How to Search This Secure Database

The Online Searchable Database of Actual Prices
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How to Search This Secure Database
Country Screen
Since this is a worldwide database of prices, and we are continuing to collect price points from all over the world, you MUST select a country within which to search. Once you have a country selected, click on NEXT. If the country you selected includes states, then this action takes you to the "Select a State" screen. (Otherwise you will go directly to the "City & Category" screen.)

State Screen
This is an optional action just in case you want to get a listing of ALL the prices in the country for a specific service. For most, however, a state would be selected here to reduce the number of cities displayed in the "city select" window on the next screen.

City & Category Screen
This is the main search screen. Here you select the specific city for your research. Or you leave this drop down window alone and go directly to select a Category in a state-wide search. The categories are: Camera/Film, Design, Finishing, Input, Multimedia, Other, Output, Prepress, Production, Software Services, and Web Services (the search engine lists them alphabetically).

The Camera/Film category is where you'll find analog photography, digital photography, photo enhancement, photo manipulation, photo restoration, film copying and duplication, film proofs such as velox, camera negs, bluelines, halftones, duotones, contact prints, PMTs, stats, photo design and photo composition.

Under Design, you'll find graphic design, illustration, cartooning, calligraphy, advertising design, annual report design, brochure design, newsletter design, and so on. We put the word "Design" in front of the subcategory headings to make it easier for you to select design of newsletters and not newsletter production (since some companies have a different price for design than they do for layout).

Finishing covers the binding, collating, cutting, folding, inserting and other functions that occur after printing has been accomplished.

Input refers to those things that are done before design begins. This includes writing, editing, proofreading, translation, transcription, scanning (including OCR scanning), file conversions and the like.

Multimedia includes animation, audio and video services, and CD-ROM services. There is a separate listing for animation under Web Services.

Other is a catch-all category that includes admin support, database maintenance, mailing services, project management, fax service, training, and VA virtual services among other services.

Output refers to print output (not mega-thousand copy printing). Here's where you'll find inkjet and laser prints, color copies and color prints, large format prints and other special printouts. The listings here typically cover outputs from one to 100 copies.

Prepress covers the retouching, image manipulation, image editing, and imagesetting services. Here's where you'll find the RC paper and film separations generated prior to running plates for a print run. Here's also where you'll find your color proofing prices.

Production is a category that primarily covers publishing (database publishing, desktop presentations, and desktop publishing) and production services.

Software Services is a category covering prices for all the specific software used in both print and electronic publishing. Even HTML, Java, and C++ will be found here. So will Pagemaker, InDesign QuarkXpress, Illustrator, Photoshop, CorelDraw and many other application program services.

Web Services covers anything that concerns Web site design and development. It's a huge category and one that is growing the largest. Most graphic designers and desktop publishers are evolving into web design, so we are finding a lot of prices for web design and development. So you'll find web animation, web databases, and web e-commerce here.

Service / Detail 1 / Detail 2
These subcategories are used to further refine your search. For example, if you're looking for 3M Rainbow color proofs, you could select "Prepress - color proofs - 3M Rainbow - 11x17" and get a per each price for these proofs. You don't have to select any of these three subcategories, but they are there when you want to get specific. They're especially useful when seeking prices for a particular size of output.

Units
This is a critical search criteria since there are various ways to price an output or a service (each, page, hour, scan, sheet, etc.). If you don't specify a unit, you could get some pretty strange Minimum, Maximum and Average results.

Results Screen
This screen will show that you searched for this category and specified this unit (e.g., per hour) in this city, state and country.

Then it will list the total number of prices found, the minimum price, maximum price and average price based on your search criteria. Below this results overview you'll find a detailed list showing each specific price point found. (A price point is simply a unique price associated with a product or service. Each service in each company has an associated price point. Web site design at $75 an hour in XYZ Company represents one price point among the many.)

Wherever we could, we included additional information about the company behind each price point. In the "comments" field you could find, date the company started, type of business, and number of employees. If there are many price points for the criteria defined in your search, you'll see a "next page" button at the bottom of the Results screen to link to the next page in the detail results listing. This enables you to study each and every price point found based on the search criteria that you selected.

Error Messages
The most common message says that:

"You searched for ...... in ......

We are sorry, but no records matched your search."

What this means is that your search criteria wasn't specified well enough to let the search engine find what you seek. Perhaps you were searching for Java scripting under Design (it's under Software Services). It could be that we just haven't gotten to that city or state to enter prices in the criteria you selected. We have over 120,000 prices in this database, and we are getting around 400 prices ported over plus collecting an additional 100 new prices each day. Thus we have a HUGE task ahead of us. We're working on it, but it takes time. We try to focus on data entry for those states in which we have a lot of subscribers. But be patient, we'll get to all the data as soon as we can.

Still Stuck?
Sending email is the quickest way to get a response from our research team. You could call us (858-538-0093) and speak to someone here, but with most of us deep in the vaults of our pricing warehouse, they don't let us out much. So we'd likely have to call back. Not always, but usually. You could also send us a fax since we have fax machines near our research computers. Fax your question to 858-484-2599 and we'll get back as quick as we can. On your fax, print your email address since this is the preferable way for us to respond.

We hope this tutorial is helpful. If you have suggestions, we'd love to see them. Real Prices Confidential was designed by those who use the data regularly. It's consistently being improved. And we are always open to your ideas for making this pricing resource even better.

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Information Line:		(858) 538-0093
Orders:		(800) 811-4337
e-mail information:		brenner @ brennerbooks . com