What kind of website will I get?
A Content Management System (CMS) is one which allows the owner to make the changes themselves. All the pages, news items, pictures and information can be edited, added or deleted as needed using a web based administration area. Once the design and structure is agreed upon the site framework is made and then it is ready to go!

How Hard is it to work with?
There are many CMS systems and the administration area of some are very user friendly. We will show you the 3 main systems we use – any one of which is suitable for a general website but has particular benefits depending on your needs – and we can adjust the functionality as needed.

How much will it cost?
Naturally this is a big variable! We can give a quick estimate during our first discussion and then we provide a detailed estimate once we know what the needs of your business are.

• Some sites are a few hundred dollars to get rolling
• Extended online eCommerce and integrated sites are in the many thousands of dollars
• Hosting is anywhere from $5 a month and up. Usually around $25 to $35 per month include hosting, all traffic and fully featured email
• More sophisticated design, supplied from the design end of our business, is a few hundred dollars and up

Why use the roca team?
We are responsive, fun, responsible and creative. Our design is second to none. We provide something beyond the ‘desktop publisher’ or friend who is “doing it on the side”. Call us. You will see what we mean

Jane Appleby - artist website

Just a few of the designs, logos and photos from recent work that roca IT & Design / Avalon Design have worked on.
Many clients are local to Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows and many more are from Vancouver, Lower Mainland and around the world. These images show logos, web design, printed and digital media of all sorts

While it is written for Lawyers the knowledge works for any person or profession!

http://www.typographyforlawyers.com

These units are usually not workhorses for crunching data but for simple web browsing and running an application such as a Point Of Sale they work great. Once they are up and running they have enough CPU power to manage most basic office and store tasks.

Worth looking into in some cases!

So many people have asked us this question!

The response usually starts with a few questions back to them such as, “What are you doing with your computer?” and “How familiar are you with the system you have now?”

Windows Vista has been out for a while and has suffered from a number of things that make it not friendly especially in business environments. Many, many times we have had to ‘back pedal’  and install XP Pro in business situations.

Home users are usually okay with Vista depending on their applications and the hardware they are using. A lot of these installations need a fair bit of tweaking before the user is happy though.

If a person is using XP and is comfortable with it there is little need to move to Vista especially on older PC’s where hardware is incompatible.

The newest version of Windows, Version 7,  is slated for public release in October 2009 and hopefully it will be all it is hyped to be. It will have an “XP compatibility mode’ so applications will run on it.  Word is this is pretty seamless but we have not tested it ourselves yet.It certainly seems like it will be a vast improvement over Vista.

A client of ours has already said they would be happy to be the ‘guinea pigs” for the new version of Windows but we will still wait until a few months have passed before moving their 16 public kiosk systems to Version 7! Once tested there then we will look at the business workstations and the newest version of their server software (Small Business server).

So, in a nutshell, don’t move to Vista unless you have to. XP is stable with XP Pro being the version of choice. Once the new version is tested and looks stable then go to it if your hardware and applications will be suitable.

Note: An alternative, on some computers, is to install Multiple operating systems (various versions of Windows and/or Linux) by one of two methods: 1 – Dual Boot, or, 2 – Virtual Environments(Servers). We can help you with this if you want to give something a test drive!

Please do contact us if you have any questions on what is best for your business.