We’d like to wrap up the year by highlighting some of our team’s favourite tech tools of 2019! These tools have helped make the lives of our developers, designers and marketers much easier and we are so excited to share them with you.
Aviva Krygier, COO, Managing Director, Illuminea
“I think I would pick Blogvault as my favourite tool of 2019. it gives us backup, restores, uptime monitoring and scans for hacked sites. It gives us peace of mind knowing our client’s sites are safe.”
David Adler, CTO
“My favourite tool in 2019 is JetBrain’s PHP Storm. Although this IDE is not new by any means, it’s constantly being updated with tons of great new features. By keeping up to date with PHP 7.4, my IDE will hint towards new features and inform me of depreciated code. It integrates perfectly with version control, has a built-in terminal and easy deployment options. Using an advanced IDE you are familiar with can save developers tons of time and ensure high-quality code.”
Emily Campbell, Creative director
“I’ve mostly been entertaining myself watching the race between prototyping tools to see who can make the workflow between design and development easiest first. I’m excited to see the updates that Adobe XD, InVision Studio, UXPin, and Axure all had this year. The design-development handoff process gets easier with every update and I’m looking forward to seeing it evolve.”
Katy Torgovnikov, Marketing & project manager
“For marketing, I like Facebook, which may seem like a weird choice in 2019, but they continuously improve their ads platform. Connecting a Facebook pixel to one of their partner CMS, including WP, takes minutes and doesn’t require a developer. Setting up ‘events’ on your website is also done entirely through Facebook. The ability to target ads to people by email, name, address, and other variables and the level of demographic targeting available is the most effective and powerful I have seen to date on any platform, not to mention the scale. I also love Instapage for their easy-to-build landing pages with A/B testng and lots of integrations – and big kudos to their super-responsive support team.”
“For project management, I really like MyHours, which our team uses internally to track our hours on different projects. It’s very simple but effective. We can also share the real-time hours on a project with a client through a link, so they can stay up to date on what we’re doing.”
Margalit Brown, Website developer
“As I’m getting more involved in digital marketing, I’m discovering the complexities of Google Tag Manager. It avoids a lot of the issues associated with integrating tracking cookies from multiple platforms and provides a user interface to manage it all. Working alongside clients as well as other marketing firms, Google Tag Manager provides a way to keep our work organized in one location and allows even non-technical clients to collaborate on digital marketing efforts.”
Eric Lee, Web & graphic designer
“For design, you can’t go wrong with the Adobe Creative Suite. They have everything you would need to work with any format of design. Adobe Illustrator, in particular, was my favourite program to work with this year. My favourite projects included creating websites with illustrations and unique design elements. The best part about the Illustrator is that anything you create can be animated!”
Joanna Chan, Front end developer
“I’ve worked with many different tools and apps throughout the year, all doing different and cool things! One of the platforms I’ve gotten to know well is Shopify, the eCommerce platform. I’ve helped build custom themes for our clients, using Shopify’s own developer-friendly tools like Themekit and Slate alongside Liquid, their templating language. There’s a lot of customization you can add, such as setting up areas in the theme for custom content and adding apps to extend the store’s functionalities. While Shopify does have some limitations on functionality to a certain degree, it’s still a flexible eCommerce platform to work with that handles many features needed to run an online store.”
Meir Bulua, Founder
“A business needs a healthy pipeline of deals and sales to survive. LeverageIT has been blessed to grow organically due to the amazing work of the incredible team, with most deals being referral-based. But managing all those incoming deals can be challenging for a team that does not have any real sales staff. My favorite tools for 2019 are ones that have helped support our business grow; Pipedrive a simple CRM with lots of integrations – which we discovered a couple of years ago and integrated with Proposify a proposal tool we use internally. These tools allowed our sales process to become seamless. In fact, we have since implemented the same structure (Pipedrive + Proposify) for a number of our clients and partners.”
