Domain development tools (1.Viewing)

We all know a good website starts with a good domain but do we know all of the tools available to develop a great website?

I know a few members that use WIX and a lot that use wordpress.


I stumbled across this great article on Sully's blog highlighting some great free domain tools.
https://sullysblog.com/5-free-tools-to-kick-your-domain-development-into-gear/


So maybe here we can list some of the free and paid service our members are using for their websites.

I will start it off...

I have my own server so I can pretty much install anything but I am running most of my online stores on ecwid.com which is a paid service but well worth the price to have a professional look and feel.


For a number of my sites I also use Google Blogger along with Google Domains for email. For some of the sites I use the full blogger platform like on the new dn blog located at blog.dn.ca


For others like mapledots.ca I also use blogger but I have figured out how to strip the entire template and start with a blank page. This is a big experiment because with some of my blogger sites I have NEVER experienced any downtime and the service continues to be free.



Lets hear some of your favourite tools...

Good topic. Here are a few more:

- CMS: Wordpress (w/ the GeneratePress Premium theme - one paid account lets you put it on as many sites as you want)

- On-site behaviour tracking (and more): Google Tag Manager (fire data into Google Analytics)

- Front end design: Browser dev tools: Fn+F12 on most browsers

- Simple backlink checker: ahrefs.com/backlink-checker

- Reporting dashboards: Google Data Studio

- What used to be on that domain?: archive.org

Free - Google Search Console - great for SEO info and help.

Paid - Metorik.com - Great for information about your e-commerce store, customers, products, sales and much more. Works with WooCommerce and Shopify

Paid - Klaviyo.com - email marketing and much more. We are just switching to it from Active Campaign.

Paid - Later.com - social media management

I forgot...

I will often send clients a link to:
https://ca.godaddy.com/domain-value-appraisal

if the appraisal is close to what I want for the domain

Great tool but only if you are in agreement with the price

On higher end domains estibot is better because godaddy tops out at 25K and will just say value over 25k whilst estibot will go to any price.