Tech Recs
When you’re a Very Online Person (VOP), or someone who works at a Web Design agency, you often get asked for recommendations for various tools, from email to app development. During our design engagements, it’s rare that we are just building a website; more often than not, we’re building a hub that connects many disparate pieces.
Recently, we built a website for FamilyMade, the online world of family content by Olympian Shawn Johnson and her husband, former NFL player Andrew East. Beyond building their website on Squarespace, we worked with them to think through how all of their tech and tools worked together. The result is a site that connects their social media presence, podcast channels, and community in one easy-to-understand, simple-to-navigate space.
When our clients ask us our favorite tools to solve a particular problem or implement a time-saving feature, we generally ask some follow-up questions to gather the information we need to make a sound recommendation. While we’ve been asked a lot of questions — including everything from “How do I make a dynamic map?” to “How can I create a multilingual website?” — we don’t know every tool off of the top of our heads. We’ll always do some research to present options to the client, but regardless, we try to make sure anything we recommend answers these questions:
Does it solve your problem…really?
It’s easy to fall into the trap of almost when looking for technical solutions. We try to avoid tools that get close but can’t actually solve the problem at hand.
Does it make sense for your budget?
A tool that perfectly solves the problem but one you can’t afford isn’t a good solution.
Is it reliable and sustainable?
Sometimes we've taken the route of solving challenging problems with very customized solutions.t But most clients don’t have team members who can help them weave the intricacies of something super technical, and those solutions can quickly become more frustrating than the original problem.
Though we do make very personalized recommendations for our clients, there are a few products we regularly use and recommend. Since you, dear reader, are now a friend of WOTW, we thought we’d open the top-secret, super-amazing, go-to-features vault.
Here are our top five most recommended tools!
Fathom Analytics- The easiest, fastest, most comprehensive way to understand your website’s analytics.
Weglot- Translate your website into more than 100 languages with the click of a button!
Squarespace- Duh! We love Squarespace for its focus on great design and its ability to be customized while remaining usable.
Userway - Power enhanced accessibility on your website with a Userway widget, including features like screen reading, color contrast enhancement, font sizing, and more.
MemberSpace - Build a free community, sell your insights, or protect content on your website when you use Memberspace to create membership areas.
*Note, some of these links will give you a discount when you sign up, and we may benefit from that as an affiliate of the organization. But pinkie swear, we use and recommend these for our clients — and use them ourselves!