Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

Dont waste your money buying adobe stuff, it is too expensive and is very bloated.

There are cheaper/free alternatives:

Photoshop for instance has PanitShop Pro, www.gimp.org (free) , paint.net (free)

Illustrator has inkscape (free), corel draw (much better than illustrator), and there is www.mediachance.com/realdraw/ realdraw pro plus a lot of others.

For Golive the is Nvu www.nvu.com/

For microsoft office suite try www.openoffice.org it even has an export to pdf built into it (there is no need to spend $100's to get that feature) and the "impress" like powerpoint can export to flash!!!! And best of all it is all free.

You also might need a CRM system.

As far as I know there is no open souse program like indesign but try serifsoftware.com they have older versions of the products for free.

Once you get going you might then want to buy the expensive apps.

I was not clear. Sorry about that. I was referring to job tracking, invoicing, accounting, etc. I was looking into Clients & Profits or Creative Manager. I just wanted to know if anyone has used these programs and would they recommend. Thanks.

Hi Falina,

After 20 years in this business I still have not found a solution for a small business, but I'll tell you what I've do

Always give clients a contract with a unique number on it
Use a book keeper, it's more professional, deductible and frees up your time. Plus if a client has a financial question they can ask your book keeper.
For Job Tracking I use Act, it works, it integrates, easy to use and it's got alarms and all sorts of gadgets.

Creative Manager is good, but remember as all things that are bought by Agencies, we always seem to get charges twice as much. At the beginning use a manual system, it will give you more feel for the system that you incorporate, using a system that doesn't do what you want, can cost you more in the end.

Remember, there is a difference between price and cost

Good luck with the New Agency