Monday, August 25, 2008

Don’t Ask Geeks About Home Landscape Design Software

Since you are a smart shopper, you just don’t buy the first home landscape design software you come across. You want to do a little research first. Perhaps part of that research is taking a look at people who review software and computer stuff. However, going to get home landscape design software reviews from geeks is not going to tell you how practical or helpful the software is for your property. They will only tell you how easy or hard it is to tinker with.

Geeks Verses Gardeners

Geeks or "tech-heads" have far different requirements from home landscape design software than a gardener would. A geek would want to know how exciting the program is – does it offer anything new, and how fast? How are the graphics, how fast is it to download and does my computer act peculiar after downloading it? Those are the sort of questions a geek would be worried about and would base a review on.

A gardener or landscaper, on the other hand, has a much different set of expectations from their home landscape design software. They want to see how easy it is to use, how practical it is for their work and if it helps them get a great garden or outdoor space planned out. For that reason, you need to get reviews of home landscape design software from gardening magazines, gardening clubs and gardening web sites.

Top Ten Reviews

If you don’t already know of a good gardening magazine that you can trust or a gardening web site, then there is a short cut you can use. You can go to a web site called Top Ten Reviews, which is like an online version of "consumer Reports" magazine. Every year, Top Ten Reviews puts out a list of the landscape software they think is the best.

You could get the names of these home landscape design software programs and put them through your favorite search engine to see what others in the gardening web world have to say about it. This can help whittle down the list very fast. You can even place the name of the software with the word "sucks" next to it to see if someone hated the program so much, they devoted a whole chunk of bandwidth to cutting it into little sarcastic pieces.

That being said, before you buy your home landscape design software, be sure you know the return policy of the store and if there is a free trial period you can take advantage of.

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