"The Desktop Global Marketer" (tm)

   A free on-line newsletter of Sidereal Designs, Inc.,
   for Internet Entrepreneurs, and those who are
   considering becoming one.
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                    August 2002

In this issue: "What we see is that most people have very
little understanding of what is trivial and cheap to build
and what is difficult and expensive."


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The first step in getting your commercial web site under way
is to contact a prospective web master with the
specifications for what you want.

We get a lot of initial contact requests from people who are
in the market for a web site, and most of them have some
sort of list of things they want, but it's often not thought
through very well. What we see is that most people have very
little understanding of what is trivial and cheap to build
and what is difficult and expensive.

They will spend a lot of time detailing and itemizing things
that amount to throw away code that I'd toss in for free. In
the same breath they will mention that they want some
features that only Amazon or Yahoo could afford. In addition
they are usually confused about what things are provided by
webmasters, hosting companies, and search engine placement
specialists.

We can usually put them on the right track, but it may help
you to think about your initial site planning if we give a
few pointers here to clarify some of these things.

First let's look at who does what.

A webmaster designs and builds your site. A hosting company
rents you space on a computer connected to the internet
where that code can reside, and also runs a special program
that serves your pages to any browser that comes knocking on
the door. These are two entirely separate jobs and one is a
one-time investment and the other a monthly
expense. Nonetheless, a sizable number of people ask for
"web design and hosting."

One reason people often think these are part of the same
service is that all the hosting companies want to wholesale
their services to webmasters who then mark it up and re-sell
it to their clients as if they were the hosting service. The
hosting companies provide the software to make it look like
Joe The Webmaster is actually doing the hosting, running a
huge farm of costly machines, etc. He's not.

We don't do that because we prefer to shop for the best
hosting service that meets the customer's requirements and
then set them up with it directly and pass the savings on to
them. Whichever way it's done however you really are getting
web designs and hosting from two different places
specialized for two different jobs. By considering them
separately you can get the best service for your money.

A favorite line of people requesting a quote on a site goes
something like, "I want you to put it in the top place on
major search engines." No. Being in top place on major
search engines is worth huge amounts of money and so it
costs huge amounts of money. Moreover, it has little to do
with your webmaster's work, and it has to be worked at
perpetually to keep you up there.

There are a few things we can do as webmasters in the way we
build a site that will help, but what you need is a search
engine placement specialist who is going to work very hard,
continuously, to move you up the lists and keep you there.

It will take six months to even get you listed on some
engines, and he's going to charge you $1500 to $5000 per
year if he's reputable and if your keywords aren't too hotly
contested by others. Anyone asking for less is a
con-artist. Our job is to help you find a quality placement
specialist.  Figure placement expenses into your web budget,
or else abandon that route and go for pay-per-click
advertising instead.  (We'll do another article soon on that
topic.)

Looking at just the things a web designer really does for
you, there are things that people ask for that aren't even
worth mentioning but which they believe must influence the
cost of the site greatly. Mail-to, contact forms, "recommend
this page to a friend" scripts and so on are good
examples. They take a little time to do, but they don't
amount to much. We're just going to allow a little in the
estimate for that sort of stuff in general and not care if
you want to throw in another one, so don't fret about these
items in putting together your wish list.

One thing many mention is page counters. Unless you really
want one as decoration (and no one on earth but you cares
about your hits) then forget this. All hosting services
offer you a free statistical package with your hosting that
will tell you much more than page counters and not look
silly into the bargain.

On the other hand there are things people mention casually
in passing, as if they assumed it was an easy matter, that
in fact can add enormously to the cost of a site. Probably
the most common of these is "I want to be able to update my
site myself." Depending on what you mean by "update" this
can run anywhere from expensive to very, very expensive.

What many people don't understand is that you don't just
take a text file like a Word document and paste it into a
web page and have it come out looking like
properly-formatted text. If you just throw text into a web
page it's going to look simply awful if not completely
illegible. Your line breaks and paragraphing will be totally
ignored, as will all of your formatting. On the web these
things are done in a code called HTML, and if you know HTML
you don't need a webmaster in the first place. This is
before we even begin to think about page layout, active
effects, and image placement.

In general if you want to modify the words on your pages in
ordinary text we first create a database to hold the text,
then a suite of tools that allow you to modify the content
of that database through your web browser using ordinary
text-editing. Then we write programs that create your web
pages on-demand whenever a browser asks for them, and these
programs get the current text you've put in to the database
and use it as the content of the pages they're
building. There are variations on this depending on just
what's required, but you get the idea; it's a lot more
involved than an ordinary web page.

When you're thinking about your web site's needs you want to
consider whether it's more cost-effective to buy the means
to update it yourself or to pay someone to update it for
you. A lot will depend on how frequently you need it
updated.

There are other things people frequently want, such as
e-commerce and shopping carts, that they expect to pay for,
but are frequently surprised to find it's less expensive
than they thought. This is because there are standard
packages of commercially available code that we can license
and customize for your application. The cost of the code
development is then spread over large numbers of web sites.

The trick here is to live within the standard features that
are provided for in these packages -- and these are quite a
rich set of features. If you really have to have something
oddball then you have to, but it's going to cost to have it
custom coded.

Thanks for reading this month's issue!

Best,

Ernie Kent


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Sidereal Designs, Inc. "Making The Web Simple."   http://sidereal-designs.com