So, you've heard about the potential of the World Wide Web, and you know that thousands of businesses are already operating on the Web or are in the process of developing Web pages. But is it for you? What are the requirements? How much will it cost? We'll try to answer these questions, and others.
The thing to remember about the Web is that it really is World Wide. If your business is strictly local, and your customers are mostly local people, then in all probability, the Web will not be a useful advertising venue for you. For example, the average outboard repair shop would not benefit from a Web presence. For such businesses, traditional local venues such as newspaper and broadcast media will in most cases prove more valuable.
If on the other hand, you do business with people outside your locale (or would like to) then for you the Web may be a very promising medium. Mail order retail, especially for hard-to-find specialty items, is currently a common and successful type of Web venture. For example, book stores, music stores, and gourmet food shops have all used the Web to good effect.
Some businesses draw almost all their customers from afar, and these are particularly good candidates for a Web presence. Resort hotels, bed-and-breakfast inns, and charter boat operations are good examples.
Even if you don't have a product you care to sell via mail-order, you may find a Web presence useful. A Web site may be a very good place to disseminate product information, to announce new products, to answer frequently-asked questions, and so forth. For example, hypertext can make a troubleshooting chart far more intuitive, and is vastly less expensive to maintain than a phone bank and on-call technicians.
Finally, the Web is an ideal place for charitable and political organizations to set up shop. The Web is an extremely flexible and powerful medium with which to make a point. Pages may be updated continuously, and can employ video and audio, as well as striking graphics. With a few keyboard strokes pages can be linked to other organizations, or to government information sites; the ability to point your visitors directly to source material is a persuasive tactic that has no equal in any other medium.
There are many other possibilities, of course. For example, the cost of maintaining a small web site is so low that writers, artists, musicians, and other professionals who wish to maintain a world-wide presence can easily do so. Even that outboard repair shop we mentioned above might be a good candidate for a Web page, if the owner specializes in collectable antique motors and hard-to-find parts. If you can imagine a way in which the Web might help your business, it may be worth a try.
Strictly speaking, you don't have to own any equipment at all to set up a Web site. You can rent Web space on your choice of many servers, and hire a firm like eightsea web consulting to design and maintain the site. However, to take full advantage of the Web, you should at least be capable of receiving and sending email, since Web users will wish to contact you as conveniently and quickly as possible. You can of course include postal addresses and telephone/fax numbers in your presentation, but Web users are typically impatient with these slower and more expensive modes of communication.
In all likelihood you already have a computer capable of email-- few businesses these days are entirely computerless. You'll also need a modem and an access provider. Your provider can be one of the large information services such as Compuserve or America Online, or you can get a direct Internet connection... often for less than the cost of an online service subscription. We recommend the direct connection, which in most areas is available for a set monthly fee. To give you a ballpark figure, we pay $20.00 a month for a dial-up SLIP/PPP connection. This gives us twenty hours of connect time (more than most businesses would need for email.) This direct connection will also allow you to access and inspect your pages with the Web browser of your choice, and even to maintain your own pages, should you choose to do so.
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, and at the entry level it is indeed almost as easy as it looks. Any reasonably intelligent person can sit down with a book or tutorial and be writing pages in an hour or two. Given suitable supervision and training, computer-literate secretarial personnel are perfectly capable of performing the day-to-day maintenance on many sites. The concept is very simple: HTML is a system of tags that mark the text and images of your page so that it can be displayed properly by any browser, on almost any computer. It incorporates the very powerful possibility of near-instantaneous linkages between any and all of the millions of documents that comprise the Web. Its great advantage is its portability, and this portability is what opens the World Wide Web to the world.
However, the fact that it is so easy to mark up pages that will display properly does not mean that any novice can design an effective Web presentation. It might occasionally happen, but it's a rarity. An hour spent cruising the Web will show you plenty of horrific examples of amateur Web design . Or take a look at Mirsky's Worst of the Web. Like any other form of communication, high-level Web design is a subtle and complex skill that takes time (and a degree of aptitude) to master. Furthermore, though it's easy to write HTML that looks good in one of the many browsers currently in use, it's not so easy to write HTML that works well in all browsers. The best HTML authors currently use a subset of the standard-in-development known as HTML 3. This allows them to take advantage of those advanced features supported by Netscape, the current browser-of-choice on the Web, and still produce pages that don't fall apart when accessed by those other browsers. In addition, writing to this standard ensures that your pages will not be obsolete when the next hot browser comes along. At the bottom of this page, you'll notice an icon that links to one of the Web's best validation services, sponsored by HalSoft. Good HTML authors use services such as this one to make certain that their pages are in strict compliance with the HTML standard. When you're considering hiring a Web design firm, you might want to take the URL of their firm's home page to such a validation service, and see if their HTML passes this elementary test. (By the way, some amateur Web designers will tell you that they design for Netscape, or some other proprietary browser. This is a Bad Sign, because anything you might want to do with Netscape's proprietary tags can be done just as well with that subset of HTML 3 supported by Netscape, and you won't be locking out that substantial portion of Web users who run non-Netscape browsers.)
In creating a Web site, there are lots of design decisions beyond the technical ones covered above. As in any medium, there are effective ways to communicate and ineffective ones. When evaluating a Web design firm, there are several warning signals that may indicate a lack of design sense and/or professional qualifications. Many of the "designers" competing for your business are young hopefuls who discovered the Web last week and want to earn as they learn. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, if they can do a good job for you. However, when you look at a Web designer's home page, be cautious if you find one or more of the following Bad Signs:
A large splashy graphic at the top of the page is a Bad Sign. You might think this is a good thing, for firms that specialize in providing Web graphics (especially if the graphics are impressive,) but it shows a basic misunderstanding of the Web's realities. If you're on a fast network connection to the Internet, you might not realize just how long such graphics take to load, at the connect speeds available to most Web users. Most users employ a relatively slow dial-up connection, and it's even worse for those whose connections are mediated through the online services. A visitor can leave your site with a single near-instantaneous point-and-click, and if many seconds pass while a large, information-free graphic loads in, you'll lose any visitor who puts a value on his or her time. By the way, this is not a blanket condemnation of graphics on the Web. Almost any page can be enlivened by small, vivid graphics, and there is certainly a place for large graphics on some sites. But the wise designer uses them after the visitor is hooked.
An extremely large and cumbersome page is a Bad Sign in many cases. One of the great advantages of hypertext is the way in which information can be organized in hierarchical layers, so that the visitor to your site can find exactly what he or she is looking for without waiting for a monster page to finish loading in. Some designers attempt to take the curse off monster pages by putting a table of contents at the top of the page, with links to the various subheadings of the page, and this is effective in some cases. In other cases, this tactic leads to annoyance when the visitor tries to jump down the page to a part that hasn't finished loading yet. (The astute reader will have noticed that this document is itself a semi-monstrous page. However, its lack of graphic overhead means that it loads in very rapidly... and since it's aimed at those who Really Need this information, the author hopes they will be patient.)
Poor copy-editing is a Very Bad Sign. If in perusing a Web design firm's home page, or reference pages, you notice misspellings, ungrammatical constructions, obscure or pompous language, an overly pedantic or inappropriately idiomatic style, or any other clues that the author of the page is an incompetent writer, pass on. The Web is still primarily a text medium, particularly for business purposes. Your pages will be available to millions of visitors, some of whom will be inclined to judge your product by the abilities (or lack thereof) of the person who writes your copy. If you intend to write your own copy, this won't be so large a factor, but even in this case you may benefit from knowledgeable advice. One of the principles at eightsea web consulting is a widely-published writer of both fiction and non-fiction, with several novels and numerous stories and articles to his credit. You may not need this level of expertise, but try to make sure your Web designer's editorial skills exceed the level required to pass Freshman Composition.
The Billboard Syndrome can be a Bad Sign. If you jump back to eightsea web consulting, you'll see a near-example of the Billboard Syndrome. This is a page which is nothing but an advertisement for a product (in this case, web consulting.) The only thing that saves the eightsea page from this flaw is the document you're reading, which is attached to eightsea's page not only as an advertising device but also as a means of providing value-added content to our visitors. Understanding this concept is vital to designing effective business pages for the Web. If your page is nothing but a billboard for your product, you'll only attract those Web cruisers who are already looking to buy your product. That's not bad, but you can do much better. If, in addition to your advertising copy, you can provide some uniquely-valuable information to the Web, the traffic to your site will be much improved. Or, you might take another approach to the problem and associate your site with a dedicated content-provider. This was the tack taken by one of our clients, The Armchair Sailor, a nautical bookstore, which associated itself with The Eighth Sea, a webzine devoted to ocean sports and designed specifically to provide an attractive content-oriented environment for businesses like the Armchair Sailor.
A cookie-cutter graphic look can be a Bad Sign . As you cruise the Web, you'll see the same graphic icons and backgrounds used over and over again, in page after unrelated page. In fact there are sites that as a service to the Web offer free libraries of these emblems of mediocrity. If you want your pages to have an identifiable and distinctive look, you'll have to use original graphic elements. Of course, there are far more malignant graphic sins than mere unoriginality. You may, for example, happen across a web designer's home page that uses a poisonous and eye-hurting background color, which may make the text almost illegible. This betrays a basic lack of design sense... though fortunately all the effort put into such an atrocity will be wasted on any visitor who arrives via one of the many browsers that don't support background color. All in all, a look around the Web may prove temporarily discouraging, but there really are good graphic designers available. The designers at eightsea web consulting have over 30 years of combined experience in commercial art and package design, as well as the equipment and software necessary to produce first-rate graphics. Your graphic needs may be modest, or you may wish to use artwork and logos you've already developed, but it's usually worthwhile to engage a design firm that has the capacity to do good original work and whose designers have good instincts.
The unthinking use of Web cliches can be a Bad Sign. A particularly trite example is the omnipresent "Under Construction" symbol, lifted from the county road crew and now infesting thousands of Web pages. In the first place, no Web page is ever "finished" unless it's a dead site--so the use of this symbol indicates that the designer doesn't grasp this elementary fact. But what's worse is that the designer has represented the site's incomplete status as a weakness, when it would have been just as easy (and much more appealing) to acknowledge that incomplete status by listing a few soon-to-be-added features. There are other prolific cliches, such as links labeled "Click Here," textual image maps, or statements like "This page enhanced for Netscape 1.1." These aren't dreadful crimes, on a universal scale, but they indicate a certain laziness of thought and execution on the part of the perpetrator.
Any complete catalog of Web design mistakes would have to be much longer than this introductory document, perhaps infinitely longer, because new mistakes are being made every day. The Web is very young and its growth is explosive. A vast number of Web pages are being written and most of them are dreadful. The good pages shine by comparison. For example, The Eighth Sea was recently designated a "Top 5% of the Web" site. This isn't as notable an accomplishment as it may seem, because almost any competently designed, content-oriented site ought to be able to claim that distinction. As the search engines which index the Web evolve and become more selective, it will become increasingly important for your commercial site to be ranked in this top echelon.
The Bad Signs listed above can help you to avoid the least competent of the hundreds of would-be web designers who want your business. But you should realize that the job of designing a good Web site involves many complex subtleties, few of which can be expressed in the simple terms used above. The organization of your site, the pattern of linkages within your site, the choice of external links, the manner in which the site is presented to the search engines, even the order in which the information is presented; all these elements and many more have a bearing on the success of the site. Look for a designer who's given serious thought to these somewhat abstract aspects of site design.
You might also wish to hire a design firm that can supply training for your employees, particularly if you envision a site with dynamic, frequently-changing content, because you or your employees can probably maintain such a site with a minimum of outside help. You may also want training in the effective use of email, or in the acceptable use of the Usenet news groups in promoting your site. Talk to your prospective designer and try to assess his or her capacity for clear explanation. Keep in mind that some design firms, including eightsea web consulting, have developed email-and-telephone-based tutorials on these subjects, thus avoiding in many cases the added expense of on-site instruction.
If you're reading this online, then you've already acquired a Web browser and access to the Web. If not, or if you're reading this at your friendly neighborhood computer store, you'll need to hook up your modem and find an access provider. In most areas you'll be able to find a direct connection via a local phone number; if not, you'll be able to get to the Web via one of the online services, which have local numbers in most cities. You'll have an email address and you can begin your research.
Familiarize yourself with the Web; spend a few hours surfing aimlessly. You'll learn a lot about the conventions and standards that shape the Web.
Learn to use the various search engines, such as Webcrawler, Yahoo, and Infoseek. Once you become comfortable with them, use them to locate any competitors on the Web, or non-competitors in similar businesses. See what they've done, and try to imagine ways to do better. If you can't find any competitors, it may mean that your business isn't suited to the Web, but it's more likely that your competitors just haven't thought as far ahead as you have.
Make a list of the things you want to accomplish with your Web presence. The more complete this list is, the better your Web designer will be able to serve your purposes.
Decide whether you want to take the time to learn HTML and site design, or whether you want to contract the work out to a Web design firm. If the latter, better get busy. If the former, see the next step.
Look at as many Web design firms as you can stand to look at; you'll find hundreds listed on the various search engines. Eliminate those you don't like. Query the remaining possibilities with your proposal. You'll find that some firms operate on the basis of an hourly fee, which can range from trivial to over $100 per hour. Other firms are willing to bid for a job on a flat fee basis. Still others will cheerfully bill on either basis, or both; this is the case with eightsea web consulting.
When you've come to a satisfactory arrangement, which in the case of most reputable designers involves the signing of a contract for services, you'll need to find suitable Web space for your pages. Your designer can advise you in this respect; there are a wide variety of servers available, at a wide variety of price and level of service. The server need not be local; in fact, you'll rarely find your best deal on a local server.
As soon as your pages are fully functional, you can announce them to the various search engines (though you may wish to contract with your site designer for this service.) Now's the time to take advantage of any training your designer offers. You're on the Web. If you and your designer have done a good job, your door is open to the world.
If you'd like to suggest a way we can make this document more useful to the Web business community, please contact: pbwriter@fwb.gulf.net, or the business office at:
eightsea web consulting
389 N. Gardner Dr.
Ft. Walton Beach, FL 32548
(904) 244-0134