When you first create a new site, you’re presented with the following screen:

Hovering over the content of the page will bring up the edit button. Once you click edit, you can make changes to the content of your page using Textile markup for formatting.

In the edit screen, there’s a handy sidebar of Textile shortcuts that pops up. Clicking one of these shortcuts will insert that tag into your content. Adding headings, lists, links, or form elements is as simple as clicking a shortcut. Once I saved the page shown above, I can see all my changes:

You can also attach comments or files to a page, making it easy to work with your clients on building their site.

Jumpchart also supports a couple more really cool features:

• Create pages and sub-pages. You can drag and drop the page order in the sidebar.
• Wireframe and Sitemap views – view your content in a basic wireframe format or view a Sitemap of the pages you’ve created.
• Export – you can export to html/css or to WordPress format. This is a huge time-saver if you’re setting up a bunch of content pages.

What makes Jumpchart worth taking a look? In my experience clients often have trouble visualizing a website during the design and planning phase. If you’re able to start building the content early in the process, it makes it easier to engage the client in the planning of their website. I’ve also found that being able to look at the content for the site often helps during the design phase as well. Plus with the ability to export to html/css or WordPress, you can easily transition the work you’ve done during planning to the build phase. Check out Jumpchart at jumpchart.com.

A couple of my favorite features are:

• Undo history & Undelete – you can revert back to previous versions of files and undelete files & folders
• Mobile access – all your files are available on the go, via the web interface (or via the upcoming iPhone DropBox app)
• Easy – it’s just plain easy to use DropBox – set it up and forget about it

DropBox offers a free plan (2GB) along with a couple of paid plans. It’s well worth trying if you haven’t already.

This is where Browsercam’s Remote Access service comes in very handy. Once you signup, you can remotely login (via VNC or your browser) to one of their remote access machines. Once you know the operating system and browsers you need to test on, you can just find a compatible machine from their list of Remote Access machines. You won’t find every possible combination, but at worst you’ll get very close to what you need. I’ve used it quite a few times to eliminate bugs from layouts. Plus, since you have control of the remote machine, you can test things like javascript and flash, which isn’t possible with screen captures only.

Remote Access isn’t a tool you’ll likely need every day, but it can be a life saver for those hard to fix bugs.

Screenshot of Litmus browser test results

With Litmus, you can test in IE 5/6/7/8, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and a few more browsers. Plus, most browsers have multiple versions available for testing.

You can really tell that the functionality and design of Litmus has been given a lot of thought. Some of the features I really like are:

1) Publishing screenshots – You can make screenshots public to show a client/colleague. Check out an example here.

2) Validation – Litmus will automatically validate your html and css code.

3) Notifications – You can be notified via GTalk, AIM, or Twitter when your screenshots have finished.

4) Compatibility tracking – You can mark browsers as compatible/not compatible for each screenshot so you know what’s left to fix.

Litmus also offers email client testing and it looks like they’ll soon be offering mobile device (iPhone, Blackberry, Android) testing as well!

Ok, how about finding a cheaper alternative? There are lots of image editing programs out there, but if you’re looking for a quick, easy, and free solution (or cheap, depending on which version you select), you might give Aviary’s image editor called Phoenix a try. It’s a browser based image editor that looks and works kind of like a very slimmed down Photoshop. You can see a sample of what’s possible here.

The thing I like about Phoenix is that you can tell a client “Go to this website and edit your images.” There’s nothing to install, no licenses to buy, it’s an easy way to get your clients editing images quickly.

Oh, be sure to check out the other Aviary image tools too. They’re quite impressive for web-based apps.

Ok, welcome back. Shopify, as you’ve seen, is a hosted e-commerce application. It provides all the tools you need to setup e-commerce sites for your clients. We use it for Gooey Templates. I think it’s the best solution out there for running a store.

Screenshot of the Shopify Admin

Some of my favorite features:

Easy Custom Designs

Liquid is the template system that runs Shopify. It’s a really easy, but powerful templating system that allows you to do pretty much anything you want with the display of your site. It uses simple tags to insert content and you can also use these tags to do more complex programming type stuff, such as if/else statements, loops, etc.

The other really killer feature of the design process is “Vision.” Vision is an app that you download to your computer. It sets up a demo Shopify site on your computer so you can edit all the layout files, add images and css, and browser test everything, right on your computer. When you’re done, just export the design and import it into Shopify. It’s super easy and saves a ton of time.

Great Interface

Yeah, it may sound vain to some, but I know that properly designed interfaces will improve the usability of an app. I also think that the easier an app is to use, the more likely it will be they’ll keep using it. Shopify is both beautiful and easy to use.

Integration with Services

Shopify is integrated with all the usual payment, shipping, and fulfillment services, making it easy to set things up for your client. They also have an API and you can export your data.

Shopify App Store

App stores seem to be popping up everywhere lately, but Shopify’s app store is really useful. Basically Shopify allows developers to setup an app that works with their API. We use Fetch for delivering digital files to our customers. You can also install other apps for things like printing invoices, detailed stats on your store, and more.

Security and Maintenance

You don’t have to do a thing to secure or maintain a store for your clients. Set it and forget it. Need I say more?

What I don’t like

Transaction fees on orders. On all but the most expensive plan, Shopify charges a transaction fee of 1/2 to 2%. Now I understand why they have to do this, they have bills to pay too. However, it can be a hard sell to clients, especially if they have thin margins. On the Shopify site, they do mention that you can contact them for custom plans, so maybe you can work out something if a client won’t go for the transaction fees?

Would I recommend it?

Yes, absolutely! If you need to setup an e-commerce site for a client (or yourself), definitely check out Shopify.

Here’s a palette I created in just a few seconds:

You can check it out here. You can even email pictures to the app, directly from your iPhone!