With the rise in popularity of working from home, it's more important than ever to have the right tools that allow our team to collaborate. These tools are much needed today for staying on top productivity and staying organized.
As a web agency, organization is a priority for us. So it's important to find tools that work and meet the needs of the team.
There are in fact tools that are specially designed to meet the needs of organizing tasks and roles within a team. These tools are useful in organizing tasks, creating mock-ups, SEO content or analysis and more.
As a website development agency, here are 10 collaborative tools and web tools that we use on a daily basis.
- Asana
- LastPass
- Upwork
- Figma
- Buffer
- Bitly
- Dropbox
- Ubersuggest
- Canva
- Google Trends
1. Asana
Asana is a popular collaboration tool in the market. It brings together several application functions responsible for organizing the agency's tasks. Asana can make connections within a project to manage possible dependencies between tasks. It can also immediately see the overlap between the two tasks, while better controlling the addition of unscheduled tasks.
Thus, Asana makes it easier to assign tasks to each member of our team. With Asana, the use of spreadsheets, email, and work organization apps are a thing of the past. We have the facility to follow the work of the different members of the team without traveling. Our work team, although distant, remains at the same level of information. We will also share projects with clients so that they have an idea of where we are at.
2. LastPass
LastPass is an online password backup software with a browser extension.
It gets rid of the problem of data loss due to forgetting the password. This tool allows us to simplify the sharing of passwords between the team and customers. It generates secure passwords for us to keep safe from any intrusion into our system.
As you can see below, it can save more than 187 passwords. And it really is the least that LastPass can do, it's a real safe.
3. UpWork
Upwork is more than a tool, it's a platform that allows you to meet your needs for skills, talents and freelance expertise regardless of the field. It's one of the leading online self-employment platforms.
Thus, UpWork is a pool of professionals who really prove their worth, especially in the digital field.
So on UpWork, you can find graphic designers, web content writers, SEO experts, virtual assistant managers, web developers, etc.
This platform allowed us to find good collaborators with whom we worked on several projects!
4. Figma
Figma is our favourite web design and prototyping tool and it's accessible free of charge on all browsers.
Figma single-handedly brings everything together for complete website design. Whether it's the creation of diagrams, graphic design, it's possible to design sites perfectly. It's easy to use and to collaborate on.
At 8P Design, we use Figma to create website mockups; to share them with customers to leave ratings and comments.
5. Buffer
Buffer is a very useful tool for social media managers. It's mostly used for programming and publishing content on social medias.
Social medias eligible for Buffer are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest. You just have to connect the accounts you want to program posts on and then you can directly publish all your social media content at one place. It also helps to program posts in advance, this way you don't have to log on every social media everyday to post. For us, this tool gives us more time to devote to other tasks, mostly with our blog social media posts.
This tool also brings us closer to our customers by allowing us to respond more quickly to their concerns.
6. Bitly
Once again, we personally use Bitly when we post on our social medias. It takes care of shortening any URL.
For social media posts, you can use shortened links to make the post look better. Mainly on Instagram, where the only place you can put a link is in the bio. Also, if Bitly is validated by recognized brands around the world, it's because it truly offers reassuring security service.
7. Dropbox
Dropbox is a tool that keeps all your files safe and accessible, no matter what digital device you're using. Dropbox is good for organizing visuals for websites, or for social media posts. You can easily share your large files with colleagues. It's easy to use and this tool keeps your files confidential through several levels of protection.
Dropbox can keep web shortcuts, traditional files or even cloud content in a common space. Through all these features, it also allows customers to directly share important visuals with us.
8. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest allows you to get more traffic to you website. It mainly analyze keywords to see if they'll perform well. It also helps find the right keywords for our web content and improves the positioning of our website, or our clients' websites on search engines.
With this tool you have an overview of the techniques used by your competitors that you can reproduce in your own way.
9. Canva
It's a graphic design tool that allows you to quickly create beautiful visuals. Very easy to use, Canva lets your imagination run wild to create original visuals. It does not necessarily require prior knowledge to be used, it's easy to learn.
We use Canva primarily for our social media and for our blog post visuals. In addition, it's a pretty popular tool and it's a fairly scalable tool that is constantly improving its functionality.
10. Google Trends
Google Trends is a research tool that keeps you up to date with the latest internet research trends. This tool has a curve that shows by period the events underlying research trends, and by region.
Google trends gives you highly sought-after information that very few have access to. This tool allows you to know the keywords that are the most searched at the moment. It's useful when you're looking for social media content to post or for blog articles ideas!
What to retain from these collaborative tools ?
For the good management of tasks within our team, we use among others, Asana, LastPass, Upwork, Figma, Buffer, Bitly, Dropbox, Ubersuggest, Canva and Google Trends.
Most of these different tools allow us to easily manage our tasks between ourselves, our clients and our freelancers. So 8P is available if you have questions or ideas for projects on which we can however collaborate.