In this article:
If you are among the thousands of content creators for WordPress blogs, social media, or other publications that involve text, audio, images, or video then you may be interested in some of the applications that I have listed below. These applications are primarily described from the Apple OS perspective, but you may find versions that are useful and available to you in a different operating system.
These products are applications that I use on my Apple Macbook Pro running the latest operating MacOS – Catalina (ver. 10.15). I currently produce content for a WordPress-based website. Our videos are saved to YouTube for playback. The majority of these products are not free, but they are high-quality solutions for a relatively low price. They provide quality and value far above their price point. We are not endorsed by the developers of these products. All of my recommendations are based on my experience in their use.
Affinity Photo
While Adobe Photoshop is a defacto standard in the creative world, I highly recommend Affinity Photo for any level of photographer or graphics artist. It has a well-designed interface that is fully customizable. You can’t beat the price difference unless you go with something that’s free – like Gimp. The newer version of Gimp is a worthy option that I recommend for use on a Linux-based system.
Affinity Design
Staying in the Affinity family, Affinity Design is the alternative to using Adobe Illustrator (one of my favorite design programs). If you’re working with vector graphics and complex fonts for illustrations like infographics then this is a highly recommended solution. Support for web and print design makes it a formidable tool in your creative toolkit.
TechSmith Snagit
Our work for the InMotion Support Center often requires a lot of screen captures. Yes, the built-in tools from Windows and the Mac are quite good (and free), but the time that I save using Snagit more than makes up for its cost. This tool makes it a smooth process to capture the image, put text on the image, resize the image or even merge two images together in one quick app.
TechSmith Camtasia
Video is a key media strategy for your content marketing. Being able to produce video content quickly with relatively inexpensive tools has become commonplace in today’s market. For example, Apple provides a very capable and free video editor called iMovie. However, some of the more complicated features that video editors require are not often available. Camtasia is a capable and easy-to-use application that makes recording screen actions a breeze. It provides multitrack editing, many video effects, and tools often only found on higher-priced applications. It’s a very intuitive program that will have you creating polished videos in a very short time.
Text Editor?
If you’re a content provider, there is at least one other thing you would be working on – copy. The text of your story is often in Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, MarsEdit, or other text editors you might be using. The problem is that we often either work with an editor that supports markdown, or use a plain text editor and then simply add HTML code into the mix. MarEdit is a very capable editor (only for Macs), but it doesn’t support the new Gutenberg block system – yet. There are other editors that support the rich text and HTML, it just depends on your preference. Personally, I don’t often work in an un-connected environment so I often use a private WordPress site to write my articles and then transfer the graphics and text (using the Code Editor mode). If I have to work away from the internet, I will use an editor like Sublime and write directly in HTML.
I hope the tools that I have described here will help you in your quest to create great content for your website endeavors! These tools are recommended because of the experience I’ve had in using them. There are definitely alternatives such as the Adobe applications and many others on the other end of the cost spectrum. Your experience and budget will be a large factor in the direction that you choose. Good luck with your creative adventures and let us know if you have any great suggestions!
For more information on using WordPress, check out our WordPress Product Guide.
