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Toolkit

I'm not aligned with any particular service in the cloud computing, web-based arena and will always seek afresh those that best fit your requirements*. However, I do have some favourites, a selection of which I list below.

These products are some of the most suitable to the needs and likely budget of a small business (though I've also worked with more expensive enterprise systems).

All the products I choose have powerful APIs (application programmer interfaces), meaning that they can easily be integrated with each other to create ever more powerful services.

*There's one exception to this - the Tocaspace™ sitebuilder, a project I lead. I'm still perfectly happy, however, to use an alternative product if you prefer.

Tocaspace Sitebuilding Service

Tocaspace™ is a sitebuilding service that aims to delight you with a website that's good looking, technically correct, highly useabale and super-easy to update - for only £600. And a key driver behind Tocaspace is to integrate "out of the box" with many of the other services listed on this page.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn Etc.

When is it best to use a Facebook group as opposed to creating a fan page? How do you promote and share an event through Facebook and LinkedIn? How many times should you "tweet"? How do you know what is and isn't worth doing? How do you integrate your social networking activity with your main website? How do you control all of this in a way that's manageable and that doesn't take up too much of your time?

Echo Commenting Engine

Echo is a next generation real-time commenting system that as well as allowing direct comments also aggregates comments about you from multiple social networking sites and other Internet locations. It’s a way to share your content and watch the live reaction. Turn your static pages into a real-time stream of diggs, tweets, comments and more.

iContact Email Marketing

iContact was created to make email marketing easy. It gives you the power to create permission-based email newsletters, surveys, and autoresponders with 98-99% deliverability.

Amiando Event Management

Amiando is an event and participant management solution that includes a neat ticket shop widget that you can plug directly in to your website. It has features that support promotion, participant registration, online ticketing and much more.

Wufoo Formbuilder

Wufoo strives to be the easiest way to collect and manage information over the Internet.

Their deceptively powerful service helps you create contact forms, online surveys, and invitations so you can collect the data, registrations and online payments you need.

Tal.ki Embeddable Forum / Discussion Board

Tal.ki is a full-featured, easy to manage, easy to use forum that's simple to embed in any website. The forum integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other services so members can skip registration.

E-Junkie Ecommerce

e-Junkie provides a neat and comprehensive shopping cart and product management solution, including the ability to sell downloads and to sell through affiliates. The e-Junkie shopping cart can easily be integrated in to any website.

Google Apps

The Google Apps suite of web-based communication and collaboration apps includes Gmail - fast, searchable email with less spam, Google Calendar - agenda management, scheduling, calendar sharing, and Google Docs - create and share online documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Zoho Customer Relationship Management

Zoho CRM aligns your sales and marketing by integrating sales with contacts, campaigns, leads, forecasts, invoicing etc. The first three users are free, and it's very affordable to then add users as your business grows. The system can be tailored for anything from a simple contact manager to enterprise sales force automation.

Xero Accounting

Xero is an online accounting package that gives you and your advisors easy access to your bank transactions, invoices, reports, VAT - anytime you need it, anywhere.

EchoSign Electronic Signature Service

EchoSign accelerates your document signing process with instant fax or e-signatures, tracks your team performance and their contracts’ status in real time and stores all your signed agreements.

Google Maps

You probably know Google Maps - the "scrollable" online map that allows you to find businesses, addresses and places of interest, and to get directions from one address to another, among many other features. You've probably also seen these maps embedded in various websites, which is pretty simple to do and extremely handy.

GoPlan Project Management and Collaboration

GoPlan lets you keep track of your projects and collaborate with your team securely through an intuitive user interface.

Paypal Payments Standard

PayPal is all about paying for stuff online, or taking payment, and they offer many ways and means of doing so. Paypal Payments Standard is one of these services, suitable for the smaller business. It integrates with your website to allow you to sell products, including a full shopping cart and many other powerful features and there's no need for you to acquire your own credit card processing "merchant account" from a bank. It's probably not suitable for a full-featured giftware site, for example, but if you just want to sell a few products from your website then it's more than adequate and comparatively hassle free.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an enterprise-class package that makes web analytics smarter, friendlier and free. Powerful, flexible and easy to use features let you analyse the traffic to your website in multiple and extremely powerful ways.

YouTube Video Sharing and Embedding

You know YouTube, but did you know that you can upload HD (high definition) video and embed it in your website? This is often all you need to meet your video needs.

More on embedding high definition YouTube videos...

Box File Sharing and Collaboration

Box allows you to share, manage and access all your business content online.

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