07.24.08

How to create PDFs for free

Posted in Content Management System, Team-Logic CRM at 1:05 pm by john

A question we hear a lot from customers is “do you know of a free PDF creator program?”.  Yes!

A lot of our customers need to create Adobe PDF documents so that they can upload them into their websites (using our content management system), and also so that they can send them as email newsletter attachments.

There are several free PDF generators on the market, but the one that I like to use is called PDFCreator.  It is an open-source project on SourceForge.net, and it works great.   After you download and install the program, it becomes a print driver for Windows, so that you can create a PDF in any program that you use in Windows.  So if you are working on a MS Word document, you click “print” and then “PDFCreator”.  The program does the rest.  Keep in mind that you won’t have all of the PDF markup and editing features that you would get if you bought the full version of Acrobat (Adobe’s program that creates PDFs).

Enjoy!

07.19.08

Team-Logic CMS - Better than Drupal

Posted in Articles, Content Management System, Delaware.Net, Inc., Web Design, Web Development at 10:41 am by john

There are many Content Management Systems (CMS) software packages on the market if you want to manage your own website content. Some are very inexpensive or free, and other enterprise CMS suites can cost over $100K. Delaware.Net offers our own system, called Team-Logic. It is neither costly nor free, and it is incredibly powerful but still easy to use. Prices start at $50 per month for the whole system.

There ARE cheaper open source solutions out there, and on the low end you have systems like Drupal, PHPNuke, PostNuke, .netNuke, Joomla, and others. These can be made to work if you have the time and patience, but for the most part they are solutions for non-profits and companies that don’t want to spend a lot on their website design work. I would never recommend them for a growing business that really cares about their website. Especially if they don’t have an in-house IT team. These low-end systems are well suited for a website where it is OK to use design templates for someone that wants to get up and running quickly. But there WILL be problems when using these systems, and like everything else - there is a trade-off.

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