My review on Paymo is coming but in the meanwhile I noticed that Paymo integrate with Kashflow. For those of you who are using basecamp, xero or similar this paymo and kashflow integration is brilliantly executed.

For those of you who don't know kashflow is easy to use online accounting and finance management software. Made for people who don't want the accounting jargon but want to manage their business finances, income and expenditure easily online from anywhere in the world.

Paymo is online time management and online billing software that helps you rock your freelance or small business work with ease.

A match made in heaven.

Visit Paymo website here

Visit Kashflow website here (and save £1 off per month with the signup discount code GIVEME1OFF)

I recently returned a wifi router to Futureshop as it was useless and I needed to upgrade. In front of me in the line up was a nervous looking young man with a Sony eBook reader in his hand. As his turn came to approach the returns counter he asked for a refund and as the lady inspected the item he continually stuttered there was nothing wrong with it. This is a familiar sight to me and I recognise it as 'upgrade fever'. The hope that an item you recently purchased or were given can be returned in the hope you can buy the latest thing that got launched which makes your old 'cool gadget', uncool.

Immediately after as I walked to the Wifi Router section to find a worthy replacement I passed the young man again in the 'Apple' section of the store frantically pouring over the Apple website showing the iPad (released only that morning). He looked relaxed now as he had returned his Sony eBook reader and probably had sufficient funds to purchase the iPad when it launches in Canada.

I recently joined up with zip.ca to supplement my TV watching and entertainment needs. After much research I found that Zip listed that they had a dispatch warehouse in Vancouver. This was good news and I expected that I would receive my DVD's within 2-3 days at least. Or so I thought. After adding a plethora of DVD's to my zip list, or zipping DVD's to my list as they call it, I was excited when my first dispatched email was sent within 3 hours of signing up. A great start; From start up to dispatch in 3 hours. The fall came when it listed Ontario as the dispatch depot....so nearly a week later I finally received my first DVD.

This experience with zip.ca echoes all the online ordering I have done from within Vancouver. The main issue seems to be there are insufficient warehousing options on the west coast or it is not financially viable for these companies to hold stock on the West Coast.

Freshbooks has long been a favourite time tracking and online invoicing/billing system for me. It makes it easy to track time, get paid and get reports on my productivity. The OS X widget makes it super easy to start and stop the clock as I work on projects which means I can be confident I am billing accurately.

The only thing freshbooks didn't have that was extremely limiting was multi-currency support. Now they do and in freshbooks style they have implement it well. I can now compile an invoice from my timesheets in 2 clicks flat, then select what currency I want to bill in. With one more button click I can convert the amounts into any currency with current exchange rates.

A truly useful addition to an already super online invoicing tool. Freelancers and small business can't go wrong with freshbooks.

Read more on the Freshbooks

This post will be short and to the point, just like your e-Commerce checkout funnel should be. In the first Movie of Lord of the Rings there is a scene in Frodo's house where Gandalf says to him 'Keep it secret. Keep it safe". He was of course referring to the Ring but the same could be a succinct way of summarising your check out process.

To help people make it through your checkout try to achieve that. Make them feel it is safe.

Here ends todays e-Commerce tip on behalf of Gandalf. Isn't he wise...

My poor Son has lost his voice this week due to a cold. It is bad enough that he can't talk yet, but to then have his only communication method (shouting/crying) taken from him is a real tragedy. For some reason in the wee hours this morning I had the picture of the casual e-Commerce shopper arriving at your/an online store. On arrival there is no 'contact us', no live chat, no email address and poor usability confronting them. It seems that more and more people believe you can set up an e-Commerce store and leave it thinking the 24/7 nature of the internet will ensure sales. This is a basic failure on the part of any e-Commerce store.

Having customers wanting to connect, communicate and hopefully convert is brilliant. But if their voice is taken from them as they have no communication channel by which to speak through they will without doubt lose confidence, become frustrated and leave.

Sales lost, frustrated customers and bad word of mouth at the next coffee session with friends.

Be online with your customers is my advice. e-Commerce is not set and forget anymore than a bricks and mortar store is.

It is that time of year for me. I have no idea when I set my company up why I would choose November as year end. Pretty short sighted in hindsight.

There are only a few things in this world I fail to spend time on and that is year end accounting. Why? I don't see spending time on it as a valuable use of my time. There are a lot of better ways to become more efficient at what I do other than pushing my nose through balance sheets. Don't get me wrong - a sound understanding of what went where and how it can be financially improved is very useful. I am interested in the end result. But having an Accountant pull this information together for me makes sense.

Anyway...enough of that...back to compiling receipts for my Accountant...

Just spent some time watching a video at Nettuts (http://net.tutsplus.com/videos/screencasts/a-detailed-look-at-the-960-cs...) demonstrating the 960gs (http://960.gs) system for rapid CSS development. It is a small framework that offers really quick layout options. The question is, is it worth it for Drupal?

There is a 960gs Drupal theme available (http://drupal.org/project/ninesixty) but personally I think I will stick to Zen for now as I know it so well. It seems a really well developed project though so have a look.

If you are creating CSS layouts from scratch then I definitely recommend looking at the 960gs system.

The sketch sheets and templates really help speed things up and can help all those invested in the site (designers, developers, managers) with understanding how the layout works.

So after working on a few new projects recently I realised I needed tools faster and smarter than the ones I was using for pre-site work. In the 1990's used to start a site using Adobe Illustrator for wireframing and all the intense layout work to then present to the customer for approval and changes. I then moved to doing it in Photoshop and finally in recent years have switched to Fireworks and even tried Omnigraffle Pro. All these methods work but there are a few reasons why they slow me down. Firstly, I get distracted by design and end up trying to do the whole look and feel of the design at the wire framing phase. Secondly, working with fully rasterised layers just feels slow. Finally, my Illustrator wireframes especially, whilst awesome, were crap to edit.

I just don't understand why when I need things to work they break. Expletives don't describe today well enough.

The checklist of moving a website from one server to another should be copy database, copy files -> upload files, upload database, move NS, check email accounts and your done.