Resources
Web Hosting
I’m busy. I don’t have time to worry about hosting. I could offer expensive managed hosting or try and save a buck with cheap shared hosting, neither of which is going to help my clients win.
Instead, I offer my clients the best of both worlds: VPS hosting with Dreamhost. My clients get a super fast website, and I don’t have to fool with managing the server via the command line. Now that’s a win-win for everyone!
Project Management
I work best with kanban boards, so for me and my clients Trello (free month of Trello Gold) provides the most value. Plus seeing cards move across the board is very satisfying!
To ensure that all of my client’s needs are captured, I trust Workflowy (additional 250 items) for jotting things down quickly during the discovery calls. Later, I revisit and reformat using Google’s G-Suite so I can share a professional document with my clients.
Time Tracking/Billing/Invoices
If you’d like to literally turns time into money, try Harvest ($10 credit). It’s great for keeping track of how much time you’re logging and then turning those hours into invoices. In addition to the web app, Harvest also offers Android, iOS apps, and Chrome and Safari extensions. Harvest also supports Stripe integration to get paid fast!
Other Tools
Image management and manipulation is hard. Client’s just want to upload a photo and let a computer figure out what looks best. That’s where Cloudinary (extra 600MB of storage space, 60,000 images, 1,800 transformations and 1,200MB of monthly bandwidth) comes in.
I also leverage Buddy as my DevOps pipeline, because I don’t have the time (nor do I care) to babysit Jenkins.
Helpful Links
Below are links on various topics and tech that I’ve used from project-to-project.
Accessibility
- Total Validator
- WAVE Browser Extension
- Contrast Checker
- Practical ARIA Examples
- WordPress Accessibility Code Standards
- Color Safe – Accessible Web Color Combinations
- U.S. Web Design Standards
- The A11Y Project
- MacOS Screen Reader Docs
- Section 508
- WCAG 2.0
- MDN
- pa11y
- Tenon.io
CSS Grid
- Cheat Sheet
- Grid By Example
- Griddy
- Complete Guide to Grid – CSS-Tricks
- CSS Grid Garden
- Learn CSS Grid
- CSS Grid Playground
- MDN
CSS Pseudo Class Selectors
- Complete Guide – CSS Tricks
- Ultimate Guide – Smashing Magazine
- :nth Tester
- Child and Sibling Selectors
- MDN
CSS Calc()
- Full Width Containers
- Example – CodePen
- MDN
CSS Animations
Emmet
ES6 / ECMAScript 2015
- Cheat Sheet
- Let’s Talk About ES6 – Series on Medium
- ES6 For Everyone – Video course with Wes Bos
- ES6 JavaScript Features – Video course with MPJ
- Official Spec
- MDN
Flexbox
- Cheat Sheet
- A Complete Guide to Flexbox – CSS-Tricks
- Flexbox Froggy
- Flexbox Bugs
- Flexbox Patterns
- Official Spec
- What The Flexbox? – Video course with Wes Bos
- MDN
JavaScript
React
- Cheat Sheet
- Official Site
- React For Everyone – Video course by Wes Bos
- r/ReactJS
- React Fundamentals – Course by Tyler McGinnis
Full Disclosure
The law says I have to be clear when I’m using affiliate links, so here’s my official policy:
If a product or service listed on this website has an affiliate program, you can bet that the link to the product or service is an affiliate link. You can also safely bet, that each affiliate link is owned by myself to help bring in some passive income. Finally, I would not put an affiliate link to a product or service if I wasn’t actively using it.