Just a quick note for those looking to buy the new Office 2010 suite for their home or small business. There are two primary options you have here; Home and Student, and Home and Business. Both are lower-cost alternatives to the more complete Professional and higher editions.

Home and Student is meant for non-commercial use only, and comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. The key selling point for this edition is that for around $150, you get the most important Office programs, and can install them on up to three computers in your household.

Home and Office is directed at the small business professional. It adds Office Outlook to the included products, and permits commercial usage. This edition is meant to be used by only a single person, but it permits installation and activation on two computers; your desktop and your mobile computer. List price is $279.

Both of the above come with 90-days of technical support from Microsoft.

For those who need more, Office Professional adds Access and Publisher, for a notably higher price tag. It also comes with 1 year of technical support.

Finally, if your computer came installed with an Office 2010 Evaluation, you can also save a little by getting a key card only.

So, it's been roughly two years now since I 'officially' became a web developer for hire. Formerly, my development work was either not web-related, or it was for my employer or my own business/personal projects. In that time, I've learned some lessons. I post them to remind myself of these lessons, mostly. But if you come across this, and learn something from it - I'll be very happy to have done some good.

Background

My work for hire has been almost exclusively for micro-to-small businesses or organizations. Most of the time, I am working for entities where a very small number of persons have the ability to approve things. Every client of mine I can think of right now has between 1 and 100 employees, with the average probably being 10. I mention this because this is going to make a difference in my thoughts and advice.

The type of web development work I do could be summed up as developing web sites with custom Content Management Systems (CMS). I generally provide end-to-end service; including hosting, administration, database design and development, and the like. I do not do design myself; I am either hired to work with a design provided otherwise, or I secure the services of a designer to provide that. I usually do the 'cut up' of a design into XHTML/CSS, and everything thereafter.

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