WEB SITES   14 things independent professionals need to know about developing their own web sites -- Basic sites for small business

I'm thinking of freelance writers and independent public relations pros here, but the principles apply to most one person or other small businesses. Big, fancy sites are another kettle of fish. I got inspired to write this when reading about freelance writers' web sites in CompuServe's MediaPro forum. Maybe this will help some MediaPro members, and you.

1. Pre-production. Like a movie, the time you spend in pre-production will pay off in the money you save producing the site, so get ready to work yourself, before you call in the professional help, if you ever do.
   
2. You'll need a name for your web site. It's also the address, called a URL for Universal Resource Locator. You can register this name yourself, over the web, using a credit card. If you go to www.internic.net, you'll get all the info you need to register. I've registered several sites using the services of Look Communications, at www.look.ca which is in Canada, but works internationally. Internic provides you with lots of choices.

The domain registration sites have free search boxes that let you see if the names you want are available. I think the best names for the web sites of independent professionals are the names of the people who run the business, but if you've established a business name, try to register it instead. That's why my site is www.BrianKilgore.com. The only other fairly famous Brian Kilgore is a percussionist in California who does not have a site with his name on it.

And you can register several names, and set up your site so all these names take people to the same place. It will cost you a bit extra each month, but may be worth it to have your name and the name both as web site addresses. Remember to set aside $25 - $30 per month to pay the company that "hosts" your site on its computers.

3. Determine the purpose of your web site. Is it to act as a rarely updated corporate brochure? Is it an often-updated running commentary on your work? Is it a resource for your clients and prospects? Are you trying to show industry leadership? What actions do you want people to take after visiting your site? Remember, you can set up the site so only some people have access to certain pages, so you can use it to show drafts to clients without e-mail, for instance.
   
   Write down the purposes you think are important, and see if you can put them in priority order.
   
4. Architecture is the magic word in site design and planning. Think of your site as being like an office building or house with various rooms. People need to be impressed by the entrance, foyer or front hall, and from here, move to various rooms describing different components of your business, just as the den and the living room and the bedrooms branch of from each other in a home.
   
   A web site can have lots of pages, (i.e. rooms) and unlike a house, more pages don't cost any more money like more rooms do. And the pages in a web site can be reached in any order, just like a stack of index cards, so your visitors don't need to go through the kitchen to get to the family room, unless they want to, or you want them to.
   
   On my site, the words in the green heading let you jump to several areas; once you get to them, there are more choices. In 'architecture" terms, the links in the green logo are like an elevator to various floors.
   
5. Buy a stack of index cards, and write various heading on them representing what services or products you want to offer in each room. You can divide some cards in half, representing cupboards or closets or display boards in each room.
   
   Arrange the cards in the order you want. This will take longer than you think but is a great business management exercise.
   
   You'll find that sometimes you want two doors into the same room, and sometimes you'll want two door out of the room. And sometimes you'll want your visitors to go back to the entrance hall and start in a different direction.
   
   And, like an office building, you can skip floors when riding in the elevator.
   
6. Your visitors, not you, control the appearance of your web site, so don't worry too much about what the site looks like, as far as type faces and line lengths go. Here's why. The web is created using HTML code that's designed to work on Macintosh, Windows and other computers, on desktop and notebook models, on 10 inch monitors and 21 inch monitors and sizes in between, set with various numbers of colors (256, 16,000, millions of colors), and resolutions, like 640 x 480 or 800 x 600. 
   
   Curious? To see the code for this page, go to View in the menu at the top of your Internet Explorer menu bar, and click on "Source". You never have to learn this scary stuff. Your viewers may not have the typefaces you choose, so their computers will substitute fonts, and that will change line lengths and spacing if their letters are fatter or thinner than yours. If you, for instance, click on "favorites" when looking at someone else's site and your favorites list jumps up at the side of the screen, notice how the line lengths of the page you're looking at probably change.
   
   And if you change you monitor's resolution from, say, 800x600 pixels to 1024x768 pixels, notice how the site you are looking at might change. I've used "tables" set BAK's Report to change as little as possible, but things happen anyway. And it fills the screen on an 800x600 pixel screen, except when things take on a life of their own.
   
   What about printing? Their printer and your site design combine to determine whether your pages will print properly. It's not up, exclusively, to only one of you. the more advanced you get, the more control you'll have.
   
7. Write down the headings for each page, once you have an idea of the architecture you want, along with a few words of body copy, and a list of the graphics you might want. No need for complete detail yet, but the more you plan, the more money and time you'll save later.
   
8. It's up to you to narrow the designer's job (even if you become the designer). Visit lots of sites, and note the color combinations you like, which ones you can read easily, which ones seem to have the spirit and emotion and mood that reflects how you want to be seen. If you're a freelance magazine writer, you'd better have a sense of this, because otherwise you're probably a lousy journalist.
   
   As you read this, if you've got Internet Explorer, go to View in the menu at the top of the page, then to text size, and change the setting. If you've never done this before, you'll see how page appearance changes, outside the control of the site's owner and designer.
   
   Near the top of this page there's a box that's orange on my screen, and yellow on my wife's screen. Just out of control.
   
9. Now, for the hard part; actually getting the site created. You can decide to create your own site. After all, your visitors know you are an independent business person, and not a web designer, and they'll cut you some slack as long as you reach a decent standard of quality. And if you can design a good newsletter or take a good photograph, you can design a web site that's just fine for your needs. Probably.
   
   Or you can look for a designer you can afford, and who is good. To some extent you get what you pay for, but some of the worst designers -- Razorfish comes to mind -- are the most expensive. But (an analogy for freelance writers) for $30 an hour, expect the same level of quality your clients get when they hire a 30 cent a word writer instead of you.
   
10. If you go for a pro designer…
    
    Sit down with written out information from the preplanning stage, including the purpose of the site, the index cards of architecture taped together in some fashion that makes sense, a list of colors you like, and the web addresses of sites you like.
    
    It also helps to have some words written, including headings for each page / room in your site, and a bit of body copy for each, so that the designer has something to work with. In an ideal world, these words are in Microsoft word, all in one long document. The designer will cut and paste into the draft of your site. And you'll save a lot of money if you provide finished, properly spelled and edited, high quality copy, instead of asking an artist to write words. They can't write well, and they charge for every change.
    
    With this pre-planning all done, ask the designer to think about your site, and give you a proposal including price, options, and a time line. Different designers have different policies and ways of working and some may, for free, rough up a couple of pages. Others may just think, and come back with ideas. Some may charge even to think about you. (I charge for thinking.) As long as you know the approach from the start, don't complain. That's the way things work in your business, too, right?
    
11. If you decide to design it yourself…
    
    You'll probably need to do more thinking, visit more sites, and write down even more ideas.
    
    You'll need special web design software. Don't waste you time on free stuff, on borrowed stuff, on anything some geek tells you is the best. They all lie and make things miserable for non-pros. Just go buy some mid-priced web design software, and I say (to Microsoft Windows users) go get Microsoft FrontPage. It costs about $150 US from Amazon and lots of other retailers, and works well, is easy to learn, will seem familiar if you use Microsoft Word already, and will do most of what you want.
    
    Then go to a good book store, and buy some "FrontPage Made Easy" kind of book, (That's not a real book title, or if it is, it's not a recommendation. Just that kind of book.) with pictures and easy to follow directions. As you look through this book, pay attention to "tables." Tables are the key to easy web site design for basic sites.
    
    If you don't have a scanner, go buy one, and, unless you've got other scanning projects in mind, don't pay more than $100. Pick some brand you've heard of. The scanner probably comes with some design software, too.
    
    You've now spent under $300. Assuming a cheap designer would do the work for $1000, you are ahead $700 in cash, but now have to spend time and effort learning and doing. Ask yourself honestly if you can find 40 hours this month when you are not beavering away on paid work. If you've got the 40 hours, you can do a nice job on a site, even if the 40 hours stretch to 50, and you run into the middle of the next month.
    
12. Once you get your site up, web site pages can be easily substituted in only a couple of minutes, so don't worry if you don't like something. You can modify a page, taking as long as you want, and no one will see it until you're ready. Then, in a couple of minutes, you can replace the earlier page, update that page, or add a new page to you site.
    
13. Learn how to do you own updates (regardless of whether you hire a pro designer). There's no purpose in waiting days and sending multitudes of e-mails to someone else asking for changes when, in half an hour of work and five minutes of transmission, you can change the pages in your site yourself, at two in the morning.
    
14. Nine semi-technical things you need to know at stage 11 of this story are coming next. Come back in a week, or even less.

The future of the internet (predictions from October 2001)

You can print this out and save it for two years, and see if I'm right.

1/ Two years from now, the number of people using the internet will be just a bit higher than today, but most of them will be using the internet much less than they do today.

2/ More and more people will have high speed connections, but they won't get the high speed they are paying for, because the networks will be overloaded.