In this episode, we walk you through 5 tools to help get your website development business off the ground.
Get 17Hats -> Check it out Now
Asana Template -> Get It Now
Divi 4.0 Release – Get Divi Today
#1 – Accounting Software
#2 Project Management
#3 WordPress
#4 Amazing Hosting
#5 Divi
Starting a business should be about passion. You should absolutely love what you do because when you bring money and deadlines into the fold, it can quickly suck the fun out of it. Passion will keep you pushing through the tough times.
These five tools are things I wish someone would have shown me when I was starting. They can and will save you massive amounts of money and time from the trail and error of system exploration.
Thanks for hanging out for another episode of Divi Addicts. We’ll see you next week!
Keegan 0:01
In this episode, we’re gonna walk you through five tools to help you get your web development business off the ground.
Keegan 0:25
So one of the hardest things about starting any business is deciding on systems and processes. So some people jump in with no idea how they want to organize their business. So we’re going to share these top five tools to get your website development business going. And the first one that you’re going to need no matter what you do is accounting software. So if you want to do freelance work, and start taking on clients, you have to be able to get paid and track your income versus your expenses. So there are a lot of solutions out there to get this done. If you don’t have any money, or need to work bare bones for a while wave is an awesome solution.
Keegan 1:01
They offer a free accounting platform with some premium add ons. Now the basic system is plenty good enough to get you started and allow you to invoice your clients for free. That’s one of the reasons I put it up here first is that it is a free option. That’s huge when you’re getting going. But the product I started using very quickly, even when I couldn’t afford it was a product called 17 Hats. So it really is an all in one solution. It offers client bookings, invoicing, time logging, project management, customer relations, management, automated workflows, recurring invoices and a whole bunch more. Another solution is fresh books. It’s it’s a really popular, easy to use platform, and it has a great reputation for being just rock solid. I’ve never really used fresh books, but I added it here based solely on the recommendations of people I respect here in the WordPress and the Divi community.
Keegan 1:57
The second thing you’re going to need is some sort of project management tool. If you go the 17 hats route with accounting, you’re also going to have project management built in. So if you don’t, or if not, you have a few other options that work incredibly well. Asana is a great tool that gives you most of its functions for free. In fact, I use a tandem of Asana and 17 hats. They do have some premium tiers which bring more functionality. But I’ve really found the basic version of Asana works for just about anything that you’re trying to do. In fact, I’ve got a project template available to you for free, and I’ll link it in the show notes, you’ll find a link out to a blog that takes you back to our website. And you’ll be able to get that CSV template which you can upload into Asana very quickly and completely free for you. And it will take you through a checklist of project milestones for web development.
Keegan 2:52
The third thing you’re going to need is a sort of CRM. Actually, I take that back, it’s not a CRM, it’s a CMS wrong acronym. And that would be WordPress. WordPress is what we use. Obviously, it’s what we love, we based our entire podcast off of it and Divi, but starting a website development business and using anything other than WordPress, in my opinion, is something that I just can’t understand. It’s not that other CMS is are bad. I really don’t have an opinion on them one way or the other. If I’m if I’m honest, I do know that WordPress makes up the majority of their internet internet for a reason. Both flexibility and an incredible network of high quality plugins, in my opinion, makes it the clear winner. And we’re gonna also link up in the show notes. An article that kind of explains the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org. Because it can be confusing when you first get going.
Keegan 3:47
Number four is amazing hosting. Finding the right web host is a really long, tough journey. And it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish and the budget that always play a part. As a good friend of mine, Tim Strifler from Divi live.com Oh, he says, if you’re serious about your business, you need to be serious about your hosting. From a very early time, we partnered with flywheel after trying a whole bunch of other hosts, none of them compared to flywheel in terms of site speed, hosting, quality, optimization, ease of use and customer support.
Keegan 4:26
They’re an incredible brand ran by incredible humans who just want to help and they live and breathe the WordPress community. You can sign up with them at Keegan Lanier Media.com slash get fly. Or if you don’t like to take the hands off approach or if you would like to take the hands off approach. We can take care of it all by you letting us host your site your site for you. You can find out more at Keegan Lanier Media.com slash managed dash hosting or just go to Keegan Lanier Media.com and look into our services. It’s very easy to find.
Keegan 4:59
The video Last one and number five on this list is is the proper theme framework. We’ve used Divi for a long time. And we know that finding the right theme framework is possibly the hardest decision when you first get started. There’s so many different options. And there’s a ton of themes on themeforest. And many of them look really, really good. They’re, they’re appealing, they’ve got great demo content, and they suck you right in. But the tough part is getting your information into that design. Admittedly, there’s always a learning curve with any new thing. But that’s why we found what we love, and we bend it to our will with every project and that theme being Divi, we figured out through so many projects that we’ve done using Divi, how to manipulate it and make it into what we want it to be in the end result for our clients.
Keegan 5:49
So Divi has been our go to theme for almost four years, and it’s just gotten better with this new release of the theme builder in Divi 4.0. We’re gonna link up in the show notes some information, you know, you can get more info on the Divi theme. And it’s awesome visual builder, with the link in the show notes at Keegan Lanier Media.com slash get Divi. And we’ll make sure to also put that in the show notes so that you can go check it out, learn all about Divi, what it has to offer, and and more importantly, the functionality and the layout and all the added value that comes with a Divi membership.
Keegan 6:25
So we know starting that starting a business should be about passion. You should absolutely love what you do. When you bring money into the deadlines into the fold, it can quickly suck all the fun out of it. No passion will keep you pushing through those tough times. And there will be tough times.
Keegan 6:44
So these tools are things I wish someone over showed me when I was just getting started. They can and they will save you massive amounts of money and time from the trial and error of system exploration. So we hope that these five tools give you a leap ahead of the rest. They would have saved us so much time so much headache and admittedly a whole lot of money from testing and trying and buying themes and doing all those things. So we thank you for hanging out for another episode of Divi addicts. And we will see you next week with a brand new episode where we’re going to talk about the things we’re most thankful for from 2019.
Keegan 7:29
Right so before we get out of here today we wanted to offer up just to you our podcast listeners that Divi addicts nation, we wanted to offer up our membership, we’re still doing this very limited time $99 lifetime subscription to our Divi Builder layout membership, you can jump in, take advantage of this and get everything that we put out from here until the end of time every layout we build for the Divi theme. They’re custom built.
Keegan 8:01
They’re just for you. And we want to offer to you $99 upfront for a lifetime of everything we bring from here on out and we’re trying our very, very best to drop new layouts every single week. And it could be a section of a page it could be a full layout a landing page or something for the Divi Theme builder. So we would love for you to jump over to Keegan Lanier Media.com and check out our layouts. Sign up today. And you’ll be locked in for life at this amazing introductory price. We appreciate it. We hope you get a lot of value and we’d love to see what you do with these layouts. So have an awesome week and we’ll see you in the next episode of Divi addicts.
