Skype for business

For several years, I have been working with a client strictly over the phone doing design work. In the first year, it was me just sending him .jpgs through email back and forth and him calling and asking for changes. This took up so much time and it would get frustrating trying to understand what he wanted and I kept having to send him a bunch of new versions. He kept asking me to come up with a way that he could see my screen and work over the phone.

I had been using Skype previously because a friend told me about it. I realized that they had a way that you could share your screen through the messaging feature. It calls from one username to another, so it's not charging you for a phone call. Skype only charges you for a phone call if you are calling a phone line, not when you are calling another skype username within your country.

Skype has made it so much easier to communicate with my client who is now several states away from me. He can see my screen and tell me to move around text and pictures the way he wants them while I am on the computer doing it at the same time so he can see it. It has become a normal everyday type of thing to use Skype for work. He doesn't have a microphone on his computer, so we still have to use the regular phone to speak to each other, although if you both have speakers, you don't even need a phone. If you have a business where you need to show someone a design or information on your screen without being right next to them, I would suggest using Skype.

Online forum creation

There are a lot of websites now that let you create an online forum free. They let you host it free on their website and give you a custom URL attached to their domain. You can always buy your own .com domain and have it forwarded to the domain link they give you.

I recently tried out out called www.lefora.com 
It's not too bad, they don't spam you with ads all over your forum. There seems to be pretty good protection from spam bots joining your forum. They make each person that joins your site click through a bunch of ads with promotions just to join but afterwards, it is pretty clear from ads, except for some text ads at the very bottom that your barley notice.

Forums are useful if your trying to communicate with a group of people all at once. For example, when your throwing an event, you can create a forum to find out who wants to attend, who wants to perform, who wants to work, get every one's opinion on a topic, etc... It also helps create buzz for the event because talking about it hypes up the excitement of going to the event.

They are also useful for weekly or monthly clubs, sales groups, groups that want to discuss a topic like art or doing charity. Forums have been around for a very long time on the Internet. Much longer than facebook and myspace. It used to be harder to start a forum, get followers, etc... but it was like a private group facebook page where you share ideas, funny pictures, talk about current events, etc... There are a lot of forums out there today dedicated to computer tech support also.

One negative thing about starting a forum is that once you get a group of people on there and things start rolling, they really start to suck you in and somewhat waste your time in the same way that facebook does. Also, if you were the creator, you may want to check back often to administer the board. You have to decide what you want to allow on there and what you don't want to allow as far as topics, NSFW (not safe for work) posts, bad language, rude things people say, etc. On one hand, moderating a forum too much, you can lose some people with too much censorship, but not moderating it enough, you can also lose some people because they may not be protected from being harassed. If it is something to do with a business or event you are running, you may want to be on there enough to moderate the negative posts. Just be careful what you censor, because people will call you out of you censor your board too much also. It's all a balance.