Posted in Computers & Tech / Software / Business & Productivity
Author: technick2 Total-Replies: 4

I'm having a problem when I'm on the last step on the New Database Wizard in Small Business Customer Manager. There's a message that pops up saying:
And, yes I have tried after closing Customer Manager.

Thanks,
technick2

Posted in Computers & Tech / What's New...?
Author: Aka_Bar Total-Replies: 4


any opinions? i have found this article very interesting, im watching how develops IBM. And im also like products created by Macintosh!

Posted in Computers & Tech / Databases
Author: himanshurulez Total-Replies: 14

Hi

I am a manager at a trading/wholesaling company (and have no programming background). I customized the Northwind sample access database to make invoices and keep accounts for my company. We now opening another office at a distant location. So, the order entry will be done at two points(we plan to use the same Access database).

I am not able to figure out how to access the same MS Access database from two different location(as LAN can't be used). Moreover, we can't afford to pay huge sums to the software developers.

Can intranet or uploading the database to a web server be a solution to this?? How?? If not, plz suggest something else?

PS: I just need a central location where the database can be stored, and all employees can run and modify the database via internet (or some other source)

Posted in Computers & Tech / Operating Systems / MacOS
Author: xboxrulz Total-Replies: 23



Nope, there hasn't been any active viruses or malware in the wild as far as most people know, maybe there are but only researchers have the backup copies.

You can customize what to install or what to not install if you do a fresh install in the Mac installation manager, but the default installation has everything installed.

It took me a day to get use to it, but it beats constantly cycling through ALT+TAB or WIN+TAB. I work very efficiently with the expose, but that's just me, for some it may come to be a terrible functionality.

If you play around with Finder (Explorer in Windows), you can find very cool things that aren't really documented unless you yourself are a programmer and read the technical manuals. GNOME is bland and dull, I don't quite like it. Compared to KDE, GNOME is quite slow and bulky. MacOS X runs much faster than both and have very good eye candy. Vista is just butt slow, even on a new machine with comparable specification.

xboxrulz

Posted in Computers & Tech / Operating Systems / War Of the OS World
Author: Reaver Total-Replies: 26

Well xboxrulz i will agree that is their advantage but also say that it can become an advantage to those who spend their hard earned money to buy a product that meets the marketing standards, by that i mean it went through research and development and then consumer testing and probably back to R&D, so where do you think microsoft gets the funds to do all of this, by selling their product to people who buy it because they approve of it and it meets their needs.When the product becomes pirated the cycle begins to corrode because microsoft gets less money for their R&D and the original users are waiting for the next release for better products but this cannot be achieved. Another point is that microsoft have even given you the choice for your security as WGA is an activex control you can manage it using internet explorer and choose to run it or not. So microsoft have by no means tied you down to using that method.

Posted in General Discussion / Computer Talk
Author: Darasen Total-Replies: 23

It is a truism that it is far far easier to criticize than to compliment. I guess it is just part of human nature. I myself am rather critical of Microsoft in many ways especially their ubiquitous Os, Windows. Now I am going to challenge us though and ask a tough question, what does Microsoft do right?

I would have to start with their website. Support.microsoft.com is a remarkable source for any issue you might be having with windows or an MS product. Also MSDN.microsoft.com and their technet are a vast source of knowledge for just about anything you may need. There are articles for everyone from PC beginners to advanced programmers available. It is not always easy to find what you are looking for but just plunging into the knowledge base at random one is bound to learn something new.

The free stuff they offer: Ms actually does have a decent amount of free products available to the public. the VB .net express as well as the C# and C++ offerings for free are good tools for learning and making lightweight applications. With the free SQL server express you can make client server database applications as well. Good stuff for no cost.

Lastly I will mention MS Access. I know that Access has many detractors but as I have stated before I can make a decent living from developing with this one application. Access is able to run the gamut of being a single user database to splitting the data and running it as a client server application. When the Access database functionality reaches it's limits Access still makes a great front end for data stored on larger database management systems. Access functions well as a rapid application development tool and all the code from an Access program can be compiled to an executable to where the user never even sees the normal access window.

There may be other things that Microsoft does well. Thus, now it is time for the communities input. What do you think?

Posted in General Discussion / Computer Talk
Author: firedoor Total-Replies: 40

I was just wonderign what everyones top 5 favorite programs were on thier pc?

My number one has to be Opera, basically I.E 6.0 is crap, they got rid of every good and left you with a browser that radomly desites to close down or order 2000 backcopies of "fishermen weekly" for no apparent reason. I did use firefox for a while but i didn't really take to it, then i got opera and have recently updated to 8 beta i find it really good once you've configured it. Still similar to firefox but i still prefer opera.

2- Photoshop, as i've mentioned messing around in photoshop is one of my pass times, I don't find it as easy to come up with original art peices using it, i need fireworks and 3dsmax for that, but it's useful for putting everything together and blending. And it comes in very handy for designing web graphics.

3- Dreamweaver, i wouldn't have half the site i had at the moment if it wasn't thanks to dreamweaver, really useful but can be a pain in the a** at times. Apart from that i managed to make a semi-proffeisonal looking website about 5 minutes after i installed it.

4- Open Office, as i can't offord MS office this has made a brilliant substitute. I find no reason to go out and buy MS if i have this, it does everything and a bit more (but i have to add that it does a bit less as well). The only down side i have for it is the spell check. I have never and proberbly will never be able to spell too well, and the spell check on this isn't as good as MS's but it does have the Real English words listed as well as the yanks version.

5- MSN Messenger, the only microsoft product to make it too my list, i'm not anti-microsoft, after all i own an xbox, i just go for freeware. I like this program for the very obvious reason that i can cehck up on my mates and my e-mails and have a laugh on it.

Editted because of a few not so nice words hope it's ok Firedoor, other then the few cuss words, good post --MoonWitch

Posted in Computers & Tech / What's New...?
Author: amitbhandari Total-Replies: 13

There is lot of discussion on on-demand computing and is an urgent need for business sector. However, the small business can't really expect to buy a laptop for their employees.

On-demand computing
When we would sit in front of any PC, anywhere, and with the digital equivalent of having all the applications and data at beck and call.

Many people carry their data around on a USB stick - presentations, documents, spreadsheets, you name it - why not carry the programs too! Portable applications are built for the sole purpose of being run off a USB stick - no installation, no writing settings to anything other than its own folder, and best of all, nearly all of them are free.

The Demands
Finding the best portable application for your needs is all about balancing size and features. Your first consideration is that the application should not write any settings to the host computer - you don't really want to leave your mark anywhere, do you? The next priority is size - the need is several small programs than one that hogs all the space. After all, even 512 MB USB drives can get full alarmingly quickly, and the more room is their for data, the better it is. Smaller applications have fewer features, but few of us use all the bells and whistles in most of the software.

Before proceeding, remember that all the applications need to be crammed into 200 MB of space - the remaining 300-odd should be kept free for data. Small size is a priority, but as far as possible, any compromise on features will not be there.

The office Suite
Portable OpenOffice.org is the choice right from its excellent support for all common MS Office formats to its MS Office-like interface, however, it weighs a lot (144 MB) taking up a huge chunk of the limit. If only Word processor is required, then AbiWord can be used which takes up only 15 MB of space.

The E-mail Client
On one hand, there is i.Scribe, a small seemingly simple e-mail client that fills up only 1 MB of space. It even comes with its own Bayesian spam filter, and is extremely light on system resources.

At the other end of the spectrum is Portable Thunderbird, which brings to the USB all the features of Mozilla Thunderbird - e-mail, internal support for RSS feeds, a spam filter and a spell checker. On the flip side, it occupies 9 MB.

The Anti-Virus
Now, be safe in assuming that USB drive is being connected to a clean PC with carrying an anti-virus with you. ClamWin is a free, open source, 18 MB antivirus that comes from the ClamAV team, who have been developing the Clam anti-virus engine since the days of DOS. To have ClamWin on USB, the software must be installed on a PC and follow the manual to set it up for USB drives. Remember, it isn't real-time or on-access scanner, so the program must be started manually and choose the file(s) to be scanned.

The PIM
For busy individuals who need to keep track of their tasks and schedules, EssentialPIM is very useful Personal Information Manager (PIM), which looks a little like Outlook's PIM side. You can use it to create to-do listss, schedule meeting and appointments, manage contacts, and leave little notes to yourself.

The Browser
There are only three browsers worth mentioning - Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. Unfortunately, Opera is not portable yet.

For IE users, Crazy Browser is available, a 500 KB browser that seams to be a head mix of all three - it uses the IE engine, but also brings in some cool features from another two, like tabbed browsing, plug-ins and mouse gestures.

The same open source community that's responsible for Portable OpenOffice.org and Portable Thunderbird also gives us Portable Firefox, which is just that - a fully functional USB version of the Firefox browser, including support for installing the insanely popular Firefox extensions, but at 17 MB, you are going to be crunched for space.

The Media Player
Work or play chances are that you can't escape without encountering a sound or video clip that needs viewing. Since the presence of codecs on the host can't be guaranteed, two such players exist which bundle the codecs alongwith.

VideoLan VLC Player which can play nearly any audio and video file in existence and doesn't require any codecs to be pre-installed. It's tad costly at nearly 25 MB though.

MPlayer is lot lighter at 7 MB and ofcourse, it too doesn't any codecs to be installed on the PC.

The Image Viewer
IrfanView supports a huge number of image formats, is light on system resources, easy to use and can even convert images to different formats with some good compression ratios

The PDF Reader
While Adobe Reader is the de facto for reading PDF documents, but it is bulky and a resource hog. Overcoming both these nags is Foxit PDF Reader. It occupies only 2 MB of space.

The Start Menu
PStart is a program that sits in the system tray and gives customized menu that lets to choose which application is required to run. It even hunts down executable files on the drive, so that manual entries are not required. Once all the applications are in place, just select scan for executables function to create portable start menu.

Making drive autorun
If the host is running Windows XP and SP2, then you can even make the USB stick autorun by specifying an autorun.inf file. Just follow the listed steps (an example of PStart menu is shown):




Making Stick Bootable
If you really want the freedom from host's OS, you can keep a copy of DSL (Damn Small Linux) OS in stick which is just 50 MB. It does comes with FluxBox Window Manager. However, on the hardware front, a bootable USB stick is required and the motherboard of the host PC must support booting from a USB device.

Posted in Computers & Tech / Hardware Workshop
Author: kam Total-Replies: 8



I'm really interested in this too ... but I came to a different conclusion ... I'm happy to be proven wrong though .

1. Supercomputers are about interconnecting 1000s of CPUs
Liking a chip architecture just because you like a supercomputer or mainframe doesn't correlate well. The latter are all about fast, custom interconnects between high-FP performing CPUs ... it's not just the CPUs themselves. Getting a bunch of Cell chips connected on a gigE LAN isn't going to match a supercomp .. no matter what Sony's marketing dept says! I'll show you what I mean: netlib has some benches on specific CPU architectures for linear algebra computations (LINPACK) ... the ones at the top were NEC's awesome vector processor scored 2177 Mflops (n=100), 3.6GHz Xeon 1MB = 1821, 1.9MHz POWER5 scores 1776, 1.6GHz Itanium2 = 1765, 2.2GHz PowerPC 970 = 1681, 2.6GHz opteron 852 = 1593, 3.2GHz Nocona Xeon EM64T = 1593, IBM eServer pSeries 690 1.7GHz = 1462, IBM IntelliStation POWER 275 1450MHz (POWER4+) = 1245, IBM eServer pSeries 630 6E4 1.45GHz = 1229, Cray T94 (4CPU) = 1129. All these are for the SINGLE CPU scores! Of course individual CPU scores are meaningless in supercomputers ... what matters is how several 1000 of them compute the linear algebra problem! Also, pricing is really important to me. It doesn't matter that Itanic benches 250MFLOPS faster than the faster Opteron if it ends up costing me more than twice as much .. plus the extra air conditioning etc required! I have seen a guy with an Itanium desktop, BTW, but that was before AMD starting to win 64-bit marketshare!!

I'm not sure where you get your stats about IBM from but, according to top500's latest report, 66.6% of the top500 supercomputers in the world are Intel based & 5% are AMD! 10.4% are Power & 5% PPC. Specifically, 35% are P4-Xeon/15.2% EM64T, 15.8% Itanium2, 5% Opteron, 4.4% Power4+, 3.2% PPC440, 3% Power4, 1.8% PPC, 1.6% Power5, 1.4% Power ... However the top 2 machines are IBM Blue Gene machines (one of them is at IBM T.J.Watson .. not really a "sale" ). #3 is a Itanic2 machine. Earth Simulator is now #4, and the Virginia Tech MacOSX cluster is now #14. There was an article at the end of last year stating about Opteron "winning three of the top 20 spots: the Shanghai Supercomputer Center's Dawning 4000A at #10, the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Lightning at #11 and the Grid Technology Research Center's Super Cluster P-32 at #19" .. things have changed now but will obviously keep changing again.

If you stick 1000s of POWER chips together, I'm sure you'll get a great supercomp, but I can't see how FP performance improves that much when we're talking about the same number .. I'm guessing you're talking about may be a couple of CPUs in a cc-NUMA or SMP workstation .. or maybe a cluster (please correct me if I've assumed wrong, BTW).

2. X86 is less of an issue these days
The x86 architecture is ugly compared to RISC designs, no doubt about it, but these days RISC chips have CISC add-ons, and vice versa (SSE3 etc)! Also, age is sometimes a good thing .. they've had lots of time to try to fix some things ... at last HW partitioning is doable . Intel did try to abandon x86, with Itanic/IA64 ... unfortunately v1 cost a bomb without enough of a performance increase to x86 apps!! It was aimed at FP performance (it did well in this, see above), and for being a proprietary UNIX system killer, but the developers ignored the masses and the masses of software written to that (and the fact that closed source software won't simply be recompiled overnight, as it were). Mass production reduces costs. X86 is open to all willing to compete, and hence we have the nice current situation of AMD & Intel pushing each other to improve. AMD came in understanding this and took over this slot, giving 64-bit memory addressing & integrated-memory controller scalability benefits without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Personally, I couldn't care less what architecture my main PC is, since the majority of my important code (i.e. for work) is my own and can be compiled to whatever happens to be i. fast & ii. cheap . The next most important other stuff are commercial x86 binaries for NT/Linux (some maths packages). The rest is opensource apps or win32/win64 on x86/x86-64 games (not as important since I'm happy to have a separate machine for those). It would be nice to have the good old days where there was tons of competition, I guess , but not just for the sake of it. I want there to be bang for buck. If I can get a massively popular (and therefore potentially cheap) x86 CPU that has good FP performance (like the Opteron in the above benches), then I'd go for that rather than a POWER/Alpha/etc that's similar in performance but with a slightly higher price tag .. unless there's a massive improvement (I'll get on to Cell in a second!!). Also the fact that I can run my CAD apps helps. BTW, did you know that IBM's official CAD app actually only runs natively on WIN32 ... for POWER it actually runs a WINE-like library layer ... that was quite a depressing shocker!! They advise you to run NT . But that's another matter!

Mind you, soon even this will be irrelevant! The instruction set is just one part of the equation. Look at what the now nearly dead Transmeta (amongst others .. there was this Russian design, plus several software companies are doing research similar to this) managed to do ... x86 code could be compiled into a very parallel VLIW underneath without losing that much in efficiency (if they had the manufacturing links they could've done better ... intel looks like it is going to pick up the gauntlet and go down this direction, taking aim at their own StrongARM CPUs according to the latest IDF because they don't want to pay ARM royalties anymore ... I actually love ARM chips, but that's another matter!). Intel claim they will soon bring out an ARM-like efficient chip that's x86-compatible .. or at least that's their aim .. I'm not entirely sure that's really possible, but anyway!!

3. IBM/AMD & Sun/AMD, Apple/intel, Cell
IBM itself isn't a good reason to vote for PPC, because IBM and AMD partner around chip fabrication, although IBM are now aligning themselves to Intel instead. Also, Sun & the startup they took over are helping AMD design very large-scale 64-bit x86 systems. Apple have given up on PPC and gone to x86 because the G5 hasn't had the expected speed bump for ages. IBM are focused on Cell, and Cell for PPC apps is damn slow.

I was really looking forward to Cell. It promised a focus back on pure uncompromised performance ala Seymour Cray & the DEC Alpha guys. But I've recently been reading a lot of negative press from developers using both PS3 & XB360 dev kits, and these are the 1st guys programming the machines. The former is basically a Cell workstation, and the latter is a modified Mac running at x% final performance (x being a fraction, but they can figure out final performance from that so it's not an issue). In both cases the developers are very disappointed .. so much so that many were prepared to publically complain. The main downer claimed is the limited amount of cache available to each of the Cell's VPUs, and the poor real-world performance of the multitude of VPUs given that they can't get enough data into them with such a puny amount of cache, and ditto for the low-clocked PPCs given that they weren't designed to do much! They were hoping to have a leap in CPU performance for AI/physics ... but programming multiple CPUs effectively is extremely difficult. Carmack's SMP quake could sometime actually run slower! Sure, you can say the developers have to figure it out .. I think it'll be a very long time in the making! Imagine using a PC with quad PII's rather than one fast P4 for gaming!! A whole load of algorithms are going to have to be figured out and rewritten in parallel with no guarantee of being any faster once the inter-process comms overhead is accounted for.

The reason these consoles went for PPC is because IBM enticed them with THEORETICAL performance-per-buck. This is great for marketing etc. Yes, there were demos of rubber duckies in bathtubs, and multi-stream HDTV decoding ... but in terms of actual game footable, Sony didn't show much .. and had even lied about some of the footage (later found to be prerenders)! A PC with PPU will beat probably them. The same thing happened in the previous generation, with Sony claiming supercomputer performance ... I still don't see games that look as good as those demos! If developers can't keep those parallel cores filled with the approriate data, performance will suffer. A good analogy is the P4's long pipeline that has a whole load of smart compiler tech to decide which data should be loaded next before it's needed ... predicting the future is never easy!

So right now I'm not too sure about Cell. I do hope these complaints are just initial problems .. since I'd absolutely love a cheap supercomputer on a card for maths .. I could then avoid going to my lab so often . But I have a feeling these guys are right .. they know what they're doing & wouldn't simply complain against MS/Sony just for the hell of it! They are putting their neck out doing so!

BTW, have you guys seen the stuff on Sun's Niagra? I'm looking forward to it .. there was a cool article in IEEE Spectrum magzine a few months back. If it's really as good as they are saying (one of their research prototype chips can supposedly match a 16-way Opteron on FP tasks, and they are talking about placing 128 of the cores on a single chip ... but maybe that'd be 2010!!). As with all things these days, I'll wait to see the real-world benches before making any final judgements! If there are any other cool CPUs anyone knows of, please put up a list on discussion. Others I know of are things like ClearSpeed etc ... but they are so damn bleeding expensive, I can't take them seriously. If you have a limited space requirement for supercomputing performance, then it's one of only a few similar companies doing this!

I'm not a pro-anything person. I have intel & AMD boxen, and nearly bought a G4 on a PCI card (didn't due to the poor performance of the cheap ones I could afford/justify!). I also (have to!!) use several OS's incl Windows, Linux & Solaris .. and even OSX has a few apps I really like (compiled to PPC .. I use my labs G4 notebook every so often!). It would be nice to get a definitive answer from someone who's used the above processors in serious workstation/cluster setups.
Kam.

Posted in Computers & Tech / Software / Graphics & Web Design
Author: Quatrux Total-Replies: 22

I personally use PHP Designer and sometimes just Notepad++, I don't think it is reliable to waste so much money on Dreamweaver 8 for personal use, well unless you have lots of money or you think that it will be very useful in your future live. Furthermore, I never liked wysiwyg editors, the code which is being created by it usually isn't trusted by me, for example, my friend were making his site design with Frontpage and I managed to lower the filesize of html by 30kb and made it look even better, I am not saying that I compare Frontpage with Dreamweaver, Frontpage sucks in my humble opinion and should be banned in all countries But I hear/read by some professional designers, that it is really useful and saves a lot of time if you know how to use it and etc.

Posted in Computers & Tech / Operating Systems / War Of the OS World
Author: vizskywalker Total-Replies: 21

This does not surprise me. A couple (read less than a year, more than half) of months ago, PCWorld released an article with a comparison of bugs discovered/threats and viruses created and found/patches and fixes released int he past couple years and as yearly average for linux kernel, OSX and Windows XP. Although OSX had far fewer by far, Linux, especially recently, came off as slightly worse than Windows. Intrigued because of all the bad press Windows gets, I looked into it, and sure enough, Linux did have more problems. The reasons for the bad press seemed to be as follows:
1) Every issue with windows effects as many people as maybe every 10-50 issues in linux.
2) Microsoft makes a point of announcing to the whole world over various sources when issues are found and fixed, linux just posts them in places where it's assumed users know to look.
3) More people who should not be touching computers use windows, so the issues with windows are compounded by stupidity.

However, to combat that, think of the number of antivirus companies that write for windows, and mostly for windows. It's most of the top companies, such as Symantec and MacAfee. These companies know what they are doing, and are quick to find new viruses and ways to beat them. But with linux, because of its open source nature, all of the holes that are easy to find have been found, so the viruses are very complex and take advantage of wholes that whole communities have missed. This makes finding them, identifying them, fixing them, and predicting them much more difficult. Also, Windows and Linux do have the same permissions system, much as people like to feel that linux permissions make it safer. It's just that most people run XP in administrator mode.

Vista changed a lot. Because it is a very new system for Windows, a lot of the old viruses don't work, and because it is a small population, it is not yet a large target for viruses. Also, Vista by default does not let the default user account be an admin account, so the permissions actually manage to protect the naive user, and the advanced user can change to a default admin account if they wish.

~Viz

Posted in Computers & Tech / Search Engines / Google
Author: plot Total-Replies: 16

http://news.techwhack.com/1493/eric-schmid...payment-system/

google has alot of things planed its amazing how much theve accually followed threw on

"Google to Team with NASA in Space Research"

Posted in Computers & Tech / What's New...?
Author: starscream Total-Replies: 18

I don't think privacy issue is in anyway compromised and not even on the basis of money or something else. For example, take a look at google's data of porn searches from pakistan. Here is the news. Personally i don't like to defame any country or person based on such data no matter how true it is. I know religious conservative people are hypocrites and that's the reason they contradicted their nature that we see in this data. You can see the rest of the picture how it is going to affect if they managed to capture the pattern of people and their location. As this is possible because it's google and they have enough resources to do that. So if you're searching some keywords like that then chances are in future they know what you're doing on their search engine. With technology like +1 and web history they can even share this data openly to public as well. So you can guess the rest how close they're to publicly open more data attached to username/IP/Region to media and defame such users.

Only thing you can ensure here is that you use scroogle or other private search engines which are taking data from google or similar to google and are free from privacy. Sure by all means monetize or do the SEO for google. But if you care for privacy of your family, yourself and friends then think about switching to privacy based search engines. There is no harm in that. If you don't care about your personal data and love to get manipulated by ad networks and think that is cool like the wanna-be intellectual who replied here in this thread before, then it is totally your call. It's not my business at all and i'm not going to call you fool like the guy who did here before.

Few more misconceptions to clear- 1)Yahoo was search engine leader prior to google and the CEO of the yahoo is responsible for the internet growth and many things. Still they're not doing what google is doing with us.
2) Bing and yahoo turns on default search so kids or minors don't get adult searches by default. This is not feature by default in google and one needs to enable modeate search.
3) Firefox default has feature for announcing no-tracking setting from browser for users. Google chrome and their other products don't allow such feature. In fact they're all for open data for manipulation by their own ad networks.
4) Facebook doesn't share your name, pictures with advertisers and not even with apps. That issue is long gone. Google's orkut and other services even track and manipulate data no matter how much you hide it. Facebook's privacy is rated on much higher level than google because facebook doesn't track you based on IP/Region unless you specifically mention it.
5) People who care for privacy don't keep their data (pictures another stuff) open. They don't think they become any cool or wise by doing that. You don't have to reveal your personal data to get what you want on web. Period.
6) Google's revenue has nothing to do with this because they're earning more dollars from search marketing and manipulating both publishers and advertisers in every possible way. Their one department contradicts with another. e.g. search team vs adsense team, so advice and data from google blogs is often contradictory.

Enough said.

Posted in Computers & Tech / How-To's and Tutorials / Websites and Web Designing
Author: mastercomputers Total-Replies: 31



Hey dissipate,

I can't really tell you what you can charge as I've got a breakdown in pricing in NZ dollars and I really shouldn't display it for competitior reasons, usually I price each company differently and don't really have a set package price, but I do have a minimum.

But don't do by the hour, as the job could be a few weeks to even months. It's best to sell the site as a package, and give a reasonable amount of time of when it will be completed, make sure you give yourself enough time, very important.

If they accept you, ask for half the money first and the rest when finished. Very important to do it this way.

Site Pages and Design/Layout

Work out a price for site pages and design, the number of pages you'll create (contacts, home, etc) and layout, this should cost around $200 - $600+, depending on a few things, charge as much as you feel it should be. Remember, you're basically trying to give them the best deal at what you think it should cost, you give them numbers and they'll get back to you, whether they choose you to do it or someone else.

Files, Brochures, Booklets, Images, etc

If they require PDF or files for download, scanning of pictures (things you must do to get the items on the web if they don't provide it themselves) etc, you should charge for this too, although not that expensive, it still should be considered in your charges, say roughly around $50 - $300 and not more, however for images you can charge $100 - $300+.

Testing and Debugging

This is something else you may consider charging for, make sure the site is operational and functions how it's suppose to and is error free, very vital that you do this, so why not get paid for this too, although, you may like to suggest that you'll give back a small percentage of this costs if it's not working correctly when you say it's completed. Anywhere from $100 - $300 but not more.

Content Management

If you create for them a means to manage their own site, then this is where you'll benefit. If it eliminates you from updating their sites then it'll save them money in the long run, if you do create such a thing for them then charge roughly 3 times the price of the above costs you've set for yourself. This is reasonable enough.

That's basically how I split the costs up. Usually you would have templates, scripts etc, already designed so that you could have their site up within weeks. It's how a lot of web designers do it nowadays, it's rare that they create sites from scratch, and if they do, it's even costs more than the above.

So hopefully this gives you a generalisation of what to expect, remember if you're trying to get the business, make it reasonable, check out your professional local web designers and see what they charge, and be shocked at how much they do it, but remember, they've got everything ready so it's only a short time when they can get a site up.

Make sure to get yourself a place where you can get web hosting and domain names at a reasonable charge and include that pricing. Make sure it has everything that the business needs.

Cheers,


MC

Posted in Computers & Tech / Databases
Author: derouge Total-Replies: 48

I'd have to agree with all the folks saying MySQL .. it just meshes so well with PHP, almost like they were made with each other in mind. Although, where I work everything is in MS Access, which I have found quite easy to learn and manage. I just think for freeform Web Design PHP+MySQL is awesome.