A few ser­vices and prod­ucts I rec­om­mend around the web:

• Mac Apps in my dock
• Word­Press & WooThemes
• Fresh­Books Invoicing

Here’s a few other things I rec­om­mend using in your pur­suit of online excel­lence. Wher­ever pos­si­ble I’m mak­ing use of affil­i­ate links so that you can sup­port me and this blog if you decide to use any of these services.

Basic Web­site Hosting

Dreamhost has been my host­ing plat­form of choice for years now and aside from a few minor hic­cups here and there I’ve had nary an issue with any of the sites I’ve hosted with them. One click installs for soft­ware like Word­Press, IMAP email sup­port, and a great con­trol panel all make for a great host for most small to medium web­sites. Plus they’ve got this great refer­ral pro­gram that will make you and I rich beyond our wildest dreams!

Spe­cial­ized Word­Press Hosting

WP Engine is a web host ded­i­cated to host­ing specif­i­cally Word­Press sites. It’s all they do and they do it very well.

With plans start­ing at $29/​month it’s not for every­one — Dreamhost should cer­tainly suf­fice for most personal/​small busi­ness web­sites — but if you don’t want to take care of Word­Press upgrades, data back­ups, mal­ware scan­ning and great Word­Press knowl­edgable sup­port, then be sure to check out WP Engine.

Square­space Hosted Website

Square­space is a pow­er­ful web­site build­ing tool where your web­site is hosted and man­aged by them, but you have com­plete con­trol over the lay­out, struc­ture, design and con­tent of your web­site with­out ever hav­ing to step foot into CSS or HTML code.

But if you do want to wade into the nerd waters a bit, you can have com­plete con­trol over your Square­space site, start­ing from one of their gor­geous tem­plates and doing all sorts of CSS inserts, lay­out changes and many other things that are oth­er­wise unheard of from a web­site build­ing tool like this.

If Word­Press isn’t care­ful, Square­space could cer­tainly eat their lunch as more and more peo­ple are less wor­ried about plu­g­ins and mess­ing with code and more con­cerned with the con­tent of their site.

Microblog­ging

Tum­blr is great for quick and easy post­ing of stuff you find around the inter­net. Their own why Tum­blr site does a great job of explain­ing why, but my rea­son is because the “u” in their logo is actu­ally an upside down “n” — clever!

Pho­tos

Flickr should be the home for all your online images.

Videos

Depend­ing on what the pur­pose is, I use a com­bi­na­tion of YouTube for personal/​misc. videos and Vimeo for videos I’ve spent a bit more time on. The main rea­son being that Vimeo doesn’t plas­ter the site full of ads and chrome.