Useful Tools & Resources
for Internet Businesses

Good Place to Find Small Business Help:

• Entrepeneur.com

Graphics:

• CoolArchive offers a free (text) logo generator. Play with different fonts, textures, and colors.

• istockphoto.com is a great place to get royalty-free stock photos. You buy "credits" that will allow you to pick & choose web-quality photos, medium-quality photos, or print-quality photos.

• ClipArt.com offers (obviously) clipart, photos, fonts, animations, and sounds. If you have the time, you can find this type of stuff for free. Otherwise this is a good option.

• GotLogos.com - clean, simple logos for $25 each.

Tutorial / Help Sites:

• BigNoseBird - weird name, lots of helpful info including some free scripts.

• Willmaster offers various CGI scripts, from form handlers, to content automation and syndication, and more. Many scripts are free. Those that aren't are very reasonably priced.

• RentACoder is a good place to get affordable help for programming, website design, graphics (web and print quality), and more. Freelancers place bids for your business.

• Elance is another good place to get affordable help for programming, website design, graphics (web and print quality), and more. Freelancers place bids for your business.

Small Business Funding / Financing:

• Americans: US Small Business Administration (SBA)
• Canadians: Industry Canada

List Management:

• Recommended! Follow Up Mailing Processor is a script you install on your own server. It allows for unlimited lists, unlimited subscribers, customization features, scheduling features, and more. I use this script myself for all of my lists.

• AWeber has a good reputation; they're a "remote" autoresponder service which means you sign onto their servers to send your messages.

Email:

• As an alternative to Outlook (which is usually targeted by viruses and the like), take a look at Eudora or Pegasus Mail.

• Spam driving you nuts? Try MailWasher. You can blacklist, whitelist, and filter your incoming email prior to downloading it through your email software.

• For good, free web-based email, go to MailBlocks. Provides excellent filtering that catches most junk mail while rarely identifying legitimate email as "spam".

Information on How to Get Free Publicity for Your Business:
(that includes blankspapers, magazines, radio and TV!)

• Publicity Insider
• PR Profits

Offline Stuff:

• If you need business cards and are on a tight budget, visit VistaPrint. They offer a set of free business cards from a limited set of template designs (you pay shipping, handling, and any upgrades).

• ExtraValue.com is a great place to find high-quality business cards, web cards, something they call "snap cards", and other items to help promote your business.

• CafePress gives you an easy way to sell t-shirts, mouse pads, ballcaps, and other items from your very own estore. You create the graphic that goes onto the products you want to sell. CafePress will ship the items to the customer.

Blogs:

• b2evolution - http://b2evolution.net/ - FREE
  A blog script featuring multiple blogs, categories/sub-categories, skins, search function, multiple languages, search engines friendly URLs and a user forum.

• Nucleus - http://nucleuscms.org/ - FREE
  A powerful blog script featuring multiple blogs, multiple authors, drafts and future posts, bookmarklets and a user forum.

• WordPress - http://wordpress.org/ - FREE
  WordPress is a personal publishing tool with focus on aesthetics and featuring cross-blog tool, password protected posts, importing, typographical niceties, multiple authors, bookmarklets and a user forum.

Customer Support:

• Crafty Syntax Live Help - http://www.craftysyntax.com/ - FREE
  A Live Help chat system featuring monitor your visitors, proactively open a chat session, multiple chat sessions, referer tracking, page view tracking, multiple operators, canned responses/images/URLs, multiple departments each with different icons, leave a message. Offers a user supportforum

• Help Center Live - http://www.helpcenterlive.com/ - FREE
  Very powerful all-in-one help center including Live Help, Support Tickets and FAQ. Features include unlimited operators/departments, monitor visitors, initiate chat, collect visitor's information, track visitor's footprint, autosave chat transcripts, canned messages, leave a message, auto-assign tickets to operators, unlimited FAQ topics and a user forum.

• osTicket - http://www.osticket.com/server/ - FREE
  A Support Tickets system featuring email piping, pop3 login, unlimited email addresses, admin/staff/user panels, avoid autoresponder loops, limit maximun tickets user can have opened, accept attachments and limit size, pager alerts for admin and a user forum.

Forums/Bulletin Boards:

• phpBB2 - http://www.phpbb.com/ - FREE
  A widely-popular open-source bulletin-board package, works well, simple user interface and admin panel, clean look, scales well, and can be customized. Support forum.

• SMF - http://www.simplemachines.org/ - FREE
  Elegant. Effective. Powerful. Free. SMF is all of the above. SMF is a next-generation community software package and is jam-packed with features, while at the same time having a minimal impact on resources.

Shopping Carts

• OS Commerce - http://oscommerce.com/ - FREE
  A power-user shopping cart with a big variety of modules and support of almost every payment gateway. A big developers community is ready to offer custom solutions depending on your needs. User forum.

• Zen Cart - http://www.zen-cart.com/ - FREE
  Zen Cart truly is the art of e-commerce; a free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart system. The software is being developed by group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think e-commerce could be and should be done differently. User forum.

Surveys:

• PHPSurveyor - http://www.phpsurveyor.org/ - FREE
  Develop, publish and collect responses to surveys. Display surveys as single questions, group by group or all in one page or use a dataentry system for administration of paper-based versions of the survey. PHP Surveyor can produce 'branching' surveys (set conditions on whether individual questions will display), can vary the look and feel of your survey through a templating system, and can provide basic statistical analysis of your survey results. User Forum.

• Advanced Poll -http://www.proxy2.de/scripts.php - FREE
  A highly windows-inspired poll script. Advanced Poll is a polling system with powerful administration tool. It features: multiple polls, templates, unlimited options, multi-language support, IP-Logging, IP-Locking, cookie support, comment feature, vote expire feature, random poll support and more. Supports textfile and mySQL database. Lots of other cool/useful scripts on their site too! User forum.

Miscellaneous

• Moodle - http://moodle.org/ - FREE
  A course management system designed to help educators create quality online courses. Available in 34 languages and features a WYSIWYG HTML editor. The teacher has full control over all settings for a course. There is a flexible array of course activities (Forums, Journals, Quizzes, Resources, Choices, Surveys, Assignments, Chats, Workshops), user logging and tracking, mail integration, a user forum and much more.

• FAQMasterFlex - http://www.technetguru.net/design/faqmasterflex.php - FREE
  Unlimited categories/questions/answers, web-based administration and a user forum.

• PHPlist - http://www.tincan.co.uk/ - FREE
  A powerful mailing list featuring multiple mailing lists, attachments and a user forum.

• phpFormGenerator - http://phpformgen.sourceforge.net/ - FREE
  A form generator featuring up to 100 form fields, all kind of input fields incl. file upload, customizable fields attributes, send submitted data to an email address or store them in a database, admin panel, user forum.

Miscellaneous Tools:

• Free virus scanner: Trend Micro's Housecall will perform an online scan (and clean) of your computer. (you should still have antivirus software that runs continuously on your computer, such as Norton Antivirus)

• Software firewall: ZoneAlarm helps to protect your private data, and protect your computer from hackers.

• Get rid of spyware and adware using the free Spy Sweeper.

• Website content: FreeSticky offers mostly free (and low-cost) content you can place on your site to add interest and relevance. Lots of categories, some blanks tickers available.

• General website tools: With NetMechanic you can check/fix your HTML, find browser display problems, optimize graphics, monitor your website, and more.

  Note: the search engine and site promotion tools are something I've never used, nor do I intend to... in my experience, site promotion just isn't as simple as clicking on a button!

  They also offer an area filled with free site promotion articles.

• Personal organizer / word processor: TreePad. A "lite" version is available free.

• Protection for digital products: Digital Vault prevents thieves from stealing downloadable products sold through Clickbank, PayPal, and 2CheckOut.