About

What?

This website's aim is to provide quality help and utilities to the user. We are user-oriented and react to current major problems and user requests.

Where?

HelpBytes is developed in England, United Kingdom.
HelpBytes is hosted on servers housed in a data centre in London.

The Funding

The site is paid for entirely by the adverts. Not intrustive adverts, not adverts that flash, give you headache, or cover our content. Just text based adverts that are relevant to the content of the page.

We do not earn commission on anything we recommend for you, we do this because we feel they are worth recommending! We are not affiliated with any of the software we recommend. The only links we get paid for are the "Ads by Google" labelled adverts. The rest are linked because of the relevancy.

Site X has the same content as you, and Site Y says your content is wrong

Jealousy is a bad thing!
Some websites, such as carbonize are permitted to use parts of our content, either automatically provided by us, or have permission to use and edit. Other websites may or may not be allowed to use the content. If people abide by the Copyright Conditions then they are automatically allowed to use content, without editing it; But I always have the final say.
If Site Y says our content is wrong, perhaps they are wrong! Site Y never contacted us because if they had of done, we would have reviewed the content and co-operated with them.

Lack of Images, Videos etc...

I have two problems with using Images:
1) They take a long time for dial-up users to download.
2) There are 5+ versions of Windows in use, and each differs so much. Not only that, but people use tweaking programs or make other customisations. People would be confused as to why their's looks different to mine. We use images only in the most appropriate places.

Videos same as above really.

The Knowledge

A common questions is where I learned all this.

I am studying "Software Engineering" at university, which includes alot of computer science, I also did a Computing "A-Level". Between the two I have a good theoretical understanding of computing, the technology, their use and application, and project and quality management. I have also learned about programming. Contrary to what many people think however, these really have had no influence of the knowledge used on this website. I am not doing a computer support degree, if such a thing even exists!

There has been a computer in my house since 1997, and it's experience that has left me with the knowledge I have. A good maths background as well as self teaching programming languages has left me with an ability to problem solve. That's what most of this website is about, find a problem and solve it. How a processor works internally, or the way to manage a team of programmers really does not come into this website!

Credit

I didn't do it all!
TheSolarWanderer - Many ideas and original layout design. Plus many of the images. German Translations.
ThisIsTita - Spanish Translations.
Knight_Templar_CF - Assistance with PHP and other webdesign issues. Proof reading.
Carbonize & Euchre - A lot of proof reading, ideas, suggestions and corrections.
Yahoo! Chat Help Room - More proof reading, ideas, suggestions and corrections.
Other credit is provided at source.

A Brief History

1998 was the year in which Emotion Creator was first developed as a way of learning how to program. It was never released due to quality issues.

I worked on a number of smaller websites that focused on distributing the Emotion Creator software, and had a few pages of help. Namely these were c-h-a-t (computer help and tutorials) and computer-stop. Both were hosted as a free subdomain of Tripod.

November 2001 saw the beginnings of Freddy's Utilities Plus. With Emotion Creator, a few Chat Client fixes, and the development of YahRooLS, we were hosted as a subdomain of Portland Communications.

February 2002 saw a move from Portland Communications to another free provider aspfreeserver, shortly followed by a move to Brinkster. During this time, we were using the domain name www.freddys-utilities.co.uk.

May 2002 saw a move to the first "real" webhost, Net57 by MyRaqs. This lasted for about 6 months, but didn't work out due to continued problems with e-mail, something we felt the site could not run without.
Average Daily Visitors: 100

November 2002 saw a move to Web-Mania, our current webhost, were it has worked out. You expect minor problems, nothing is perfect, and we got them, but judge for yourself on the service we receive, by the fact you're reading this!
Average Daily Visitors: 300

The website really developed during 2003 with the production of SMarTPost and a huge increase in the pages we had to offer. We also integrated together webpages from other sites such as Transmission, and TheSolarWanderer.

February 2004 saw the renewal of the Domain Name freddys-utilities.co.uk, 2 years of our services! We also felt it was time for change, a new permanent name that reflected the move from a software based website to help and software. In late february we registered helpbytes, and during March we changed the site over.
Average Daily Visitors: 2500

March 2005 saw us move to Total Choice Hosting, which ended suddenly in August 2005 when they deleted our website for posting a critical review of them. We then moved to HostGator. We have renewed our domain names so we can continue providing services until at least 2008!
Average Daily Visitors: 3100