brilliant presentation that looks good, has the animations, has videos, images, etc. And you can even export that to a PowerPoint file so that that could be played on a completely different computer outside of Google Documents.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Obviously you’re going to want to check that it looks alright before you play it. You’ve also got the document and you’ve got the edit, sorry, the Excel style to. It’s called spreadsheet. And then there’s also a really good drawing application and we use that drawing application a lot. We use that for wireframing and wireframing might be at the point where we’re working with an agency who haven’t got to design stage yet. We’re actually talking about the functionality of a program. And what we might do then is use that drawing application inside of Google Docs to wireframe a user interface that could then be tested and checked out. And you can do the same sort of thing in the presentation tool if you want to make things more interactive, et cetera.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
But we’re a heavy user of both the draw tool, the PowerPoint tool and of course the spreadsheet tool as well. We do write a few documents that would be for the proposals, et cetera. And we’ve got the templates that we’ve saved in there. But the most used three tools in the kind of the collaboration area are things like spreadsheets for data information analysis, et cetera and calculation of quotes. We’ll be using the presentation tool for some presentations, but mainly for interactive wireframes and also then the drawing tool as well to lay stuff out. And really it’s because I’m being stingy. I don’t really wanna fork out a whole load of extra money for a wireframing tool because you can pretty much do it in Google Docs. Everyone’s got a Gmail somewh so everyone can access and you can share a public link or you can share a private link and get other people to collaborate.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So for us it’s phenomenally great. It’s brilliant. If you’re on outlook, that’s office365 then you. I think you can get pretty much everything I’ve just discussed, especially online presentations, et cetera, but I’m not sure what they’ve got in regards to drawing, et cetera. So that’s what we use. And we are in Google Apps all the time. It is one of the cornerstones of our business. Now for conversations we’ve got a team here in the UK and we’ve also got people out in India and then we have other developers that work with us around the world.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So that could be somebody in Australia one week we could be dealing with America or Croatia or literally all around the world. So we are heavy users of Skype and we only use the free Skype version we put a bit of credit on now and again if we need to call maybe Indian mobile and it’s really cheap again to call through Skype and we’ll predominantly use Skype for one to one conversations. We have found that group conversations don’t really work as well in a Skype environment. The call quality can go down the screen sharing suffers a lot more when you’re trying to do things like group conversations etc or share files that that again can be quite time intensive on the bandwidth, etc. It seems to be very slow. So there we have Skype for all of those communications. And the great thing again on Skype is it’s compatible with pretty much any smart device out there. Again I’ve got that.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’m not 2% with that windows Phone. I have Skype built into My Windows Phone, it’s available for iOS and for Android, so you can make telephone calls using your digital plan, you can send messages, etc. So it’s like taking the office wherever you want. There is also, which we don’t use, but we did used to use about three years ago when I first started. There is a Skype in number, so you can actually present to the world an actual landline number to the world that they can call from a normal phone and that will go through to your Skype. But we’re going to cover what we do on telephones shortly. Now, I did say that group conversations are not great on Skype in our own experience, especially when we’re dealing with people around the world. So we use for that sort of thing for screen sharing and for group conversations where we’re either training external clients or we’re using some sort of internal collaboration.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Then we’re going to use Zoom and we. That’s Zoom us, we use that again every day. Another essential tool to our business and this allows us to invite different people from around the world into a essentially a room and we can all have a conversation. We can see each other all on our webcams. We all see the main person who’s speaking. It’s got this ability to switch between who’s speaking, who’s not, etc. We can also then see the screen and also which Skype is missing. We have that ability to request control of the screen and then start to move the screen or sorry, move the mouse around and do stuff on the other computer or the presenter’s computer also the presenter as well can just make a window available rather than the whole screen, etc.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So it’s a very, very powerful tool. And the main reason I went for it again was that using other companies like GoToMeeting, I found it was really expensive. It was something like £30 plus VAT a month. So it was working out quite expensive. Or Maybe it was 20 something pounds plus VAT and worked around 30 pounds, but it was quite expensive per month. Whereas with Zoom I think we’re paying something like 90 to $100 a year. And that gives us everything, it’s unlimited. We can even record the calls that we have and we will often do that, especially in a training environment.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So if we’re doing a training session for a cl, we will use Zoom to record that. That will record straight to our device and then we can pop that over to the client as a recording for them to refer back to as many times as they need to. All right, I did mention phones. The solution we use is Soho66. Again, you’ll get links into that, and that is an online VoIP service. We’ve got physical phones in our office that are plugged in directly via Ethernet cable into the network. It’s using sip and we’re able then to have phones based there. I’m also able then to get those calls through to my computer or through to my phone if I want to.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And again, with iOS, with Android, with Windows Phone, you’re able to connect to a SIP account that is SOHO66, and then receive telephone calls and also make telephone calls. One of the reasons as well we went for Soho 66 was the quality of the telephone calls was much better versus, say, trying to do something on Skype. And also you’re getting unlimited landline calls, which is pretty darn awesome. We call a lot of agencies in the UK and we’re getting very cheap calls that is free. But also we’re able to call other countries as well, quite cheaply. Nothing I don’t think quite beats Skype for calling the USA or India, though Skype tends to be the most cost effective there. Okay. Moving quickly through communication, we also use WhatsApp.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Of all the apps in the world, we use WhatsApp. The reason for that is it is so important to be able to turn off your mobile phone or at least turn off the ability to receive calls and texts if you are heavily into a project and you now need to lock down to just you and the team. So what we’ll do is we’ll be stuck there in airplane mode and have our WI FI on, or we’ll perhaps have turned off the ability to receive calls, depending on what phone you’ve got. And then as a team, we can send each other very quick voice messages via WhatsApp, or we can text a message, or we can send a picture and we’ll use that as kind of like an offline resource. Maybe I’m out on the road, someone needs to send me a message, audio so that I can hear it whilst I’m driving, etc. Very, very useful tool for staying off the radar, but also still ensuring that we’re being able to communicate as a team about things that perhaps we need to discuss. So that’s WhatsApp. Such a cool tool.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
All right, let’s move on to project management. If you stuck with me so far, that’s awesome. If you’ve thought of some tools that you guys use for communication, you think we should be checking those Out. I love shiny new objects. So please, please send me a link to something that you think I should be checking out. Maybe go ahead and share it on that Facebook group. Remember that’s Lee Jackson Dev. Go ahead and share some of your communication tools and don’t just drop a link.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It would be really helpful if you say why you think this is the best thing since sliced bread and why you use it. That would be fantastic. All right, like I said, project management. So we only use two tools for project management again, and that is Basecamp and Google Calendar Select. Talk about Basecamp. So having a project management system is imperative, of course, for managing projects essentially of any size. So we use Basecamp to manage our team both in the UK and around the world. And like I said, we have certain developers that we might switch on or off at certain times.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And I don’t mean they’re robots, I don’t mean switch them off like robots. I mean we’ll bring them into certain projects depending on their skill set and their availability, etcetera, etcetera. All right, so we’ll split any project out into what’s called sprints and then we’ll create task lists within those sprints. So let me just cover what sprints are. Sprints are essentially the different stages of a project and they’re especially useful for the bigger projects where you might have a two week sprint on a certain type of development piece and then at the end of that you would have a client review and sign off so that sprint would actually get signed off and need never be touched again. And then you would move on to the next feature. So that definitely good for the bigger projects. But we’ll also split even the smaller projects out into some sort of Sprint structure.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So like I said, split it out into sprints. We’ll then create tasks lists within those sprints and within those tasks there are dates and there are people assigned to them them. In Basecamp you’re then able to drill right down into each and every task and you can then it will have discussion. So this means that you can per task bring in different people and then start a discussion. So perhaps there is a task that needs some more information to it. So that you could then attach a document, a functional, maybe a page of your functional spec or from the statement of work, however you’re going to call that. Maybe you need some images attaching to that. How’s this going to look? Could you advise on X, Y and Z? And all of that will then be emailed to all the people that that You’ve hooked into that conversation against that task, and that then enables you to get stuff done a lot better or done a lot quicker.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s not all buried in email, it’s all within the task. You do get email notifications. You can reply to the emails as well, and they’ll automatically go against that task, which is super useful. Means you don’t have to keep logging into basecamp. But for the person who really needs that information, it is invaluable being able to click on that task and then go and look at the entire conversation thread. And you can also hook other people in as you go. So as the need for another specialist to come in, that raises its head, hey, check their name. Boom, they’re in that thread.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
They can then see what’s going on and they can chat through. What we’ll then do is, after that task has been discussed, people have collaborated, worked, et cetera. Once that task has been complete, it will then be assigned to the person responsible for checking that particular task has been completed to the full satisfaction, and then they will then then close that task off. If there is a problem, they will then type in that discussion, hey, there’s a problem, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they will then reassign that task back to whomever was responsible for the delivery. And you essentially play task tennis until it is fully closed off. Now, obviously, we don’t want that to be too often. Task tennis can be slow, a slow process. So we’ll always make sure that the person who’s going to assign it back does a double check.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So they double check. They’re definitely happy that the task has been completed. They’ll assign it to the checker. The checker will then check it, and then depending on the type of project, that might then get assigned on to the client to review. It really does depend. I just mentioned the clients. The great thing about basecamp is you can feed all of your clients into this as well. So this means that they can monitor the progress, they can be part of those discussions, and they can also see the full calendar of the project with all of the relevant milestones as well.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And this, again, does oodles for your credibility. It also stops that worry because they can say, oh, wow, the guys are working on this, etc. And of course, there is the ability to hide discussions, task lists, etc. That you want to hide from the client because you just want to avoid them interfering with something that might be particularly complex. And you just don’t need them commenting or sticking their or in kind of at an early stage, you guys need to be left alone in that private discussion area, that private task list. Now, everything that I’ve discussed is Basecamp. It’s called Basecamp two that we’re using. I believe Basecamp three is launched or is imminently launching.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Excuse me. And there is the older version of Basecamp. If you have the older version of Basecamp, everything I’ve talked about is available in the older version as well, just in a different way. Basecamp 2 for us is much a much nicer, cleaner interface. It’s visually more appealing, more spread out. For us, we like it. Again, we like pretty typography, etc. So Basecamp 2 works really well for us.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And the latest version of Basecamp, again, not sure when that’s coming out or if it is out already, we’ve not checked that out yet, so we can’t speak to what’s going to be available in there. I’m perfectly aware there are a lot of other project management tools out there and would definitely recommend you check out what works best for your business. I do believe there’s one called Freed Camp, which is meant to be very similar to Basecamp, the original Basecamp, which again gives all of the features that I’ve discussed. So if you want to go ahead and check that out. But for us, we’ve always ended up coming to Basecamp. Coming back to Base Camp, I have tried to go elsewhere, I’ve used Asana for a while, etc. But it’s always led us back to Basecamp because it seems to work in a way that we work. It gives us all of the visibility that we need and helps us to just push through some of the really complex projects at a good pace.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So I then mentioned that we’ve got Google Calendar. We have Google Calendar there because we can sync that with Basecamp. So this gives us a big visual across the entire company of everybody’s schedules compared to the project timelines. And this is especially important during planning, as we can see who’s going to be off who’s on vacation, so we can plan accordingly. So if I’ve got somebody who specializes in I know jQuery and there’s going to be some complex jQuery needed at some point, and I can see that guy is going to be away then, hey, I can make sure that I adjust the task lists or the schedules or the sprints accordingly to match what resources I have available to me. And it’s also super useful for the accounts team as well, because they always want to Know when a project is likely to be at the next billing stage. I’ve heard it a million times. I’m sure you have too.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
A healthy business has a healthy cash flow and hopefully you’ve got a great accountant who is on your back asking you when the next batch of invoices are good to go. Go. All right, let’s talk about delivery. So delivery is us actually doing the work, working with design files, doing the coding, etc. So let’s start with one of the most important tools that we use, and that is GitHub. GitHub is phenomenal. Essentially it allows you to do some work on a file and then submit that as a version that is synchronized then with GitHub’s server, and that is in there as a version number along with changes tracked. So this means we as a team around the world can work on a project and then submit those changes into the project and commit those as particular versions.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And we then have a full history of development going on for, well, a recent project took a year. I mentioned. We have every single commit ever made, every single change ever made, with the colorations showing us what was there before, what was then replaced, what was added, etc. What files might have been deleted. And this is so important for several reasons, two main ones being obviously backup. This is ensures that all of our files that we’re working on are backed up. But also the other reason is if something goes wrong, we can trace it, we can when did this bug appear? What was the last thing that we did? And we can go through GitHub and we can look at the sorts of changes that were made, any files that were deleted, et cetera. Perhaps there was a dependency that was deleted.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And this gives us that full visual of everything that’s gone on over the lifecycle of the project. So it’s really useful again for finding the those. Now with GitHub, it isn’t free. We’re paying currently $50 a month and it’ll probably go up again even more in the future as we add more and more projects. But it’s an essential part of our disaster recovery and it’s also an essential part of our development cycle because we can see what’s going on. There are other versions of GitHub services available that are probably lower cost and you can also host your own server. But for us, we didn’t want to start going down the line of trying out multiple tools or trying to put our own server in place. We were just happy for the amount of time it would have taken us to do all of that sort of stuff.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
We’re happy to support GitHub and pay them direct and use their services. The reason why you need to pay is because you probably don’t want your code visible publicly. And if you use GitHub for the free, you are essentially open sourcing or making your source available to the world. Therefore, for the paid version you can then make private repositories for your, for your code, for whatever you’re working on. So that’s why we use GitHub. And there are ways of saving money as well. If you’re only working on a few projects, maybe 10 projects etc. At any one time, you can archive off old projects so that you, you can kind of reuse the, the live repository, private repository allowances that you’ll have within GitHub.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
GitHub. So that’s GitHub. There’s. Before I kind of finish on GitHub. There is also really nice GUI tools out there for both Windows and for Mac as well. So if you thought GitHub was all about command line, don’t worry about that. There’s a really nice use graphical user interface, nice little application, both Windows and on your Mac. And if you’re on Ubuntu or Linux, it’s on there as well.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You’ve got a really nice interface there. Okay, what we then use for the actual code is Sublime. That’s Sublime Text Editor. There’s two versions, two and three. We’re currently using two. It’s the kind of the long standing stable version and there is version three out. We’ve not moved over to version three yet. I believe it’s still in ongoing development.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
But we also use an add on for Sublime called Sublime sftp. So this allows us to make some changes to a piece of code and then hit save and that change will automatically then be uploaded via SFTP to the development server so that we can then test the change that we’ve just made. So this saves hours. It really does save hours dragging and dropping files using say something like filezilla. I haven’t had to open Filezilla for years, which is great because with Sublime sftp I’m just hitting save, it’s going up and we’re checking it out. But also because we’ve got GitHub on the roll, we can quickly discard a change. If I, if I upload a change that I’ve made, I’m not happy with it, doesn’t do what I need. I can use the discard feature of GitHub to just get rid of that, it resets and then I can do something again or I can make another change.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So Sublime with the Sublime SFTP module. Now Sublime is super cheap, something like 20 or 30 bucks with sublime FTP plug, again super cheap. And you can pretty much use it on a million computers I think. I think you only pay one license fee, so definitely well worth you checking that out. Although there are a whole load of other editors with Sublime as well. We can make text larger depending on who’s short sighted. You’ve got all the colorizations for your code, etc. And there’s a whole load of other tools as well that you can add on there like prettify of CSS code etc or validation, all those sorts of features that you would expect from a code editor.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now we also have then when we’re working with the actual design files, the Adobe Creative Suite. So we pay for that. We don’t use the online storage or anything else like that. We’ll cover online storage right at the end of this section, but we certainly use Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Fireworks. Sometimes we use Adobe Illustrator and then we definitely use the online type of typekit facility. So let’s cover off Adobe Photoshop. This is the most commonly used within our business because most of the design agencies are sending us websites that have been designed in Photoshop. So that means we can use the latest version of Photoshop to unpack those designs to find out things like heights, widths, fonts, sizes, padding, leading, etc.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
We can also do the same with Adobe Fireworks because some of our clients use Adobe Fireworks to send those design. And we do like working with Fireworks simply because you have things like the line heights in there, quickly accessible in the bar at the bottom. So we quite like working with that one as well. That’s quite popular. But again Photoshop is up there. And then lastly, we would work with Illustrator predominantly when we’re working with brand assets like logos. We don’t do any logo design, but we’ll certainly receive those logos which we will then need to save out as some form of transparent png, maybe in a high resolution for Retina, except for so we’ll often receive the AI or the EPS file that we’ll be able to open up in Illustrator. We then pretty much don’t use any other Adobe tools within the Creative Suite, so it’s a shame they don’t have kind of like a middle middle line that just covers those ones that we use.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And then obviously lastly you’ve got Typekit Typekit allows you to embed glorious fonts online. Obviously we use Google fonts a lot because a lot of the designs we receive come with Google fonts already used. Because agencies are cluing up to the fact that you can get all of these freely accessible fonts. But also some agencies will use some of the Adobe fonts in their designs. And that that’s fine because we can use either our Typekit account or the agencies or the client’s Typekit account to be able to embed the font within the website. So we’ll use Typekit in those circumstances. When we’re testing our websites, we use two services. Well, one’s not a service, one’s an application.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That is Chrome, okay? It’s Chrome is the fastest browser I know of. I do love Firefox, obviously I do not love Internet Explorer. Edge is quite nice. It’s kind of getting there. But Chrome for us, everybody across the board has Chrome installed. We will do all of our development, all of our testing inside of Chrome. We use the Inspector tool within Chrome as well, so that allows us to inspect our code, look at the console, see if there’s any errors, etc. Look at page load times, see what might be slowing things down, etc.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
There is so much packed into Chrome and it’s so user friendly. There is even the ability to test what your website is going to look like in different browsers. Now, I’m going to caveat that with what it’ll do is it’ll allow you to test the iOS, Android, etc. That experience and touch experience as well. Well, using the Inspect tool and the mobile, you just switch to the mobile view, but it is definitely not going to give you an absolute accurate representation because this is essentially Chrome with a few extra bells and whistles to give you that sort of experience. So what we then do is we, once we’ve done everything in Chrome that we can possibly do, we’ll move over to Browser stack. Now with Browser Stack, we can essentially access any device known to man. That is totally an over exaggeration.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
But you can access multiple types of Android devices of multiple sizes, also iOS devices and multiple versions. So you can go right back as far as iOS6 if you want to, or further back. You know, some people will still have the older iPhones, it just really depends what you’re supporting. But for us, we will support the latest version of say Safari on an iPhone device and the version previous to that, we’ll do the same as well on Android. That would be the stock Android Browser, Chrome and the version before that. And then we’ll also support the versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, I think that’s the main ones, isn’t it? On a Mac. And again the version before that. So that’s kind of the previous version and the most current version.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s what we’ll make our code compatible too. And the same with Windows as well. There’s no longer Safari on Windows, so that’s not covered. But we would definitely do the latest version of Internet Explorer, which is now history because we have Edge. So we’ll do the last version of Internet Explorer edge support as well. And if some clients ask for further backwards compatibility, the great thing about BrowserStack is they’ve got it all. We can go back as many versions on as many different operating systems or devices that the client is willing to invest in that sort of compatibility. So browser stack, it’s online, you can access that anywhere in the world and you can pull up really quickly a website.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
They’ve also got this great facility to be able to access localhost. We do do some development on localhost servers and the. So the ability to access things in browserstack is really useful. It means you don’t have to keep uploading stuff to the Internet to then test it. With BrowserStack you can use their plugin which will put stuff through your local host host. And finally we’ve come to the last end again, one of those really important tools, which is Dropbox, Dropbox you will likely have heard of. This gives us that ability to ensure all of our super important files are backed up, synchronized constantly. We paid for the add on as well, which gives us 30 days worth of recovery backwards.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So I can restore a version of a file from up to 30 days ago, which is very useful because there have been times when we’ve saved over a file and then realized, oh, damn it, you know, same file name. It does happen. We’re all human, rarely happens. But when it does happen, it is so great to be able to use that feature as well to roll back. We can then share files with our clients. So one of the things we do very often is we might do a video recording and then we’ll need to send that over to the client. So instead of using a third party service to upload that to and send it to the client, or trying to squish it into an email, we’ll just simply load it on a folder in Dropbox and then we can right click and share that file. And that does remind me there’s another cool tool you’ve got to check out.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
If you’re ever doing a video demonstration to clients, go and check out Snapit. We do use that a lot. I can’t believe I forgot to put this in my notes. I’ve got a bullet list of tools to cover, but Snapit is so important for the training aspect. So if you’ve created a website, you’ve got a section that you know the client’s going to be asking you questions and. Sorry, you’ve got a section that you know the client’s going to be asking you questions. In a few weeks time, just do a video recording, a screen recording of whatever it is, and then you can bundle that up, put that on Dropbox and send them a link saying this is how to add a page or this is how to do X, Y and Z. So super useful as well.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So with Dropbox as well, we can then share particular folders, so again other people within our team can collaborate. And again it means I can push stuff out to someone in another country who might be working on, you know, particular design files, etc. We’ll use GitHub for most of the development side of things, but maybe if we’re working on large files, maybe design files, PSDs, etc. Then that’s where we’ll be using Dropbox to share that sort of of content out and then for people to work on and as they make changes, they are then synchronized between all of our computers. So super useful, Dropbox. And of course that little bonus in there that I almost forgot to mention, which was Snap it. All right, this is a WordPress podcast, so let’s just throw in two WordPress plugins that we also use for delivery. First one is Duplicator allows us quite simply to move the finished product to the live site.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So when we’ve built everything on our dev servers or on our local host, wherever we’ve done it, Duplicator, we install that and within a click of a couple of buttons we’ve made a zip file version of the entire site, including the SQL file with a little installer PHP file. We drag that onto the client site, we run the wizard and boom, the site is moved. All of the URLs and the paths and everything required to allow WordPress to run perfectly on the client’s server is there, ready to rock and roll. So Duplicator, an amazing plugin, and then the other one we use during the delivery, that is the build is advanced custom fields. This is a lovely interface Visual interface to create very quickly a range of different custom fields that you can relate to different post types within your WordPress installation. Definitely useful as well is the repeater feature, so you can allow for repeating pieces of information to be added to a post. There’s also map integration, etc. And this for us is a code time saver.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So this allows us to quickly visually create the custom fields and then all we’re concentrating on is using the relevant loops, etc. That we might need to display that information in the theme itself. And the documentation that comes with advanced custom fields is phenomenal. The support is phenomenal, the price is phenomenal. Advanced custom fields is an absolute game changer, was for us and is definitely for other agencies. So go ahead and check that out. And if you’re interested in what other WordPress plugins that we use, then you need to go and check out the secret list. Yeah, I made a secret list.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s on leejacksondev.com secretlist and you can get hold of my top 10 WordPress plugins that transfer formed our agency that really took us to the next level. So that’s 10 plugins you’ve got to go and check out. I’ve just leaked two. All right, go ahead. Leejacksondev.com secret list. Well, head over to the website to episode 20 and we’ve put together for you a full list of all of the tools that we’ve mentioned today in this podcast. So that will be leejacksondev.com episode 20 and you’re gonna find there a link to all of this information put together in a nice pretty PDF for you to print, stick on your wall or do what you want with. There will be links to every single product and a reminder of what we do with each.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Obviously you’ve got this podcast to listen to multiple times. My beautiful full voice in your ears. If you want a nice friendly reminder of any particular item. Now, we’d love to hear from you. What tools are you using? What would you recommend that other people, our peers, our community go and check out and take a look at, maybe even use. So head on over to the website and go to forward slash contacts. That’s leejacksondev.com contact. Or if you want to join us in the group and let’s have a conversation there, share those tools in there.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s either go to Facebook and type in WP Innovator or go to leejacksondev.com group and that will redirect you to the Facebook group. Just apply to join yes, me or Larissa will get you in, accept you asap and you can come and join the party. Let’s create an awesome group of WordPress developers, of web designers, of peers who are there to support each other, help each other out and have fun and maybe even share some cat pictures. Thanks so much for listening. Have an awesome day and we’ll see you in episode 21.