Financial & Travel Musings

Over the last 10 years we’ve all become very much DIY printers for all kinds of things that would previously have been the exclusive province of professional printers, but should DIY always be the only option that’s considered?

It’s certainly true that the software available these days is right up there with that which professional printers would use in pretty much every circumstance. The home-use page setting software of today is way beyond the capabilities of the professional page setting software of a few years back and most word processors are pretty much up to that standard too these days. Moreover, there’s the major plus point that doing it yourself means that the page looks just like you want it to ie there’s none of the interpretation that professionals apply to your ideas.

However, when you print it out it’s a whole different matter. Everything from business cards to wedding invitations is turned out on home printers these days and usually on inappropriately light card and with none of the embossing that gives such things the appropriate level of impressiveness. Usually that printing choice is down to a combination of perceived cost and perceived speed but neither really stand up. For reasonable volume there’s little difference in the cost since your own printer ink is pretty expensive and moreover you’re getting better quality printing, paper and potentially embossing too for the price. Whilst it’s true that you’re never going to get the stuff back in your hand immediately if you use a printer, for the likes of business and invitation cards the day or two delay is hardly going to be an issue, is it?

At the very least you should consider professional printing for specialty printing jobs.

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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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