Winning Web Apps

100 web aps for freelancers

While this article is aimed at freelancers many of these tools are valuable for office workers and just for people going about their daily lives too. Here are some of my favourites.

Google calendar is a wonderful tool for business and personal. Sharing calendars is a brilliant way to reduce the frustrations of scheduling meetings. One office I was in used Outlook calendar, which was powerful but limited. Google brings you all that and more. Features like having appointments sms'ed to you are great for the slightly disorganised. Hopefully they'll be adding a to-do list feature very soon, but until then I'm using Remember the Milk which plugs in neatly.

Flickr is not just for holiday snaps. It's a great way to simply present product catalogues. Likewise YouTube and Google Video aren't just for amusing home videos.

Another one from Google their document suite is a work in progress but it's getting there. It's nowhere near as powerful in terms of functionality as Microsoft Office or some of the other packages out there, but where it works amazingly is it's sharing systems. If you have numerous people working on a document (eg a bug report list, a paper) then you no longer have to email it round in circles. People can work on a google doc concurrently and have it deal with the merging - there's even a little chat window available to discuss what you're doing in real time.

Campfire - I only looked at this very very briefly but it had some interesting ideas. It's easy for people to use that aren't used to using MSN or irc and the like and has some interesting side functions like the ability to upload documents and the like.

Cafe Press - I've not used them to sell, but have been tempted to buy before. Cafe Press do a print on demand service so you can have your artwork on tshirts, mugs, stickers, pretty much anything. Let people advertise your company for you!

Moo - a lovely little company with a great personality who link through to FlickR to print affordable, high quality business and note cards.

These are just the ones that I've used, I plan to investigate some of the other recommendations as well. Anyone got any suggestions for things on that list that are useful, or ones that are missing?