As a small charity, we are keen to provide the best professional service at the keenest price. Whilst a professional website can cost many thousands of pounds to produce and maintain, there are often cheap – or even free – resources that can do just as good a job in many areas.
As we come across software or services that we find useful and meet those criteria, we will list them here. We offer no guarantee, just that we like them! (The descriptions below are largely provided by the software suppliers.)
WordPress – WordPress is a free, open-source content management system (CMS) that allows people to build and manage websites visually without writing code. Powering over 43% of all websites on the internet, it is the most popular website-building platform in the world.
LibreOffice – LibreOffice is free and open-source software, developed by users who believe in the principles of Free Software and in sharing their work with the world in non-restrictive ways. LibreOffice is a suite of six apps – Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (vector graphics), Math (mathematical formulae), and Base (databases) – providing a comprehensive office software suite, closely mimicking the features of Microsoft Office.
Irfanview – IrfanView is a fast, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10 and 11. I have been using this software supporting the L&B for around 20 years, and there is still nothing to beat it.
Zint – Zint provides a cross-platform barcode generation solution with a Qt-based GUI, a CLI executable and a library API, giving both end-users and developers a flexible way to generate professional barcode output. We used the downloadable Windows executable for offline generation.