The Best Online Writing Tools to Use in your Online Work
The success of your online carrier depends on many things. First and foremost it is the quality of the content that you publish; it should be unique, interesting and useful for the readers. There is no substitute for that. Then the way you present it too, has its stake in your success. The readers will not follow you, if you are unable to present your stuff in a way that the readers find it easy to follow and understand. Therefore, you need to put extra attention to the structure and layout of your article and also you should not forget to include nice images, videos, slide shows to support your writing. In this article I am going to introduce you some of the online writing tools that I use to prepare my content and organize them.
There are many high tech sophisticated online writing tools to help you in this regard but they come with their price; you should know how to use the tool and sometimes you have to pay for them. For example you can use Photoshop to edit your image to fit into your online article. But learning Photoshop is a challenge by itself and also you don’t need the high power of Photoshop when it is just adding few texts to your image is all what you want to do with the image. So, in this article I am listing the very easy to learn and use but very effective free online writing tools that you can use to improve the appearance of your articles. Enjoy!
1. Dropbox for file sharing
You should have a file sharing tool in your set of online writing tools, if you are using more than 1 computer for your work. It is very important to have the most up to date files all the time. This can be tricky if you are not using a file sharing tool. Many would use a flash drive for this purpose but it is not reliable. Also flash drives are a very good media for the viruses to spread and you can loss the data in flash drives very easily. Data recovery from flash drives too, is not a simple task always. So I avoid them as long as I can. Google apps too, is an alternative but it has its restrictions. In Google Apps, there is no mechanism to share your zip files, photos and other useful utility software.
When you install Dropbox, it creates a folder in My Documents in your local machine. This folder is available in any computer you install Dropbox. No need to upload files to remote servers explicitly, just save your stuff in that very folder and you have the access to them from anywhere in the world. More importantly you can share your Dropbox folder with others, excellent for interactions. For a free account they provide 2GB of space, but premium packages are available with added space and services.
When you are using Dropbox you will never go out of the access to your most important data/files and it is a very valuable backup source as well. Dropbox is one of the most important online writing tools for me.
2. PicMonkey for Image Editing
A picture is worth a thousand words and a relevant picture is worth ten thousand words (that is a saying by me, LOL). So you need to have an easy to use photo editor in your arsenal of online writing tools. We all do insert pictures into our articles to make them livelier and, a relevant picture is an invitation to read the article. I normally use free images from the internet but I seldom use them as they are. By touching the picture with PicMonkey for just a few seconds you can change the picture into a completely new one which is relevant to your article. I know there are hundreds of professional phot editing tools for this, but you have to know the tool. You should know how to work with layers, how the transparency and the other stuff are handled in the specific package, which image format to use for which purpose, etc,etc. There is so much to learn. But PicMonkey, which is a web based tool, is designed with only one intention in mind; That Is to make the image suitable for the web. You can very easily add some text into the image, change the border style, improve the contrast etc. These simple changes will do wonders to your image. And using such an image in Pinterest can do wonders in bringing more traffic to your article. PicMonkey is my best bet as an online writing tool for editing images to the web.
3. Jing for screecasting
Although it is not used regularly like images, sometimes we need to take a screenshot of the desktop. Jing from TechSmith can do this and lot more. You can use Jing to:
· Take screenshots : you can take an image of the screen. If the screen contains a scrolling window Jing can take a screenshot of that scrolling window too. That is very fantastic and the Windows Print Screen facility can’t do this.
· Record screencasts. With Jing you can create onscreen videos. This is great if you want to create a video with your voice to prepare tutorial or to give instructions. After creating the video you just can send it by email through Jing itself. This is very valuable and it is free!
So Jing is one of my favorites as an online writing tool.
4. Pixie the color picker
Pixie is a tiny peace of software made especially for web designers and web masters. It can be used to find out the color of an exact place in the screen. It comes as an .exe, just run it, simply point to a color, and then it will tell the color of that point in, HTML, RGB, hex, CMYK and HSV. Then you can simply reproduce that color by applying those values to your favorite photo management software. Very tiny software with only that feature, but it is a very valuable tool for a designer. You can save lot of time in color matching in your articles/web pages by using Pixie as an online writing tool.
5. Kizoa for creating slideshows
A nice video or a video made up of photos can add value to your article. With Kizoa you can
- Create beautiful slideshows with effects, text and music
- Edit photos
- Convert into video
- And many more.
At the simplest you can select some photos, add some text, music into it and animate them into create a video. Then you can simply add that video into your article. This is simple but very effective online writing tool and more importantly, it is free!