Free Web Tools to Help Your Business

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:29:46 GMT

There are a lot of fantastic tools freely available on the web that enable you to collaborate with colleagues, expand your network, schedule tasks and share a calendar, exchange large files and so on.

These technologies were developed with thousands of highly skilled man-hours and are usually paid for by revenues from online advertising. That means they are free resources your company would pay tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Euros to develop from scratch.

I'm just going to go over the main points of the generic tools that are applicable to most industries. Some of these are high profile but nevertheless:

Networking Tools

These are networking tools that enable your company to constantly outreach, doing a little each day rather than a huge amount all at once. LinkedIn is dedicated to professional networking and with 50 million members and growing, it's not a tool you'll want to ignore. Likewise with Facebook, with over 300 million members it is a vast resource for businesses to market themselves and is a common communication platform on which to connect with individuals and groups.

And Twitter, it's kind of like Marmite - you either love it or hate it. But this is a tool that allows you to get out snappy, short bits of info that keep you in people's minds. Twitter is becoming the gel that integrates both Facebook, LinkedIn and other social platforms because you can feed your tweets through them.

Productivity tools

There are many small development companies that have created really excellent productivity tools, like Basecamp from 37Signals. But here I'm talking about freebies. And who better to offer powerful free software than Google.

When you create a Google account you get to add many features to it. You can select from a long list of software applications, depending on what you need and would find useful. As with most of Google's stuff, there's a low learning curve, so if you've basic computer skills you can just start using these without too much fuss.

My top apps are:

Google Docs - You can create or upload files and folders that are stored and worked from online. If you work on several computers, and would like to collaborate with colleagues on documents, then check it out. Export and save copies to your desktop as you wish.

Google Calendar - Plan your week or month ahead and select whatever info you need to share with your colleagues, so your efforts are coordinated. You can create many calendars to keep tasks and roles separated. But, again, it's online so if you're traveling, working on many computers, or using mobile then online tools are your best option.

Google Reader - Many websites today have fresh and new content added to them daily, weekly or at various intervals. Instead of having to go back and visit them one by one to see what's new, you can "subscribe" to them by using Google Reader. This app will pool all the new stuff together from your selected websites and show them to you as a heading with short description. This helps you sift through large amounts of information quickly and pick out what's relevant or of interest. Keep in the loop on many topics in minutes rather than hours.

Gmail - This is a powerful email app that also comes with a lot of free storage. But, integration is probably the main point to make here. When it comes to productivity it's a major benefit to have software integration. For example, you can setup reminders in your calendar that will email you alerts to your Gmail account.

Google Wave - On the theme of integration, Google Wave promises to be a huge contribution to the web as far as productivity tools are concerned. This software is not on general release yet but it's defined as "a personal communication and collaboration tool". It will merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking, which collectively add up to a large share of why people go online.

Ok, so I'm sure you get the idea - there's loadza stuff out there for free that you can use. Don't want to make this 'blog too long, so just go check them out and enjoy.

What is CMYK?

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:14:59 GMT

CMYK relates to the most common printing method in use today and it stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and BlacK (or Key Black to be more technically correct). These are the colours used to reproduce "full colour" onto paper and card.

"Full colour" is an illusion that is created by mixing tiny dots of these four colours. For example, an image of a blue sky would have a lot of cyan dots with a much lesser concentration of magenta dots and probably very few yellow and black ones, leaving the white of the paper to show through for the clouds.

If we look at the above image, it’s a dark night-time photograph so the ink would have to cover out nearly all the white of the paper, therefore requiring each of the plates to have heavy concentrations of dots. In printing terminology, this image would have to be "separated" so the correct combinations of the 4 colours will produce the colours we see.

The printing press transfers the ink from each plate one at a time to arrive at the "full colour" image. If you had a good magnifying glass and looked at the printed image you would see how the dots of ink sit on top of one another to create the illusion of full colour.

There is a lot more technical information relating to CMYK printing but there you have the basic concept of how it works.

House of Design 'Blog

Free Web Tools to Help Your Business

Networking Tools

Productivity tools

What is CMYK?