Welcome to the Family

First of all, you’re in. Welcome to the IT Arsenal family!

If you have a second, before you grab your downloads and goodies, I’d like to get to know you a bit . . .

. . . so if you can do just one thing for me today, I’d REALLY REALLY appreciate if you’d send me an e-mail through my contact form and drop a quick note to say “hi”, let me know who you are, and what ideal outcome you’d like me to help bring into your life through technology. 🙂 Bonus points for being specific.

Anyway, since we’ve found each other, I’ll be hooking you up with all sorts of great stuff in the days, weeks, and months ahead. Check out your goods below or look around the site!

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5 of the Most Useful Web Apps and WordPress Plugins

WordPress plugins

  1. YoastSEO – Yoast is a de-facto SEO resource. He writes great instructional posts, and has put together a SEO WordPress plugin that’s been downloaded over a million times. It helps you tweak your page titles, and analyze your content in the compose screen of a post/page. It’s a must.
  2. Gravity Forms ($40 value!) Consider yourself my client, because I have a developer license to use on unlimited client sites for this plugin. Gravity Forms is the best forms plugin available for WordPress. Use it for reliable contact forms and much more with their add-ons. NOTE: The link downloads a fully functional unlicensed version, you’ll need to purchase Gravity Forms for updates, and/or add-ons. https://itarsenal.com/downloads/gravity.zip
  3. Social Floating Bar – There are thousands of sharing plugins, this one shines above most. I choose this over Digg Digg because it’s more mobile friendly.
  4. Imsanity – A plugin that automatically crops your image uploads to be web friendly, increasing speed, SEO score, and backup reliability for your site.
  5. SumoMe – From the AppSumo team, a suite of tools to grow website traffic, invaluable for list building, marketing, and more.

Web Services

  1. BoxShotKing – Designer level box art (the stuff you can use for guides, booklets, announcements, information products, and the like) that takes minutes to produce, all created through an easy to use website.
  2. ScheduleOnce – A meeting and appointment scheduling system done very well, that seamlessly integrates with Google. See my implementation here: https://itarsenal.com/scheduler Now works with Outlook
  3. Boomerang – Killer feature = having an e-mail you file away automatically come back to your inbox if no one responds. Requires: Google based web mail.
  4. Buffer – This web service lets you batch post your status updates and links, but then trickles them out over time to your audience on various networks. If social media seems tedious to you, this is a shortcut to getting in, writing 10 posts, and looking like you’ve been “staying with it” for days and days.
  5. TheNounProject – Icons are one of the easiest ways to put together much needed graphics for newsletters, downloadables, blog posts, and more. TheNounProject makes tens of thousands searchable, and easily downloaded and attributable, it’s like a graphics easy button for your website. IT Arsenal is working on a WordPress plugin for TheNounProject.
  • CloudFlare – Bonus – Cloudflare may be a bit more technical to setup but helps speed your website up, protect you from hackers, and if you pay for website bandwidth can save you money as well. It’s what is called a content delivery network of sorts, it makes copies of parts of your website, and loads them fast without having to tax your web server which can get bogged down with multiple plugins and many other things.

PS. If you want to take a look at past newsletters, check out the newsletter archive page.