I think you have to be careful striking a balance between short term revenue and longer term gains. For free sites like plenty of fish, Adsense is the main form of income. In this example, the adverts frequently show links to other paid dating sites.
Personally I didnt want to do that with my own site, whereby we let the competition display links on our own pages and help the customers leave our site.
I guess it's really a question of the business model you are going to use and what type of customers you want to attract to your site. If your running a hobby website in your spare time then Adsense can be a great way of providing you with extra income.
IE has always tended to be big with business due to the ability to easily alter its settings by group policy and deploy updates through WSUS (Windows Software Update Services). Having deployed browsers for a very large organisation, the amount of testing required, particularly for corporate apps that used plugins and ActiveX components was massive which was why IE was the browser of choice.
I've seen many friends use the "have a go" site builder website and it's fine just for putting a contact page up, but that's about it; websites like these won't bring you any business.
The main thing that I think that many struggle with is how to market themselves online and how to layout a good looking professional website with great content which is what a professional desinger and marketer can help you with.
Many I know realise that they need to do more with their websites but sadly, never get round to it. I like to use the example that people don't use yellow pages anymore to look up businesses; they use Google!
I used to love building computers, but you're right the cost savings aren't that good anymore. The last thing I built was a home theatre PC, but looking back I should have just used a laptop with a HDMI connection as it would have been cheaper and quieter.
I was caught out a few times with faulty components from the suppliers. Sometimes it was difficult to find out what was at fault if you didn't have the same parts to swap out to diagnose faults.
I've just got a Nokia Lumia and I think it's great, I like the integration with the Office Suite and the mail client is good too. Browsing experience is really good and it's still got plenty of apps available for it. Nevertheless, I still miss the physical keyboard of the BlackBerry.
You can get a cheap PC and install Mac OS on it and save yourself the money on the hardware. There are many articles you can search on Google on how to do it.
For a business, as apps become more web/broser based, the operating system that something runs on becomes less important.
With products like VMWare Player, you can easily host "guest" operating systems on your computer inside a Window. It's useful for those who have Windows 7 and like to run applications that will only work on XP. Using VMWare player you can run OS X on your PC without having to format or parition your hard disk.
