14 Business Apps to Help You Increase Productivity in Your Art & Design Practice

Below are ten web apps that may help you increase productivity and efficiency in your Art & Design Practice:

1. MailChimp is free to use for up to a 500 user mailing list. It helps you manage email newsletters for your business. It is a great email–marketing service that takes care of the complicated tasks so you can focus on  the work that really matters. MailChimp makes it easy to design exceptional email campaigns, share them on social networks, integrate with web services you already use, manage your subscribers, and track results too. You’ll love mixing and matching MailChimp’s templates, features, and integrations to suit your needs. It's your own personal publishing platform. Learn more about plans  and prices.

2. Surveymonkey is a online survey platform that allows you to create web-based survey that you can use for your business.It is free to join, and we've found SurveyMonkey's free plan has 

sufficient feature for any business who want to create a basic survey.  If you want the full features you can sign up the pay plans.The plans range from free  to approximately $65 month.

3. NewsMaker is a fast, easy-to-use solution for PR professionals and marketers. Now you can spend your time on high-value tasks such as effective messaging and creative strategy, while NewsMaker take care of the process of sending out press releases and sharing them with the ‘social web’. 

Newsmaker distributes hundreds of news releases to both online and offline media outlets every day. NewsMaker uses its proprietary technology and industry knowledge to harness the power of search engine optimisation (SEO), social media and news aggregation such as Google News and WotNews.

4.Unbounce is a self-serve hosted service that provides marketers doing paid search, banner ads, email or social media marketing, the easiest way to create, publish & test promotion specific landing pages without the need for IT or developers. What we like about Unbounce is you can create landing page or a squeeze page  for  your business yourself without  getting expert to help you.

5. Dropbox is an great service. You can back your files, store them on the cloud, sync them between computers, and share them with your clients. It allows you 2GB of storage for free. If 2GB is not enough then you can sign up for a monthly "Pro" plan. Plans from 100, 200, or 500GB starting at $9.99  monthly. Dropbox has some of the best and easiest storage in the cloud. One feature that we really like is being able to email links to large files rather than exhaust email clients with huge attachments.

6. LogmeIn is a free service and will allow you to take full control of your desktop remotely. This is service will be usefull if you areaway from your business and need to access a file on your studio desktop. It is one of the best remote desktop login’s on the market at the moment and is very useful for remote IT support as well.

7. Jing by TechSmith allows you to take screenshots and capture an image of what you see on your computer screen. With the service you can also record screencasts. Record up to five minutes of on screen video. It's ideal for creative people who need to take fast screen captures. A crafter will use this feature for mock up  designs, and scrapbook projects.  There is also a paid version with additional features.

8. Wufoo is a web application that helps you build amazing online forms. When you design a form with Wufoo, it automatically builds the database backend and scripts needed to make collecting and understanding your data easy, fast and fun. With Wufoo you can create contact forms, invitations, web surveys, and more. It can intergrate with Mailchimp and other equivalent mail programs. Costs will range from free to $200/month.

9.Google-apps.  Google  mail (Gmail) is the best free service for email system. It's reliable and your can search for old emails easily. Once you have a Google account you will get lots more benefits like Google docs which allow you to create easy online forms, spreadsheets, power point presentations, word documents, and excel spreadsheets. As long as you have internet access you can open your google docs anywhere.

10. Workflowy. is an organizational tool that makes life easier. It can help you organize personal to-dos, collaborate on large team projects, take notes, write research papers, keep a journal, work out your marketing strategies, and much more. You can basically type the information from anywhere and worry about organisation and expansion of that data at  later stage.

   

11. Evernote helps you remember and capture everything. It allows you to save ideas, things you like, things you hear, voice notes, photos and to-do lists anywhere from a computer or mobile device. Evernote is free to join.

12. WhatsApp Messenger is a cross-platform mobile messaging app which allows you to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS. WhatsApp Messenger is available for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone and Nokia and yes, those phones can all message each other! Because WhatsApp Messenger uses the same internet data plan that you use for email and web browsing, there is no cost to message and stay in touch with your friends.

In addition to basic messaging WhatsApp users can create groups, send each other unlimited images, video and audio media messages.

13. Join.me- is a instant screen sharing application. Get everybody on the same page, when they're not in the same room, instantly. Review documents and designs. Train staff. Demo products or just show off. join.me is a ridiculously simple screen sharing tool for meetings on the fly. This is a fantastic app as we use tool to coach our clients from anywhere. It 's interactive and everyone is on the same page. You can join free and you can start a free trail too. Monthly fee is $19 and yearly is $149.

14. About.me - A lot of us have multiple online profiles scattered across various services including Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter. And one problem we face is pulling all of this information together to build a single on-line identity — be it for personal use, or to create a professional on-line profile. about.me focused on enabling you to create your personal splash page

Would you like to learn how to increase your productivity the ArtSHINE way?

It’s as simple as 1... 2... 3...

1. Like  ArtSHINE's Facebook page

   

2. Send an e-mail to this ArtSHINE : info @ArtSHINE.com.au

3. Contact Vinh for a no cost, no obligation coaching 

session:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ArtShineDiscovery