Five Essential Must Haves when Setting your Business up for free!

One of the issues that tends to stop people from getting a venture up and running is cost and skills. Do I have the money? Do I have the skills? Well I felt like that once and until a very progressive weekend trip to Blackwell's and what I think to be a fairly decent business idea, I am where I am now. 

I tend to go to Blackwell's to get stationary for my creative work, as they have a great little shop in the basement. Books tend to be quite expensive for my taste and I tend to like shopping around Oxfam for books relating to design etc when needs be. One day however, I was in there and walked past the Bargain Bucket and found a book priced at 1 pound and thought to myself, I will get a cheeky read in to see what it might be about. Freesourcing by Jonathon Yates, was quietly, yet quickly taken to the counter and paid for. I then began to use it to help create a business platform for very little money and took principles from it to help me learn how to do things effectively to create my venture. 

I have found from this book certain types of free software that can be put to use in creating the necessary work to get your business up and running and they are:

1: GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/downloads/) - a great piece of photo editing software that for what it is, is fairly developed and contains many more features than its rival open source Paint.Net (http://www.paint.net/). If you want to splash out, then Photoshop is the way to go and I do have a copy, but I often get graphics work done using this package for its user interface which is friendly and fairly intuitive. Cons- well, there are'nt many, but I have found is that the software can be a bit awkward with getting things done- selection tools and such are not so straight forward and just basic tools can at times, need a search engine to find them when your first getting to grips with it. But out of the many free types of graphic software, this is my favourite. 7/10

2: Google Sketch Up (http://sketchup.google.com/) Now, when it comes to the best piece of free software in the world, this is it in my view- this 3d modelling software is amazing! I honestly believe that the better you get at it, the better it becomes and the more possibilities arise from it. Its sooooo  easy to use and even so, that from past teaching days even students with serious SEN have managed to get some form of outcome from using it, which is really saying something. The tools are dead obvious and the materials library is pretty damn good for a free program- you can even create your own materials with it. I speak to architects and they all have it. Get it, because the kind of work you can do with it is unlimited. Cons- are there any? Well yes, you might find that the model you create can look a bit cartoony and may be a little off putting, however there are aspects to it that allow you remove them. Other than that, i can't think of anything else. 10/10

3: Inkscape (http://inkscape.org/) Adobe Illustrator lovers get on this. For free vector programmes this is the one I would promote for getting graphic branding done. Its fun, easy to use and exports in pretty much every format you can get- for those wanting a more creative PDF form- INKSCAPE IT! ArtRage is another programme and it is pretty cool, but the programme that grabbed me most out of the two was this little treasure. Top Dog in my books. Pros- the above, fun, loads of good features like the
Tweek Tool which is essentially the nudge tool on Illustrator. Cons- it is limited in some ways. Not many effects to speak of, and at times, you will request it to do something and nothing happens- which is why it is open source I guess? 7/10

4: SerifWebPlus SE (http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/software/webplus/) a long time ago when the idea hit me that I needed to do this business lark, I realised that if I wanted to start up a business, the best bet is to create a website. But I did also think, "I don't know how to design websites- I don't know how to use Dreamweaver and I don't know anything, I am without the know how arghhh!". Until I did a bit of research and found SerifWebPlusSE and all was made good again. This free sofware is a little gem if you use it to its creative best. Stay away from the templates and add some graphics created on GIMP or Inkscape and you can turn each webpage into something pretty nice to start with. No HTML code know-how needed, and creating hyperlinks to other sites is a simple "Word-esque" process with an Insert Tool Option. Its dead easy to use and as I said, there is a lot you can get out it, if you use that creativity. Cons- it is a programme that when you have explored every avenue, you tend to get bored with it and trying to get it to do the kind of things that Dreamweaver does for example, just does'nt work. I had to move on once my creative side had conquered it and needed enlightenment. It is a good piece to get you started on the net though. 7/10

5: Filezilla: (http://filezilla-project.org/) yeah this is all good Ben, but how do I get all this digital creativity on the net? Fillezilla- getting stuff up on the net needs FTP (File Transfer Protocol) for the egg heads reading. It is the bridge from your computer to your web space that you will have booked and paid for using many of the web hosting services that unfortunately are not free. The best one is however: http://www.justhost.com/ - really, really cheap packaging deals and reliable too. Once you have that this programme Filezilla, it will allow you to get your webpages and graphics across to the net- with SerifWebPlusSE two files are created for you to transfer- the file with webpages and the file with graphics, buttons, images etc. Takes five minutes and your done. Pros- pretty easy to use and gets most of your stuff over quickly. Cons- could have a little more, I say that as I have stumbled upon a little bad boy called Web CEO (http://www.webceo.com/) and this is as Usher Raymond once said, "TTP" not only is it free, it analyses your pages and let's you know how you are ranking in Google, Bing, Yahoo etc, allows you to edit them so they work well with search engines and you can transfer things to your webspace too. Actually, WebCEO is better, get that instead. Filezilla (6/10) WebCEO (10/10)