I get asked for recommendations all the time — everything from web hosting & domain purchase, to stock photos & how to research key words, and more.
Web Hosting & Domain Purchase*
It is my recommendation that your purchase your domains with the guys that are best for purchasing domains and purchase your hosting from the guys that’s best at handling hosting. You can own as many domain names as you want, but one will have to be associated with your hosting account & I suggest you purchase a small domain that you know you won’t use to manage your hosting account:
Domains
Hosting
WordPress Themes*
There are SO MANY WordPress themes out there, but few places that let you narrow down your choices better than ThemeForest. You can filter by rating, date of release, features, and numerous other criteria.
WordPress Resources*
There are SO MANY WordPress themes out there, but few places that let you narrow down your choices better than ThemeForest. You can filter by rating, date of release, features, and numerous other criteria.
- What WordPress Theme Is That | A free online tool allows you to easily detect what WordPress theme a site uses (including parent and child themes).
- WordPress Theme Detector | Another free tool that allows you to find all the details about the WordPress theme and plugins currently being used by a site.
- Scan WP | Yet another free WordPress Theme and Plugin Detector
Websites Speed Tests
These FREE tools allow you to analyze the load speed of your websites, and learn how to make them faster.
Stock Photos
Helen Sedwick wrote a great blog post with legal advice for using images on your website/blog, and also about creative commons and public domain images. Once you understand the differences and what they mean, you can use any of these options:
Sharable Image Generation
Sites like Pinterest & Instagram are designed for sharing images, and Facebook & Twitter allow you to also. But how do folks generate super sharable image-based content when they’re not a designer?:
Keyword Research
It’s important that you have data to help you know just how many people are searching for your keywords and how much competition there is for them. Sometimes just changing one word slightly can improve searchability many times over. You’re always looking for that sweet spot between enough people searching to make it worth your while, and not so much competition that you’ll never rank:
Email Marketing (ie: Mailing List Subscription)
If you want to build an email list by having a subscribe form on your blog/website (and most folks do), this allows you to easily build that list by adding the simple embed code they provide:
Email Solutions
Looking to write and receive emails? Here’s what I recommend…
- Gmail | If you plan on having just one email provider, this should be it
- ProtonMail This is the Gmail of Secure aka Encrypted email providers
- Best Cloud Based Email Services for Business | A list according to the good folks at Cloudwards
Social Media Marketing
If you’re looking for a simple way to update multiple social media profiles at once, and schedule them out for when your updates will have the most impact, these tools are for you:
Miscellaneous
Tons of usefull resources that I’ll sort later:
- DomainTools Whois Lookup | Domain Availability & IP Search
- Is It Down Right Now? | Find out whether a domain is down or not
- Leaf DNS | A free comprehensive DNS test
- TeamViewer | The #1 Choice in Remote Desktop Access and Support
- ViewDNS.info | Checks whether a specified site is down or not.
- Whois.com | A Free Whois Lookup
- Who Is Hosting This? | Find out where a website is being hosted
- Why is My Website Down? | Find out if and why your website is down