Credits
At TechSolvers, we believe in giving credit where credit is due. We’d like to give a big shout out to the following products and services that made it much easier to get our business up and running.
Divi
ElegantThemes flagship product Divi is one of the most widely used paid plugins for WordPress. This plugin makes WordPress site creation super simple and we cannot fault it. It’s worth every cent (and some!)
Wordpress
WordPress is the worlds most popular Content Management System. It’s easy to setup, theres a huge friendly community and there are thousands of plugins available for use.
NetVirtue
NetVirtue are an Australian based Web Hosting provider. Their prices are very competitive (especially if you take advantage of one of their coupons like what we did) and the service is excellent. Highly recommended.
Ubuntu
We’ve been using Ubuntu for years and decided to run all of our virtual machine clients on Ubuntu. It’s simple to setup, it does what it says on the tin and it’s free.
Design Hill
We used DesignHill to host a Logo / Business Card / Facebook Cover Design competition when we setup the business. We were very happy with the end product although we perhaps underestimated the amount of effort that would be necessary to get there.
If you use this referral link to sign up, you’ll get a free $100 upgrade (we will also get a 10% commission – win-win!)
Zoho Mail
Zoho operate a freemium business model for mail hosting – sign up and you get 5 free email addresses, Zoho expects that you’ll love their service so much that when you need more email addresses, you’ll be happy to pay. We think they’re right. We’ve used Zoho for our email since day one and we can’t knock em.
Use our referral code xly6odKm when signing up and we’ll both get an extra 5 email addresses.
Stock Images
Finding the right stock images for your website can be a time consuming process. We enjoyed our experience of the following online stock image services.
Adobe Stock
Out of all the stock photo services we considered, Adobe Stock had the best selection of photos. Their pricing is reasonable however if you aren’t 100% certain, you can sign up and get your first 10 images for free.
Big Stock
BigStock has a reasonable range of photos, their depth and range is not as great as Adobe but they are more affordable. My only gripe with their service is the website could be better. You can use their 7 day free trial to sample their service before signing up.
Graphic Stock
Graphic Stock is very competitive on pricing however their range (for our purposes) was not as comprehensive as Adobe or BigStock. Graphic Stock offer a free 7 day trial, they are definitely worth checking out.
If you’re looking for logos in vector format, we found WorldVectorLogo to be an excellent resource.
Other Notable Mentions
In no particular order…
Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is the most popular contact form plugin on WordPress. Out of the box it has rather limited functionality however it has been written to allow other users to create supplementary plugins that can hook in and help deliver a more fully fledged contact form solution. We used the following plugins to get us our Contact Forms over the line:
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Contact Form 7 Star Rating
We use Contact Form 7 Star Rating to expose a Star Rating field on our feedback form. I would have liked better configurability of the stars (as well as a half star granularity option) but the price was right (free!)
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Flamingo
The Flamingo WordPress plugin is used for persisting Contact Form detail to the WordPress database. You might not need this if you’re happy to just receive email notifications instead but for tracking bookings etc, this is essential. It unfortunately does not create unique identifiers which therefore means a further plugin is required…
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Contact Form 7 Serial Numbers
Contact Form 7 Serial Numbers creates unique identifiers for Flamingo inserted Contact Form submissions. These are obviously useful for customers when they need to followup on a booking.
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Contact Form 7 Conditional Fields
We use Contact Form 7 Conditional Fields to drive some of the logic in our Contact Forms.
Yoast SEO
Our SEO plugin of choice, we’re still trialing the free version of Yoast SEO at the moment and we’ll make a decision in the coming months whether to upgrade to the paid version
Font Awesome
The Font Awesome icon set is found all over the internet these days and for good reason. The icons are well crafted, the set is extensive and its free.
Better Font Awesome
The handy Better Font Awesome plugin exposes the Font Awesome icon set within Divi.
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