Exploring Web Applications: What Tools Are Available To Freelancers

Freelancers are an interesting group of business professionals that expands each day as more and more day workers leave the corporate world and enter the world of working for themselves. With a much looser operating structure, freelancers can get into bad habits if routines aren’t established from the start. Large and small companies in addition to freelancers themselves have found a niche market in producing tools, applications and software oriented towards freelancers.
Applications consist of time trackers, invoicing and billing, project management and quote or proposal web applications. Utilizing available tools whether they be free or paid, can significantly cut down on the amount of time spent doing monotonous or daunting but necessary tasks as a freelancer. Similar to the way that a corporation’s accounting department has ledger software, the creatives have design software and the coordinators have project management software – a freelancer needs to become all of these entities in order to run a successful business.

Project Management Tools for Organization

Once a freelancer starts working with multiple clients at a time, it can be difficult to remember what was emailed to who, said over the phone or promised during a meeting. Using a software that can note these events under clients will save time and prevent heartache in the future.
Certain project management applications even offer internal task creation events to keep a virtual, cloud based to do list for each client. Insightly is a free project management software that also offers Gmail integration; making logging contact with a client even easier. Enjoy all of the benefits of a large company’s system available to you as a freelancer with Insightly.

Contract and Proposal Creation Applications

Freelancing involves a little bit of sales work as well. As a freelancer, you’re constantly pitching yourself and your skillset to new clients who have quite the list of freelancers to choose from. A great contract and proposal creation application offers freelancers the chance to show off their skills while spending half the time than before when putting contracts or proposals together manually.
Motiv is an excellent choice for creative freelancers as it offers industry specific content for freelancers to aid in the proposal creation process. It’s a known fact that each job a freelancer does requires a contract; Motiv also has handy content for aiding in this process including the option for clients to e-sign.

Time Tracking and Invoicing Tools

Projects taken on in the freelancing world either operate off of an hourly rate or a flat rate per project. Both are common depending on the specific industry and scope of the work. A large website would be done on an hourly rate while a small character creation or animation would be done on a per project basis.
Harvest is a legendary time tracking tool that allows freelancers to honestly report the amount of time they spent working on a specific project. It offers one click time tracking from your desktop, browser or mobile device. From there, reports and invoices can be generated for clients when it comes time to invoice. Invoicing in itself may be a feared aspect of the freelancing job. Having to keep track of accounting and produce documents to both clients and accountants is no simple task.
Freshbooks has a wide amount of invoicing tools for freelancing professionals including the option to be paid online versus snail mail checks. 

A freelancer can arm themselves with many tools that will help them succeed in both the long run and short run of their freelancing career. By utilizing one or all of the available tools, a freelancer can adequately track their hours and send professional invoices using Freshbooks and Harvest, create killer proposals and contracts using Motiv and keep track of what’s what with Insightly.
Most of the applications mentioned above offer a free trial period and are under $20 per month for individuals. Considering the amount of time saved by utilizing available applications, many freelancers take advantage of applications available. Finding what works for you may be a process with a significant amount of applications on the market. Achieve a balance between apps and complement them with your work. Remember, apps are here to help you grow as a freelancer; not hinder your work.

Automatically Add Users to Sites Across a WordPress Multisite Network

When navigating a WordPress multisite network, it’s important to note that users of one site are not automatically made users of other sites across the network. Ordinarily, users have to complete the regular registration process with each site they want to join.
Mika Epstein, otherwise known as Ipstenu, is a prolific multisite plugin developer. She recently released Join My Multisite. This is a brand new plugin that makes it easy for users across a multisite network to join each other’s sites. After network activating the Join My Multisite plugin, each site admin will have three new options for new memberships on their own sites:

• Auto-add users – any time a logged in user visits a site, they will be automatically added to that site
• Have a ‘Join This Site’ button in a widget
• Keep things exactly as they are

Have a look at the settings page:

In addition to the new membership options, site admins can also automatically assign new members a specified user role, using the dropdown menu on the plugin’s settings page.
The membership options determined by this plugin are also available through a widget that each admin can easily drop into any widgetized area of their WordPress theme.

If one of your site admins has registration turned off, this plugin will not affect that. Visitors will not see the ‘register’ button.
As the network admin, you may understand the ins and outs of how WordPress multisite networks work, but visitors more than likely have no idea, especially if the sub-sites are well connected and themed to be similar to one another. They may not understand that they are not automatically members of the other sites. That’s where this plugin is very useful. It lets you eliminate that point of confusion by giving site admins the option to automatically add new visitors as users. Another benefit is that it helps to prevent your networked sites from getting too fragmented and isolated from one another. Download Join My Multisite for free from the WordPress plugin repository.