It’s also good to know the income of the people who might be visiting your site.

Georgia Tech’s poll indicates that the internet is used disproportionately by those
making between 50-74 thousand dollars per year.

This slide actually came out of a second draft of this presentation. There's a lot of
services available, and we're only skimming the surface.

As smart as you are, unless you're providing IT services for a living, you may be
bewildered by the number of options available.

And so, here are some management strategies for dealing with the web that I've
seen; with pros and cons of each.

The cheapest way is to do-it-yourself. But this requires the most effort on your part-
-- which may make it more expensive in lost time than other options.

The next option I've most often seen is tasking some of your staff as a part-time web
service manager or provider. This requires less effort on your part, but can easily
cost much more than you intended in lost productivity.

I can think of an easy example of a customer that tasked his art department to
perform $2,000 of web site upgrades. A year and $40,000 salary later; they chose to
hire a contractor to finish the job.

If, however, you manage part-time insourcing well, you can get very impressive
results.

On any web site endeavour you undertake, these are the cost drivers.

Anyone who’s done any kind of custom work, or even had their house worked on
knows that design changes and good design are the biggest cost drivers. This is true
for web sites also.

Design is very important in web sites, and can usually be 90% or more of the total
cost. Design is picking the graphics (and creating them), writing the content, laying
it out, determining how the content will interact with any other software you might
use.

If you outsource, look for a company that addresses design risk early on. They may
provide multiple designs for your to sign off on, they may schedule meetings for
you to review and approve your designs and content. They may provide authoring,
video, and photography services.

If you’re going to do it yourself, you need to prepare to finish the job. Make
yourself a reasonable schedule and budget ahead of time.

When you build a web site with your own name, here are the minimum fees you’ll
accrue.

If you really need to save a few dollars, you could even register your own domain
and point to a freely hosted web site on Yahoo’s Geocities, or equivalents.

Some basics on getting noticed:

First, join as many online communities as you can. Social Networking sites like
MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and CollegeYearBook are great because they both
increase your exposure (so that you show up in search engines) and because they
give you an opportunity to engage visitors in back-and-forth conversation.

How many social sites should you join? A good rule of thumb comes from Jeffery
Gitomer’s “Little Red Book of Selling”. Type your own name and city in a search
engine. Do you show up as #1? You should.

Other places to get listed are on local business indexes. The yellow pages online.
Google Maps. Citysearch. Your local chamber of commerce.

Now, many people talk about Search Engine Optimization (or SEO). There are
some natural best practices that will help increase your ranking and cost you
nothing.

First, make sure your site is registered with the search engines. While search
engines still do go out and look for new web sites, they also rely on web developers
to submit what is called a SiteMap for listing.

Some online advertising terminology:

These are the two most common terms you’ll encounter in online advertising.
Pay-per-Click means you are charged if someone actually visits your web site from
the advertisement.

Pay-per-View means you are charged every time the ad is displayed to a user.
There are also terms you may want to know such as cost per thousand impressions,
and what impressions are (they are views of a particular ad), and so on. You may
hear the acronym CPK to discuss this.

Online advertising is just too big a topic to cover in an overall presentation, so if
I’m ever invited back to speak again, I’ll save it for then.

We’re going to try to touch on other things, so we’ll leave demographics behind for
now and cover some terminology.

The reason I have a terminology part at all is to provide you with some ideas of
what services are out there and what the current market rates are. Please bear with
me if you already know all this; I’ll try to make it quick and painless.

A quick background on how the internet works so you’ll have an idea of how these
terms fit together:

The best metaphore for internet is the postal system:

A domain name is essentially your postal address. You have to rent these on a
yearly basis from an authority that registers addresses internationally. This costs
about $9 a year.

Sticking with the metaphore, a host is essentially your post box. If you have a highend
internet service, you could designate one of your own computers for this job or
rent a host from a 3rd party service. These run generally $7 a month.

An internet service provider, to stick with the metaphore, is essentially your postage
courier.

The price you pay per month varies broadly, like postage. The higher prices give
faster service, the promise of expedited correction of any interruptions.

Some of the highest-priced services offer a fixed IP Address for your location.
Think of this as your own dedicated ZIP code. Having this allows you to provide
some of your own services without renting a host from a third-party.

Like we said on the previous slide, an Address is a unique number that you could
think of as a forwarding address or ZIP code.

When someone types in your registered domain www.acme.com, their computer
essentially asks the registrars what IP address is associated with that domain. The IP
address, like ZIP codes, handles the bulk of how a message gets back and forth.
What does all this mean to you? It means you can be online for as little as $9 a year
and $7 per month, and it’s independent of your ISP.

If you are looking to have more control of your information and services, you can
begin for as little as $9 per year plus $95 to $225 per month.

Now that your online, what you do with it is up to you. Most people have a web
page. You should certainly do that. You can also exchange files online, have your
own email, manage your clients with products like SalesForce, sell items with a
shopping cart, and so on.

Another term you will probably here is Web 2.0.

This term bears some mentioning because some unscrupulous developers have used
it to provide the same Web 1.0 product at a higher price.

Web 2.0 has nothing to do with technology. Instead, it’s a new mindset about what
to do with the web. At it’s most basic, Web 2.0 is the idea that you can keep your
visitors coming back if you give them reasons to do so.

And ways to do so include:

* Having visitor feedback forums where a community of your customers and
visitors can talk about your products and services.

* Contests where fans of your company can upload their contributions (photos,
news, art, poetry) and maybe win prizes.

* Birthday clubs

* Games -- remember the #5 largest use of the internet?

* News -- remember the #2 and #3 largest use of the internet?

* Social Networking -- like myspace and facebook; starting to be somewhat
overused.

If you’ve ever thought, “I know I need to do a web site, but that’s the only reason I
want one,” then this is the slide for you.

You can get some very, very nice looking web site’s that you can create in your
living room using free tools and post them to the web.

Consequently, the startup cost moves from free up.

You’ll see signs around town for $199 web site, or $99 web site, or something
ending in a $9. These are usually automatically generated using this process.

It’s the cheapest way to go, and if you are only looking to meet a perceived
requirement for your business, I’d suggest going no further.

An automatically generated web site is the most feature poor way to go. And you
will have to play by the rules of whichever tool you choose.

Another very cheap way to get started, and probably more than enough for the very
small startup is a template-driven web site.

You can get some excellent animated and non-animated web site templates from
templatemonster.com, freecsstemplates, among other sources.

Just plug a template into an editing tool, and edit it right there. You can quickly get
online.

Something to be wary of is that some templates display poorly on different
browsers. If you do use a template, download a copy of firefox and opera and test
using internet explorer and those two browsers to make sure your site will look
good to anyone visiting.

I show a cost that can range up to several hundred dollars. Here, the primary cost
driver is developing the text and images. You may hire a photographer or artist to
create images for you. You may hire a professional ghostwriter to write your text
copy. Or, you may do it all yourself.

I started two slides ago with the slide for the guy who “needs a website, but doesn’t
want one”. If, however, you want a website and have big plans for it, this is the only
way to go.

Why would a small business want a fully custom site?

Some reasons commonly given are to distinguish yourself -- have custom video, a
unique experience that makes you stand out.

For the utilitarian, there may be things like integrating Web 2.0 features like
forums, shopping carts, bulletin boards, games, custom applications, calendars, and
databases.

Generally, a fully custom web site will demand the use of many skills -- art, design,
authoring, many different kinds of web programming, integration, and good test
skills.

You may be automatically tempted to insource. This isn’t a bad idea if you expect
your maintenance costs to justify a person’s yearly salary. For small jobs and
startup, it will usually be cheaper and more reliable to hire a company to design for
you.

This animation shows all of the process you should give some thought to when
undertaking a web development task.

There are three major phases. Design is usually the most involved and most
important -- it’s also the phase that demands the most of your attention as you (the
business owner) are the only one who’ll really know what image you are trying to
project.

Implementation and deployment are the two phases where you’ll most likely run
into the need for technical assistance. Think about these things when doing your
budgeting, scheduling and design. For small jobs, the need for technical help can be
very minor.

Here’s the final takeaway.

Two points.

The first is this: 60% of the United States uses the internet. They use it
#1 to talk to each other, #2 to window shop, and #5 to actually buy things.

The second point is this -- make your online presence (or lack of it) part of your
business planning. If you are going to have a presence online, think first about what
you want that presence to accomplish for you -- what that’s worth to you in dollars.
It’s a good idea on this second point to know some web development companies
and keep their phone numbers around. Like everyone else, they have to work to
make a living, but they may have time to give you advice and help you plan what
you’d like to do with the web.