Financial & Travel Musings

Although you can pay a whole lot of money to some consultant to soup up your website, there’s an awful lot of free seo tools knocking around which can go a long way to checking out what needs doing (if anything).

Free doesn’t mean low quality either. There are excellent tools around to analyse the keywords on your site and compare it with those of your competitors. In years gone by that would have cost your serious money but these days very good tools are around to do it free.

In fact there are a whole raft of excellent free tools. The problem is working out what to do with them, what the results mean and what you can do to correct any problems that are thrown up. Take, for example, the incoming links. Although more is better, how many is “enough”? That depends on what your competitors results are (you can use these tools on them as well as on your own site). If you don’t have “enough”, what do you do about it? That’s easy too: just subscribe to one of the many directory listings services and stand back as the incoming links start rolling in.

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When they first came out it was simple to tell a netbook from a notebook computer. The netbooks were much smaller (7″ screens were typical), didn’t have any hard disks and the batteries lasted for four or five hours compared to a typical two for a notebook.

Then they started putting out versions of the netbooks with hard disks and the screens started getting bigger and the definition became rather more difficult.

These days there’s quite an overlap in the things. Fairly low end “netbooks” come with 10″ screens and 250GB disks these days. Move up just a little and you can be talking in terms of 12″ screens and 7 hour battery life. Right now it seemed that the only difference was in terms of the battery life but even that’s becoming dodgy as what would previously have been called a notebook can sport 8 hours of battery life and have a processor that runs somewhat faster than low end laptops.

Coming soon is the final nail in the coffin ie the inclusion of a DVD drive in a “netbook”.

At the moment the only real definition seems to be one of price although even there there’s an increasing overlap in the prices of high end netbooks and low end notebooks.

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These days many small software firms specialise in niche markets essentially tailoring off the shelf software to the needs of companies within their niche. That works fine if your needs are fairly standard and it’s a very economical way to go but what if your needs don’t fit neatly into some vertical niche market?

That’s where custom software comes into play. With bespoke software basically you can ask for anything although obviously that flexibility comes with a cost and, sometimes, a substantial one.

However, regardless of the upfront price of your software solution, it’s worth considering the ongoing cost of maintenance and upgrades with bespoke software. Whilst with standard software it’s simply a matter of paying up for the latest upgrade, in the case of bespoke software you’ll generally need to specify your requirements as they change and, eventually, the software may need to be rewritten (allow for this cropping up after no more than 10 years).

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