In the current economic downturn, for very small business, we would always advise that they use a pre-built open website design, as it not only lowers initial design and development costs, but also gives the client the chance to see their new website (90% of it) before any work begins.

If you have worked with small business then you will no doubt recognise the fact that initial designs can be a complete nightmare that never seems to end. One part the website design gets changed or evolved, and then often a few days or weeks later the client will ask if ‘we can try this or that’. By using an open design you essentially can get your client to sign-off (on the design) upfront leaving them to concentrate on content rather than design.

In most of the cases that we have worked with the client has been more than happy to keep the designers link in place, thereby shaving days of initial design and development time - which can be quite a substantial saving - up to 80% of project costs in some cases.

For those that are adamant that they do not want the designers link, then in a lot of cases we have worked on, the designer is more than happy for them to remove the link for a small fee.

In order to present and highlight the professional designs currently being released as Open Designs, we have now created a new website called: Open Websites - built using exactly the same technique - e.g. the customisation of an existing open website design.

We hope to work with some of the providers of these designs in order to make the process of either employing the designer to customise the design further, or to remove the designer’s link, a much easier affair.

If like us you have say 5 or more log-ins per domain (hosting log-ins, email, social sites, applications, etc) and have so 10+ accounts, then trying to remember passwords is a complete nightmare.

Now rather than use insecure, easy to remember (and easy to hack) passwords, we would instead recommend the excellent, free, open source password manager KeePass.

By being open source you can download the code and check it is not doing insecure or unsafe things with your essential log-ins!

Also if you currently use E-Wallet, AnyPassword, Oubliette, PINs, or PasswordSafe - you can now import your existing password database straight into KeePass.

Now with a new beta version, as well as many very useful modules or add-ons, not to mention ports on to other operating systems - including PocketPC or SmarthPhone,  now is definitelythe time to utilise this ESSENTIAL software.

If you have rang Adobe suport for help and support on, say Dreamweaver MX 2004 or CS3 problems, then you will no doubt understand our sentiments!

Not only does Dreamweaver has serious problems handle thousands of images in a given directory, but if you ask Adobe support for a resolution they will tell you to ‘another ftp client’ - which clearly should be illegal under the grounds of ‘not being fit for purpose’ (here in the UK).

If that was not bad enough, if you have a given file that you are working on that is a specific size in bytes - or any factor of this size, you will have serious problems with Dreamweaver. This is clearly an outrage and needs to be solved, rather than just releasing new versions such as CS4!

In our opinion, if you dont have to use Adobe Dreamweaver MX2004, CS3 or CS3 - then we would recommend either the Open Source GUI IDE’s such as Eclipse and Notepad++ - both of which can print in colour - something which Dreamweaver MX2004 and CS3 cannot!

article on some of the key differences and similarities from C++ to PHP.