Recommended Vendors
At Bourn Creative, we search high and low to find the best tools available to help us run and manage our business. Over the years, we’ve tried and tested a lot of options and listed below are our recommended vendors and service providers — our favorite tools and resources, and the ones we use in our own business and highly recommend.
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The Best of The Best
If you are an elite entrepreneur or business owner who wants only the best, most flexible, top of the line providers (you won’t outgrow) that deliver stellar value, high-quality products, and dependable service — here are our recommendations for what we prefer to use for our custom WordPress sites:
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Perfect to Get Started
If you are a start-up or a new business owner who is looking for solid, reputable, high-quality vendors you can depend on, but you’re on a budget while getting your business off the ground, here are our recommendations (if you don’t need cart services, we also recommend Aweber for email marketing):
A Full List Of Providers We Love & Recommend
WP Engine is a managed WordPress hosting company with custom built servers tuned specifically to achieve performance, scalability, and security for WordPress powered websites. With WP Engine, your site will be upgraded to the newest version of WordPress automatically, it will be backed up every day, and it will run lightning fast. Plus, security is guaranteed — and in case of disaster, you can restore your entire site with just one click.
HostGator is one of our top choices for WordPress website hosting. They offer fair prices on hosting, have good support, and offer account management through an easy to use c-panel. Plus you can purchase a domain name through Hostgator as well.
The Genesis Framework is one the best best WordPress frameworks on the market created with security and SEO as a priority. Built by StudioPress and backed by Copyblogger media, this isn’t just a couple guys working out of their garage, but an entire team dedicated to creating, maintaining, and improving a stellar product. All of Bourn Creative’s custom WordPress websites are powered by Genesis.
Not quite ready for a custom theme design? StudioPress also offers more than 50 different premium WordPress themes (which also run on Genesis) that are ready to go off the shelf.
Infusionsoft is by far the most robust, most flexible, and most in-depth marketing software on the market. We use Infusionoft to power almost the entire backend of Bourn Creative, including our CRM, email marketing, auto responders/follow up sequences, shopping cart, client management, training, affiliate program, and more. The advanced segmentation and targeted marketing that Infusionsoft allows you to do is unmatched. Plus, we just love the company and their staff!
1ShoppingCart cart offers email marketing, auto responder, affiliate management, and shopping cart services. Wildly popular with the online marketing community, many of our clients who sell products and services on their websites use 1ShoppingCart.
AWeber is by far the easiest email marketing system available for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Aweber’s social media integration, drag and drop email builder, loads of free templates, web form generator, and auto responders make it a robust solution for email marketing. We set up all of our clients who don’t need shopping cart services at AWeber.
MailChimp helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results. It’s like your own personal publishing platform. 2 million people use MailChimp. Join them today.
WordPress.org powers more than 25 million websites and WordPress.org allows you to install WordPress in your own hosting account and manage all aspects of your site yourself from design and content, to plug-ins, videos, and images.
Instant Teleseminar is the awesome tool we use for our teleseminars — with or without Slides, and for our audio recordings. We love Instant Teleseminar because it is super easy to use, fast to set up, and participants can listen in by phone or by web simulcast!
Basecamp by 37signals is an awesome project management tool used by more then 5 million people worldwide, including Bourn Creative. As we work with different clients, we have used several different project management tools, and Basecamp is by far our favorite! Basecamp has made collaboration with our team members simple, easy, and fast! We use it to collaborate on projects, track hours of work, share files, complete to-do lists, manage client workflow, and more.
Hootsuite is a simple social media management tool for small business. Review your lists, posts, and news feeds from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more all in one place. Hootsuite can be used in real time to view all of your social media profiles in one place or to schedule your posts in advance! Hootsuite also allows you to create additional users so you can add team members.
Bit.ly allows you to set up your own custom short domain for free (at Bourn Creative we use http://bourn.co). Use your Bitly API Key to link your new custom short domain with your WordPress blog and other apps like TweetDeck and Hootsuite so all of your shortened links are branded and trackable.
Please note that some links on this page are affiliate links, meaning that if you decide to purchase using our link we may receive an referral fee. Rest assured that this referral fee is never added on top of the price and that we only recommend products and service we LOVE and TRUST — Because we know our referrals affect our reputation and your success.