It might seem like a lofty ambition, but with the
growing capabilities and widespread availability of
technology on the internet, running your design
business with minimal cost is quickly becoming a
refreshing reality. Whether it’s handling new business
inquiries, invoicing for completed jobs or managing
a project, web applications can provide your
business with the same features as their desktop relatives,
but without the hassle of installing, upgrading
or being confined to one computer to handle day-to-day
business needs.
These tips are primarily targeted to freelancers
and small studios, but, if adopted in an open-minded
fashion, they could easily be translated for use in a
larger studio. I’ve noted this because typically it is
freelancers and small studios that are concerned the
most with operating costs and cash flow, especially in
a situation where they need to bootstrap expenditures
to gain some financial growth when starting out.
Readers will also learn about websites they may not
have known existed. I try to stay away from the generally
obvious web applications like communicating
with colleagues through AOL Instant Messenger—I’m
pretty certain this has become a commonplace occurrence
in the design industry.
COMMUNICATION
In recent years we’ve become well accustomed to
e-mail, but have neglected many other forms of
communication that can also make the flow of ideas
and design iterations move smoothly. Faxing and
telephony have been transformed from their predecessors
to allow for better functionality—all from
the comfort of your web browser.
Faxing
Who wants to pay for an extra phone line or deal
with turning on a separate fax machine every time
a new connection occurs? Most online fax services
will provide you with a number in the area code of
your choice, and even e-mail any incoming faxes to
you once they come through.
Fax It Nice (www.faxitnice.com) $5.99/month:
Fax It Nice is an intuitive, simple and quick online
fax system that you can subscribe to monthly or pay
only when you need it, with no commitment. A
terrific thing about Fax It Nice is its simplicity. You
don’t need to download any special software or do
any extra setup to the documents you want to fax.
Sending faxes is a breeze as well, since Fax It Nice
allows you to upload several types of files to send as a fax (PDF, Word doc, JPEG and text). A small
studio can subscribe to Fax It Nice at the minimal
cost of $5.99—that will give you 50 pages per month
(incoming and outgoing). If you send and receive
more than 50 faxes each month, you can pay $4
extra and get 350 pages on a Prepaid Premium plan.
Either way, it’s the best bargain I’ve seen.
Webmail
If you work on multiple machines, you know the
hassle of keeping your e-mail in sync. Webmail is
the online version of e-mail and can be used from
any web browser. The beauty of webmail is that all
of your messages remain on the server; so no matter
what computer you log in from, they will always be
there for you.
Gmail (www.gmail.com), free: By far the best
bang for no bucks is Gmail, a webmail application
from Google. It allows you to use your existing e-mail
accounts and check them using the slick and intuitive
interface, while also giving you the chance to track
conversations, avoid spam, add events to your own Google calendar and more. You can even use your
Gmail account to store files online—up to 2GB.
Telephony
Handling phone calls as a small studio or freelancer
often means giving out your personal cell phone
number to act as your business line. While this is a
natural thing to do, it can also become rather costly
and cumbersome to juggle personal calls with business
calls.
Grand Central (www.grandcentral.com), free:
Grand Central, also from Google, is a service that
provides you with one central number that’s not tied
to a phone or a location—but tied to you. When
someone calls your Grand Central number, it will
ring all of your phone numbers—home, cell, work
and so on. You then pick up any of those phones
and Grand Central will tell you who is calling and
ask you if you’d like to accept the call or send them
to voicemail. It really is ingenious. The great thing
about Grand Central is you can have a completely
different number and voicemail for your business.
This is what I have done for DSGN + DVLP, as
shown in the footer of the website www.dsgndvlp.com. Feel free to call the number and you’ll hear how
it all works. Currently the service is in private beta,
but you can reserve your number and your area code
now at Grand Central’s website. I should mention
the service has a terrific administration side and a
host of other features too numerous to mention here.
Messaging
In recent years, text messaging has become an
engaging feature of most cell phones and intranets.
For teenagers, it acts as a means to keep the gossip
tree growing, but for most business folks, it can be
a necessary tool in getting teams to work together
who might not be working in the same location.
Messaging can provide the small studio or freelancer
with a great way to share ideas, keep tabs on the
progress of a project or grow relationships with vendors
and clients.
Jott (www.jott.com), free: Do you ever get
ideas at the most inopportune time—such as driving
on the highway—or do you find yourself thumbing
away intensely on your phone only to find out
you’ve jumbled most of the words? If so, then Jott
may be for you. Simply put, Jott is a voice-activated
messaging system. As its website says, it’s as easy as
“Call. Speak. Hang up.” In small business, there
are a thousand things to keep track of—ideas, bills,
calls, expenses, etc. Once safely noted with a simple
phone call and your voice, Jott helps with priorities,
reminders, delegation and categorization. The easiest
way to work with Jott is to have it set up as one of
your quick-dial numbers on your cell phone. That way, you can dictate a message easily with the press of
a button. Another great thing about Jott is its powerful
integration into other services you might already
be using, such as Twitter (http://twitter.com), I Want
Sandy (www.iwantsandy.com), Jaiku (www.jaiku.com)
or Blogger (www.blogger.com). With one call, you
can send a message to any of these services, have it
posted instantly, or delay it until a selected time.
NEW BUSINESS & SALES
Keeping track of leads and opportunities can be
difficult for a small studio or freelancer. The major
obstacles of a new business are often not following
up on leads, missing new opportunities because
we forgot about them and fumbling the proposal
process to the point where the client no longer is
interested in working with us. The best way to
circumvent these issues is to proactively utilize a
Contact Relationship Manager (CRM). A CRM
will help you prioritize sales efforts, remind you
when you need to get back to people and help you
keep track of the conversations you’ve had so you
don’t miss any opportunities.
Highrise PR (www.highrisehq.com), $24/month: Made by the folks over at 37 Signals, a well-known
web application studio, Highrise PR helps
you keep track of the communications and conversations
you have throughout your day. It’s a great new
business tool because it can also help you set up specific leads to follow, tasks to complete and meetings
to be at. When you get e-mail from a client about a
new project, you can forward it to a special e-mail
address that your Highrise account checks. Then, by
logging into Highrise, you and other users on your
account can see the conversation you’ve been having
with that client. It can also send you text messages
or e-mail reminders when you have a meeting. The
service will cost you a minimum of $24 a month, but
you do get 30 days to try it out and a $10-off coupon
for your first month.
Similar software alternatives to Highrise that
you should check out are Relenta CRM (www.relenta.com), Sugar CRM (www.sugarcrm.com) and
Salesforce.com (www.salesforce.com).
FINANCES
Need help keeping track of invoicing and bookkeeping?
These web apps will help you manage
details like when you should expect money to be
coming in, how much you currently have and where
it all is going.
Less Accounting (www.lessaccounting.com),
free: Less Accounting is a web application that makes
handling invoices, documenting credits/debits, estimating
proposals and determining cash flow so much
easier. Unlike similar desktop-accounting applications
that have been used for years, its versatility is in its
simplicity. As the site says, Less Accounting “doesn’t
even act or smell like Peachtree or Quickbooks, but
it can import files from those types of applications.”
Its biggest strength is the dashboard, which is your
account home page; it tells you what your current
cash flow is, what invoices need to be sent out, what
invoices you can expect to be coming in soon and
what your financial projections are currently at for
the month or year.
Less Accounting can also give you reports on
many different financial areas of your business. This means that come tax season, you can provide your
accountant with a nice printout of all the expenditures
you’ve made and all the money you’ve paid
out to vendors and staff—truly an excellent thing to
have. The pricing plan is nice as well. Free accounts
are limited to a smaller number of invoices, estimates
and the like, but for $19.95 a month you can bump
all of those features up to unlimited access.
Similar alternatives to Less Accounting are
Freshbooks (www.freshbooks.com) and Blinksale
(www.blinksale.com).
ONLINE MEETINGS
With rising fuel costs, having face-to-face meetings is
becoming increasingly expensive. A great alternative
is holding meetings in an online setting. These online
meeting places often provide you and your clients
with an easy way to share files, images, video and
audio—sometimes you can even share the view from
your desktop.
Vyew (http://vyew.com), free: Do a search for
“online conferencing” and you’ll get a slew of results,
mostly ranging from the extremely expensive to the
cheap and cumbersome. Vyew is a different kind
of online conference application. First off, it can be
used at no cost. Secondly, it can be used on virtually
any operating system. The software that Vyew uses
to run its web application are Flash and Ajax. What
does this mean to you? It’s highly likely that you are
already set up to use this website. There are no third-party
plug-ins you have to install, no tedious learning
curve you’ll have to embark on—the entire application
is extremely straightforward.
The best part of Vyew is its long-term, asynchronous
capabilities. This means you can either have
a meeting in real time, or hold a meeting over a longer
period of time—like a month. As each member of
the meeting logs back in, they’ll see what others have
said and contributed to the meeting. It’s an excellent
tool for new business and project management in the
long run.
THE FUTURE OF WEB APPS
This is just a glimpse of some of the essential online
tools available that will help you run your business at
a much lower cost, and it should be noted that I easily
could have stretched this article to span the entire
magazine because so many great online tools are
available. With this in mind, I’ll be blogging about
other web applications and various ways to lower
your monthly business costs at http://blogs.graphicdesignforum.com/dschutzsmith. So come by, share
your tips and let’s grow our businesses together.
