Whether you are a small business owner hoping to go online or just starting your online business, you are going to need a website to succeed. Hosting a website is not too expensive these days, but having a website designed from ground up can be. That’s why smart small business owners rely on open source solutions such as Wordpress to go live with their websites without breaking the bank. Premium Wordpress themes make it easy to give a website a whole new look and feel without spending too much money. And if you need your site to look unique, you can always hire a designer to change things around. That won’t cost you as much as hiring someone to design a site from scratch.

If you are planning to launch multiple websites and need professional quality themes to give your sites the better chance to succeed, here are 5 Wordpress theme membership clubs you should look at:

Templatic: a very powerful membership theme club for Wordpress that gives you access to various professional looking themes to take your e-commerce business online or start your business blog.

WooThemes: WooThemes is one of the top premium theme clubs for Wordpress. New themes come out on a regular basis, and the cost is not that high. Best of all, you get all you need to change these themes around to make them fit your needs. Continue reading 5 Best WP Premium Theme Clubs for Startups

In case you haven’t noticed, tax time is awfully close again. Whether you are a corporate or an individual, you only have a few months to get your tax documents in the system. Of course, the deadline could be different depending on the type of tax return you want to file. But most people will have done their tax by April. Many small business owners prefer doing their taxes by themselves. After all, that saves you a bit of money that you can spend on other things. But doing things by hand can be difficult, which is why you want to pick up proper software to help you prepare your taxes and stay on the top of legal issues associated with running your business.

To prepare your business taxes, you are going to need a decent accounting software as well as a good office suite. It would also help if you have a legal reference to go with those. With that in mind, here are 5 software kits that let you prepare your business tax more effectively:

TurboTax Business Federal + efile 2009: designed to help you prepare your business tax fast. It helps you maximize your business deductions too. It’s not perfect so don’t get too aggressive with your write offs.

Quicken Home & Business 2010: Quicken has helped me a lot with my business. It helps me keep track of incoming and outgoing funds. Of course, it’d be nice if we could get the updates for free once in a while. But the software is constantly improving, so you’ll have all you need to keep track of your business transactions. Continue reading 5 Best Tax Software For Small Businesses

Whether you are a blogger, a small business owner, or work for a start-up with a handful of products, you always want to give your visitors and customers a way to communicate with you and each other and share information. Forums have long been used by companies for support purposes. It’s so easy to address the concerns of your customers by putting up a forum and responding to their questions on a consistent basis. Best of all, there are plenty of open source forum software solutions that you can use to save money and get yourself a head start in the process.

If you are looking for a forum software that lets you start your own business forum and save time in the process, here are 4 forum scripts you should take a look at:

PHPBB: a free software solution that gives you the chance to build a killer forum without spending too much money. You can always enhance the functionality of this script and even get help.

vBulletin: one of the best forum software solutions on the market. It’s not a cheap solution and is designed for those who have a commercial forum in mind. Many top forums on the Internet are taking advantage of vBulletin as it’s secure and easily customizable. Continue reading 4 Forum Software To Start Your Own Board

When you are starting a business online, you are going to need a catchy domain name that you could use for branding and promotional purposes. But it goes beyond that. Having a lousy domain is the best way to get forgotten and lost in the crowd. Besides, a long domain will be hard to remember for your visitors and would leave a bad impression on your first time visitors as well.

Finding a catchy, short domain is very difficult these days. Most marketable domains have been taken either by real businesses or those who make a living selling domains to businesses. It is still possible to buy a catchy domain but that won’t come cheap. If you are starting up without a big budget, you may want to spend time searching for a good domain before spending your money on a premium one. These 5 tools make the process easier:

Domainsbot: one of the few tools that I have been using on a consistent basis in the past few years. The interface is ajaxified and very easy to use. The service comes with options to help you find brandable domains fast.

Domize: one of the more innovative domain tools one the market. You can combine your key terms and let the engine go to search for you. You can search through synonyms and even pass regular expressions to the engine.

Domainr: Domainr is an interesting tool that can dig up gems of domains out of thin air. If you have heard of domains such as bit.ly or su.pr and want to have a similar domain for your business, Domainr is the tool to use.

Continue reading 5 Best Domain Tools for Businesses