Online tools

By Rachel Lankester, editor The Mutton Club

Favorite resources and very cool online tools.

How I built and run this website!

When I started my Magnificent Midlife and Mutton Club journey, I did a ridiculous amount of web surfing, watching of videos, following of free courses, researching the best resources available. Oooh, actually I still do a lot of all that! Whenever I hit on a favourite resources page on somebody’s website, I realised I’d struck gold. Especially if I’d already decided I rather liked the somebody whose website it was.  So here’s my list of favourite resources. Lots to do with websites, online business courses and some just to do with life in general.

I apologise now for the length of this post but boy did I discover some great stuff (and some awesome people too)! I’ll keep adding to this list so you may want to bookmark it to revisit later.

Because we need to somehow turn this labour of love (The Mutton Club) into a money-making venture, some of the links below are affiliate links which means we earn a bit (not a lot!) if you click through and spend any money. We only ever recommend things we really like.

Enjoy!

Website building, hosting and maintenance 

WordPress is my preferred CMS (content management system). I looked at others like Squarespace but most experts suggested Wordpress was the best for us and would offer the most flexibility as the site grew.  I know some people hate WordPress and I struggled with it at the beginning. But once I’d learnt how it worked, I fell in love with it.

Then again I did build the Mutton Club website myself! I tried out two budget website developers, one in India and one in Manchester, UK, both from the site peopleperhour.com. Neither worked out well – I think I was probably hopeless at selection back then! But I learnt a lot seeing what they did (and didn’t do) and realised I could do a lot better and quicker if I just applied myself. YouTube is a wonderful thing. I never looked back.

I just wish I’d had a fabulous book like this one to help me out. The author, Alannah Moore was kind enough to feature the Mutton Club as a well made homemade site! (We’ve evolved a bit since then.)

WP Engine used to be our website hosting company and they used to be great.  But recently I think they got a bit too big for their boots, they became relatively very expensive and service dropped dramatically. So we’ve moved both the Mutton Club and Magnificent Midlife over to SiteGround and so far we’re very happy there.

I started out with Simple Mag as the Mutton Club theme. I originally tried to build a bespoke site using Headway, a ‘theme’ recommended by US techies. I thought it would provide lots of flexibility. But it was a disaster. No-one on this side of the world knew anything about Headway and as a Wordpress novice I couldn’t work it out either. I also only latterly discovered  I could get all the functionality I needed with sufficient flexibility, from a magazine theme like Simple Mag, which I bought through Theme Forest. So much simpler! 

Having started out wanting a bespoke site, I finally realised a theme was a VERY GOOD IDEA.  I have also since built sites using the very flexible Divi theme from Elegant Themes and that is also a good place to look for sharp, smart, intuitive, responsive and elegant themes.

BUT as the years have gone on and I’ve added so much to The Mutton Club site, it got very bloated and slow. Which is hopeless if we want to get more traction on Google. So in 2022 we upgraded the theme to Kadence. Rather than doing the transfer work myself this time, I got some help from Grayson Bell at iMark Interactive. He/they were brilliant.

The Magnificent Midlife website is built using Thrive Themes and the Thrive Architect page builder. We LOVE the page builder in particular. It’s a bit time consuming to learn but once you know it, you can pretty much create anything you want on a website. We pay $40 per year for support which is excellent.  Unfortunately Thrive is a toolset that can slow sites down. In an ideal world we’d upgrade Mag Mid to a difference theme too. But we currently have too much bespoke design on there to do that. So it’s important that we keep an eye on site speed and Google Core Web Vitals for that site too. We’ve used WPGeared to help keep both sites optimized. 

Upwork is useful for one-off coding projects. We found a wonderful developer in India through Upwork who helped out whenever we needed him.

Design tools

Canva is an incredible free online design tool that’s really easy to use. I use Canva for banners, quotation images, party invites, Pinterest pins etc. If you use your own images it’s completely free – you only pay if you use Canva’s own images or layouts. Check out our Best of the Mutton Club board on Pinterest to see some of the pins we’ve designed. I’m quite proud of those!

99designs is another great design tool. You put out a brief and designers bid for your work.  You then chose who you want to work with. I did it slightly differently as I worked with someone already recommended. But our 12 ways to transform midlife and beyond ebook was designed through 99designs. I reckon it’s pretty cool. What do you think?

Stencil is a great online design tool similar to Canva with loads of images included in their database which we used early on.  It’s great for creating Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest images etc and moving between sizes without having to recreate the wheel.  I signed up to a special lifetime access deal when it was still Share as image and that gives me access to an incredible image library. Now we basically use the upgraded Canva for everything we need.

Free image sites

These sites offer free images for download to avoid hefty stock image charges. I do often use Bigstock (not free but less expensive) for images for posts on Mutton Club and have occasionally used iStock (more expensive) when I don’t have time to search, but mostly I use the following:

Pixabay (searchable)

Unsplash (free gorgeous photos)

Plugins

Here are the best plugins I’ve found to make our websites awesome:

SEO by Yoast – very good and free. Makes search engine optimisation (SEO) manageable for anyone! Just learn as you go.

Facebook comments is what I finally opted for comments on posts. I considered Wordpress’ own comments and also Disqus but eventually decided Facebook would be best. I know it shuts out anyone who isn’t on Facebook but I can’t please everyone right!  One thing I do like about this comment device is that is forces people to be themselves. People can’t hide behind a fake identity unless they have a fake identity on Facebook! It has proved a bit tricky: I lost all the comments when trying to change the URL structure of posts and also when I tried to add additional security to the site via an SSL certificate. But you win some, you lose some.

Tinypng image compression – if you have lots of image on your site like we do, don’t bother looking over the competition, just use this. It’s really great. 500 image compressions per month for free then a nominal amount after that. Note that your images will need multiple compressions depending on size – more than you think you need – so this will bump up the number made. But the cost will likely still only be nominal. UPDATE – we now use SiteGround’s own compression plugin to help keep things ticking along nicely.

Thrive Architect page builder – see above.

E-mail marketing

We used to use Mailchimp which is free up to 2000 subscribers and is relatively easy. It filled our needs for a year but we then explored other possibilities and the top ones of those seemed to be AWeber, Infusionsoft (reported to be rather complicated) and most recently ConvertKit, none of which are free.

We decided to go with ConvertKit and while we struggled to make the transition from Mailchimp, mainly because of different language for similar things, we like it a lot now.  One great thing is that you can resend to subscribers who haven’t opened the email you sent. It’s email sequences are also pretty intuitive. Convertkit also includes their own lead pages and forms to include for signup on your site which is pretty cool.

Other resources

Google Analytics is a must have if you have a website and you want to know anything about who’s visiting it. It’s tough at the beginning but there are plenty of tutorials out there. Just Google it!

Evernote and Pocket are great tools to keep content that you find on the web either just to read later (Pocket) or to keep for future reference (Evernote).

Monetisation

There are some of the ways we (try to) make money from the Mutton Club.

Amazon Associates – if you see books or products recommended on here, they’ll usually have an Amazon link. We only recommend things we genuinely like very much.

We used to also have adverts on the site but have recently decided against this. We used to use the following:

Mediavine looks after all the advertising on this site. We love Mediavine. It was a long time before we had enough traffic to qualify but so amazing since we did. They are amazing and offer the best support both when you start and ongoing. 

Social media management

We’re very active on social media and have used various tools over the years to help this. 

We now use Recurpost for Twitter, LinkedIn and some Facebook, Tailwind for Pinterest and sometimes Plann for Instagram. It’s best if you can post directly to most platforms to get better reach – but who has time for that?!  So we use a combination of planning tools and native posting which seems to work. 

Mentors and courses

I’m rather an online course junkie and I love input and learning new stuff! Here are some of my favorite online mentors and courses.

Marie Forleo is very cool. I discovered her about 6 years ago from a friend’s referral. Then I came across her online business school B-School on the last day of signup. Unusually for me, I made a snap decision and signed up. It was brilliant and Mutton Club, which was just a vague idea when it started, blossomed and grew over the 8 week course.  B-School gave me all the training and tools I needed to set up an online business. I also met the most amazing group of women through the online community. Some have become great friends. Fantastic.

Nathalie Lussier is a tech wiz and has loads of free resources on her site, a free 30 day list building challenge and lots of other stuff. She’s an online entrepreneur and the brains behind products like Popup Alley.  She’s also an INFJ like me :).

Jen Lehner is a great friend of the Mutton Club and a very clever and funny lady. She knows everything there is to know about social media marketing and has loads of free webinars as well as fantastic courses at very reasonable prices. You can read more about her in her Mutton Club profile.

Ruth Soukup’s Elite Blog Academy is fantastic – great value for money if you’re serious about blogging.

Mike at Stupid Simple SEO is brilliant. I have learnt so much from him about how to make sure what we write about on this site is found through google and other search engines.

Memberships

Love these:

The Member Site Academy – everything you need if you want to set up your own membership.

Female Entrepreneur Association – exactly what it says!

Magnificent Midlife Membership – brilliant of course!

Wow! You made it all the way to the bottom!  I’ll be adding more to this list in the future so come on back and check it out.

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