Good Free WordPress Premium themes

admin    free, Productivity, websites, wordpress     free, themes, websites, wordpress

If you are looking for free wordpress themes you will fun in a big issue, you will either come upon many pages where they try to get you to buy the theme, affiliate link sites, poor quality themes, or even worse themes with bad links in them. Or the worse scenario, themes with virus or malware.

Even if you find the right theme unless it’s well supported you will come across issues sooner or later. The best option is to get free themes from premium sellers who offer the free themes as marketing and provide good updates and support. Here are some that I found:

Woothemes free themes:

Makes one of the best engines for wordpress themes. You can expect good integration and quality. The style is professional as well as it has some that are more playful.

Fearless Themes:

The themes look really great and has a nice design concept to it. There is a large selection but the configuration options are limited.

Site5 free themes:

Themes are professionally design and good layout but it adds playful graphics to it. Good for web 2.0 websites that are casual but serious business sites. They provide great hosting service. They offer these themes to promote their company so you can expect good support and updates.

WP Shower:

Minimalist themes. Great for arts and fashion businesses that need simple elegant themes. They also recently started have premium paid themes. With their minimalist design there is not many options in the back to customize the themes.

http://www.creattor.com

Lots of themes here. It is well organized and easy to scroll.

Email Management Process for Maximum Productivity

admin    free, Productivity     email, gmail, inbox, management, outlook, productivity, tool

Managing your email is one of the most important elements in maximizing your productivity. If you actually track the time you spend managing emails you will realize that it’s a big chuck and it can be better utilize doing real work.

The goal is to see your inbox as an inbox and emails are not suppose to be there permanently and it should be cleared at the end of the day. Clear as in 0 emails in the inbox. The first few times you see this, it’s actually very liberating. Here is the strategy to get it clear:

1. Review from top down every message and make a decision on it before processing the next
2. Delete. If you don’t need it.
3. File it. If no action is to be taken file it. (I like to keep as few folders as possible)
4. Delegate. If you can assign it to someone else then do it.
5. Do it immediately.If it takes 2 minutes or less
6. Add to-do list. If it takes more than 2 minutes

Email Management Tips

1. If you have hundreds of emails or emails from the past then drop it all in a folder and sort it later. For now sort all the incoming emails.
2. Have as few emails as possible. This way you do not spend all of your time checking different emails.
3. Schedule times to review your email and follow the process each time you check it. If you do not feel like processing your emails then don’t check it.
4. Have separate email for junk. Check those when you feel like it.
5. Set up automatic rules to process email. Send up subject text to automatically process the recurring transaction and receipt emails.
6. Make sure to have a to-do list and always go through that list of things you have to do. Do not count on going through your email.

Send Faxes for Free

admin    communication, free, Online Tools     business, commuincation, fax, free, online, phone, tools

free faxing service

I still can’t believe it but it’s true. People and companies still use faxes. Let’s say you use it once in a few months to send a fax to someone that let’s say is living in the 90′s then you should use Faxzero,com. It’s free to send but has an ad on the cover. Which shouldn’t be a big deal, make sure to call them and check to see if they thrown it out along with the ad. I use this all the time without any issues but I sent it to a bank once but they didn’t process my request, I guess they threw it out with the cover ad.

Free Fax:

• Free!
• Ad on the cover page
• Maximum 3 pages + cover
• Max 5 free faxes per day

Paid:

• $1.99 per fax (Paypal)
• Max 15 pages + optional cover
• Priority delivery vs. free faxes
• No ad on the cover page

I never use the Paid fax before but if you need it to look professional then pay the extra. To receive fax I use my Grasshopper number but before that I use a fax line from fax.com, it’s $9.99 which is the best deal around and it’s easy to use but I just don’t fax enough to justify it.

I’ve tried several other options before but it was cumbersome.

Easiest way to Screen Share and Trouble Shoot Virtually

admin    free, Online Tools     crossloop, help, online tools, support, touble shooting, virtual

We have all probably been there, trying to walk someone through how to install or use a software. It’s one of the most difficult and annoying things to do especially if the other person is not too savvy with the computer and internet. The easiest way would be to share screen over Skype but since they are not too savvy they probably aren’t already using Skype. There’s a great very easy to use tool, Crossloop.

You and the other person downloads the application and they give you the access code. You enter it and that’s it. Very easy to use. They both a PC and Mac version.

Compare free online survey tools

admin    free, Online Tools     free plans, Poll Daddy, survey monkey, surveygizmo, surveys, webapps, zoomerang

If you do surveys here and there but it’s not part of your main business you might consider using the free plan from the top survey providers Surverymonkey, Zoomerang, Surveygizmo, and Poll Daddy. There are details of their free plans.

SurveyGizmo:

SurveyGizmo is the top choice because it has a very easy to use interface to help create questions quickly. It is the only provider to offer unlimited questions and you can have over 100 responses per question. And the great thing is you can also export your data.

1. 250 Responses per month
2. Unlimited questions
3. Basic reporting
4. Export data

SurveyMonkey:

SurveyMonkey is easy to use with simple features it does not offer the slick and highly usable interface of SurveyGizmo. It also have many limitations like the other providers.

1. 100 survey responses per surveys
2. 10 questions per survey
3. Basic reporting
4. No data export

Zoomerang:

1. 100 survey responses per surveys
2. 10 questions per survey
3. Basic reporting
4. No data export

Poll Daddy:

1. 200 survey responses per month
2. 10 questions per survey
3. Branded with links
4. Basic reporting
5. No Data Export

You can try those out. What I highly recommend is NEVER use GetResponse’s survey feature. I used that at first because I have a free account and it was a waste of time and cause of much frustration. There are not much options for questions and when viewing the data it is very limited and you cannot see each response. The worst is the export data feature, I got the data in excel and could not follow, took a lot of time. And the data was actually incorrect from the site to the export file and I discovered that the most important respondent was missing.

Free online tools for the virtual office

God    free, Online Tools     basecamp, dropbox, free, gamil, Google Docs, online, tools, yammer

1. Dropbox – virtual hard drive – gives you 2GB of data
2. Basecamp – Simple Project Management tool, helps keep track of shared tasks.
3. Yammer – Internal company twitter. Great to keep updated on what everyone is working on
4. Gmail and Google Docs – Free collaboration on excel and word documents.