In another life I was selling t-shirts. I put up a new design, and tweeted about it out to my followers. “Awesome!” they responded. “Full of win!” “WANT!” I got 100+ clicks on the URL. Not bad.

No sales.

When I had the chance to speak again with one of the people who’d responded so enthusiastically he told me, “I don’t really care for the font.”

You gotta be kidding me. If you don’t want it, fine, but if that’s the case then you probably want to watch out for words like, I dunno, “WANT!” People might misunderstand you.

Don’t get your hopes up. Sales exist when you see them on your reporting, not because a customer sounded like he really wanted to buy.

We brainstormed about the value of the project for a little while.  Soon the ideas were stretching way out into the future, into that world where “people want to market you because you’re valuable” rather than “you need people to market you in order to get some value”, if you know what I mean. There’s an inflection point there.  The local television station doesn’t want to talk to you on day one, they want you to gain a following first, and then they’ll talk to you.

Trying to bring the conversation back on target I said, “This product is real when people pay money for it. For that to happen I need to get it into an Amazon or Lulu or some other publishing house that can outsource that for me. To do that I need an ISBN number. To do that I need the content to be at a place where I want to stop fiddling with it. What we need to do is focus only on what will get us there – content ready for publication.”

“Absolutely,” said my friend. “Agreed. Let’s do that.  Ooooo, video!”  And once again we were back into projects that would take money and resources and be months away.

Your product, be it a web site or a book or whatever, only exists in a meaningful sense if people can buy it and give you money.  So whenever you’re working on that task list, ask yourself whether the task at hand is needed for that to happen.  Do I need a video to go with my book? No.  If I was selling a video course, then yeah, maybe kinda sorta.  Obviously.  But a book is words on a page, so I need to focus, at least for now, on exactly just that.

It’s May.

If you’re going to put something time sensitive on your web site, you need to have a plan to keep it timely and take it off when the time is appropriate. What am I supposed to think about a restaurant with Christmas decorations up in May? Is the online version of their menu kept up to date? How about the contact info? For that matter if they put so little effort into their appearance how much effort do they put into the food?

If I hadn’t seen those Santa Clauses, then regardless of how old the data was I would have assumed it was still good. Just because you don’t touch your site all the time isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if your information is pretty static. But if you throw down the gauntlet by doing seasonal stuff, you give the expectation that you’re paying attention and keeping the site up. So do it.

As such, it’s quite the thrill the first time you see a comment or get an email.  Hurray!

It’s spam.  Ignore it.  Seriously.

No matter how small you are, the bots and scripts are out there waiting to jump on your comments and your inboxes, and you will very quickly start getting junk.  This site has only been up for maybe a month or two and the rate of junk to good stuff is about 8:1.

Why Me?

You’re a tiny little shop that just opened its doors and doesn’t even have any traffic yet, why would the spambots bother you?  It’s nothing personal, really.  Don’t forget that the web is a big place, and links have value.  It’s not your blog that’s valuable by itself, its that link the bot wants to put on your site.  Because if it does that 10,000 times, that makes the search engines think that the site being linked has more value than it actually does. 

Is it all spam?  All of it?

Well no, not all of it. You’ll certainly get some real comments in the mix.  So how do you tell the difference?  Mostly, read them.  You’ll develop an ear very quickly for messages written by a real person, and those that have been written by a robot (and by that I mean a message-generating computer program, not an actual physical creation, in case that term confuses anybody).

Guidelines

* Comments that are completely generic, making no reference to the original post.  “Great ideas here! Thank you for posting.”  Spam.  Almost always comes with a link, though sometimes you’ll find them without – those are tests, to see whether you let them through.  If you do, the same bot will come back later and start putting in linked comments since it thinks you’re not moderating.

* Links.  Especially, unrelated links.  If you write a blog on Shakespeare, and people write comments with links to check mortgage rates or by Viagra, kill it.  Kill it with fire.

* Garbage.  Many bots are just bad, and generate broken links, misspelled words, and other errors.  These are easiest to spot, and little more than an annoyance.

* Get Rich Quick.  Anybody that offers, out of the blue, to share with you the secrets to making a million dollars online?  Delete.  One of the sites I work on got up and running a few weeks ago, then sent me an email he’d received in his inbox asking if it was real.  It was to help him optimize his SEO.  It was entirely generic, making no references to his site.  Spam spammy spam.  The truth of it is that most of the people trying to make money on the web these days are trying to do by selling you the secrets to making money on the web.  So if anybody claims that they’re offering you something that will make you money, but it looks too good to be true? It is.  Delete it.

* Stay on top of it!  Want to know how to spot a blog that’s no longer maintained?  You google for a topic, click through to a story, and that story which was posted a couple months ago has 3 relevant comments and then 27 comments that are Viagra ads.  That’s a site that’s no longer being maintained, so if you were thinking about adding a comment, or emailing the author to ask a question, or even putting that blog in your list of feeds to watch, forget it.  Not worth it.

Be patient.  Audiences build.  Nobody wants to be the first person to post on a story – but once somebody does step up and go for it, people follow along.  It’s like being the first person to try out a new restaurant.  Nobody wants to sit down at that very first table, but you don’t mind so much sitting down at the second table, because now you’re not alone.  Just keep doing what you’re doing, and you’ll start to see the customers come around.  Don’t get bummed out when 90% of it is junk in the early days, that happens to everybody.  Just keep deleting.

Before You Launch, make sure this works! Your hosting provider may even have a control panel where it will ask you that exact question – “When people visit domain.com do you want to put the www in”? Whether you actually require the www has more to do with web server configuration and is somewhat geeky, but anybody can test and make sure that both ways work!

Another site I frequent is about to go live, only with “site.blahblahblah” instead of “www.” Highly uncool. We’re working to get that fixed before he gets his business cards printed!  Once he gets that fixed I may ask his permission to use him as an example of some other things we can all work on.

“Subdomains”, as those are called, do have a purpose. If you have a legitimate reason to subdivide your traffic, it’s perfectly reasonable for example to put the primary site on “www” but then maybe have your discussion boards be off on the “forums.blahblahblah” subdomain.  Another good one is the popular deal-a-day commerce site <a href=”http://woot.com”>Woot.com</a>, which recently created <a href=”http://kids.woot.com”>Kids.Woot.Com</a>.   This is acceptable because at least people know that just typing “woot.com” gets them to the main page.  Imagine if every web site out there had some random dictionary word at the front and you had to remember whether you’re supposed to type kids or blog or forum or site …  Forget that!

Juggling subdomains with your primary homepage is also dangerous game to play with regard to your search engine optimization, and I’ll point to my own self as an example of stuff you can get caught up in. For my other site ShakespeareGeek, both versions work — shakespearegeek.com by itself, and www.shakespearegeek.com. However, if you notice they actually redirect to blog.shakespearegeek.com. This is because the site started as a blog, and I always tell myself that I will grow it into something larger. Thus, I reserve the top level domain for future growth. I need to get off my butt and change that.

The problem is that when people link to me, half of them are linking to www.shakespearegeek.com (the ones that type it in directly from memory), and half are linking to blog.shakespearegeek.com (the ones who cut and paste it from the URL). I don’t know for certain what Google and the others do on the back end in this situation, but it’s pretty safe that it’s working against me at least a little bit. The solution to this problem is to have www be a real site, not a redirect, and simply include the blog content behind the scenes (using one of those Ajax/widget tricks we’ve spoken of previously). That way everybody ends up pointing to the same URL, and I get the maximum bump from the search engines.

You’re typically asking people to give you money. Look like you deserve it.

Anyway, if you’re going to play on the web you’re going to hear the term HTTP a lot.  Some people think that it’s useless at this point, that web browsers should not even include it anymore because it’s just assumed.

I disagree, strongly.  HTTP is a very specific thing, something that you will be paying for if you’re running a web site, so something that you should understand so you know what you’re getting.  You should also know what else can go in that spot besides HTTP, and what the difference is.

It’s important to begin with a very simple concept, and build from there.  Just about all the communication between networked computers takes the form of “request / response”.  That is, your computer makes a request of another computer, and that computer responds.  Now, both the request and the response (and everything else a computer does) reduces all the way down to a stream of 1’s and 0’s, so there has to be some sort of structure to those 1’s and 0’s that allows the receiving computer to know “Oh, ok, this is a request for a web page.”

See that P at the end of all the acronyms?  That stands for Protocol. A protocol is an agreed upon set of rules for how communication between two parties will take place.  Consider the transaction of going to a fast food restaurant.  The person behind the register will ask for your order, you will recite some items from the menu.  The person behind the register will tell you the total price, you will pay, then you will get your food.  That’s a protocol.  Remember that both parties have to understand the protocol for it to work.  If you tried to apply the McDonald’s protocol at, say, the post office?  It wouldn’t work so well.

The T next to the P stands for Transfer, and is really kind of redundant.  Just about every request between two computers is a request to transfer some information from one to the other.  We just put the T there to make it clear.

The rest of the letters describe what kind of transaction is going on.  The most common are:

FTP : File Transfer Protocol.  FTP is used for moving files between computers.  Nothing is done with the files – you do not open email or videos, or display web pages. This is the Internet’s way of copying files directly between computers.

Do you need FTP?  Probably not, since it can be simulated on an HTTP server.  The most common usage for an FTP server these days is if you’re not currently in the business of moving very large files between computers, and then all of a sudden you have need to do so.  Rather than expose a section of your web site for this purpose, you might instead opt to put the file you need to move on an FTP server somewhere, and let the people who need that file know how to get at it.

HTTP :HyperText Transfer Protocol.  Much of what you know as the Web is actually a whole bunch of “hypertext” pages.  This is what HTML stands for as well – HyperText Markup Language.  You request an HTML page and your browser displays it.  How you browse the web is by clicking on links in the web page, which signal to the browser to go get another page.  This clicking on links?  That’s the hypertext bit.  It may sound obvious now?  But really, this is the whole deal of the web, this linking thing.  Before about 1991 or so, we just didn’t have that.  Every time you needed a file you went and made another FTP request to get it, and then opened it up in an editor or something on your own.  It was the brainstorm of the web founders to say “Hey, what if we made one single program that got the files, displayed them, and made a way to tie them all together so you could just follow links between them?”

Do you need HTTP?  Well yes, of course you do.  This is what the web is.

HTTPS : HyperText Transfer Protocol, Secure.  The existence of HTTPS is a good reason why you should understand what HTTP is.   What does it mean for a connection to be secure, or not?  It’s hard to explain in short time, but consider two points.  First, when that stream of 1’s and 0’s moves back and forth between your computer and the other guy’s?  Yeah, bad guys can listen in on that.  There’s lots of different ways, and it’s far too complicated to get into here.  Second, how do you really know that the site you’ve connected to is who it says it is?  You think you connected to your bank and typed in your password, but how do you know that you didn’t just click through to a site that looks exactly like your bank, but is really a fake site that has been set up to trick you into typing in your password?  This is actually a technique known as “phishing”, and you may have seen it in the wild.  Ever gotten an unexpected email that looks like it’s from your bank, saying “We have to verify your identify, please click here and enter in your personal information?”  Yeah, that’s the bad guys.

There are a number of steps that you’ll need to perform if you want to support HTTPS, which mostly entail proving to the right people that you are who you say you are and paying for something called a “server certificate.”  Once you have this, people who connect to your servers will have proof that you are who you claim to be, and the connection will become encrypted so no one can snoop on the conversation.

Do you need HTTPS?  If you plan on doing anything related to ecommerce, any tracking of customer’s personal or financial data, then you absolutely want to set up HTTPS.  No customer should ever be expected to enter personal information into a web site that is not secure.

For more information on setting up HTTPS, be sure to ask your hosting provider.  They will no doubt have the appropriate step-by-step documentation.

SMTP : SendMail Transfer Protocol.  Do you want to send email from your domain?  On your business cards would you like to write “bob@bobspizza.org”?  If so, you’re going to be running an SMTP server.  When somebody tries to email bob@bobspizza.org, your machines will be listening for requests that conform to the SMTP protocol, and respond accordingly.

Do you need SMTP?  It’s always a good idea to have email from your domain.  Putting a Yahoo or Hotmail address on your business cards doesn’t look very professional.  The good news is that your hosting option almost certainly has some sort of e-mail capabilities that came along with it, even if you have to pay extra for them.  In other words, you don’t have to do any extra work to get this, you just have to fill in the right forms.  Highly recommended.

VoIP : Voice Over Internet Protocol.  I’m throwing this one in just for completeness, because it almost certainly won’t be of interest to you unless you’re going in to this business.  I just wanted to show that they are not all variations on the Transfer protocol.  VoIP refers to the ability to make a telephone call over the Internet.  The concept is the same – an originating computer has to make a request of a certain format to the receiving computer, only instead of a one-time transfer of file, the connection remains open for streaming the conversation.

So that’s your lesson in Transfer Protocols, hope it made sense.  At a minimum you’re buying the ability for people to make an HTTP connection to you, and probably an SMTP connection as well.  If you need it you’ll also get the secure HTTPS as well.  You probably won’t bother with FTP, because you likely won’t need it.

Step 0 : Brochure Ware

At the most basic, the web is really a content delivery format.  There’s information on one machine and you want to get it to a different machine.  The person who created the content formats it up with some special instructions about how to include pictures and when to use boldface text instead of regular.  These formatting instructions are understood by your web browser.  This is that HTML you’ve no doubt heard mentioned.  The whole circle here is very simple – your machine requests an HTML file from another machine, that machine serves up the file, your browser then draws the HTML file according to the instructions it was given.

The advantage to this system is that it is hands-down easy to work with.  For hosting, all you need is a place to put your files. Get yourself an HTML editor to make some files, move files to server using an FTP program, and you’re done. You absolutely positively want to get started this way if you haven’t already parked your newly hosted domain.  People can’t land on a web site that has no pages, so put one up even if it just says “Coming Soon”.  In this mode you want to focus on writing your content, which works out well for you because who knows your business better?  Break out your editor and start banging out the hard sell for who you are, what you do and why you’re the best at it!

The biggest disadvantage to this level of web building is that it’s about as interactive as a marketing brochure (hence the term “brochure ware”, get it?)  In the old days a web developer would be given a copy of the existing marketing brochure and told to make the web site look like that.

As a general rule, nobody accepts plain HTML as good enough any more.  There are just too many things that you can’t do (like something as easy as submitting a contact form to the site owner).

The exception to this rule is what’s called the “micro-site”.  Sometimes when you’re promoting a specific product and really want nothing but a single page which is all content and links directing to a specific service (such as Lulu for an e-book sale), then it’s quite common to whip together a single HTML page for the purpose.  This is very different from using this technique for your business’ primary web site, though.

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Step 1 : Client-side JavaScript

For a web page to do anything beyond interpreting the HTML formatting commands, it needs to run a program.  The next logical question is, “Well, where to run it?”  Should it run on your computer, or the server computer that sent you the content?  Or somewhere else?

For now let’s talk about programs that run on your computer (“client side” in programmer lingo).  The most common way to make this happen is using a language called JavaScript.  JavaScript programs are embedded directly into the HTML, and it’s the browser’s job to run the scripts when necessary.  A simple JavaScript program might contain a list of a few dozen Shakespeare quotes, and then a simple timer that keeps refreshing one area of the site with a new quote every few seconds.  A more advanced program might play some games with the user, or even make calls out to other web sites (more on that in Step 3, AJAX).

The major benefit to JavaScript is that many programs can be run with a single request.  You may not realize it, but the slowest part of cruising the web is making that request to the other computer and then waiting for that computer to deliver the results.  So programmers try very hard to limit the number of “server side requests” that we make.  Any opportunity to do something client-side is considered a big win for performance.  One of the best tricks you can pull is to refresh only one segment of a page without refreshing the whole thing, so you could keep updating the top news story  without the user ever having to click Reload.

There are several disadvantages to JavaScript.  One is that there’s only so much you can do entirely on the client side.  For example in that game I mentioned above?  Sure you could play a game, but could you save high scores? Could you make it multi player?  Could you download fresh content?  No, not really, not without contacting other computers.  So while JavaScript can contact other computers, it’s a different way of thinking to work with both at the same time and that’s what we’ll talk about in Step 3.

The other major disadvantage of JavaScript is one of security.  Anything that is on the client’s computer can technically be hacked by the client if they wanted to.  You may not think your customers are interested in hacking your web site, but remember that not everybody who hits your site is your customer, some could be bad guys looking to mess you up.  The classic example that all programmers know is what’s called “form validation”.  Imagine that a web site is going to ask you for an email address, and it has to take the form of <word>@<word>.<word>.  You could set up a simple check in JavaScript that says “If the email address does not fit that pattern, then show an error and do not send this page back to the server.”  What you have to take into consideration is that someone could sneak around this program and submit a bad email address, just to see what happens.  So it’s important to validate all your code on the server.

Step 2, Server-Side

Most of what you experience on the web today is the result of server-side applications.  That is, when your computer makes a request to another computer, that computer is actually running a program to figure out what you want and provide you with an answer.  An obvious example of this would be a web site that requires you to login before you can see anything.  You request the “My Account” page, and then a controller program says “Do I know this person? Does he have an account?”  If you don’t, the program kicks you to the login page.  If you do, and you are logged in, you get to see the My Account page.

The scope of *how* to do server-side programming is wide open.  One popular option is the programming language PHP (sometimes referred to as part of the “LAMP stack”, which refers to Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP ).  Most hosting providers offer PHP as part of their plan.

Another popular option is Ruby on Rails, which is something of a combination programming language / web framework where many of the assumptions about typical requirements have been made for you, and you just plug in the code that is different for your business.

For the larger enterprises you may hear talk of Java, Enterprise Java, or .NET.   Java and C# (the most popular .NET language) are typically the realm of trained software engineers and not the kind of thing that you pick up with a book from the local Borders.  PHP and Ruby, on the other hand, are more open to teaching yourself, which is perhaps one of the reasons why they are so popular.

To run programs on your server, your hosting provider has to allow them.  The best way to have any idea what this means is to have access to a developer/programmer.  They will poke around and tell you in a matter of minutes what it would take you hours of research just to get your head around.

What your provider likely offers is some “one click installation” software.  The idea is the same – these are server side programs just like you could have built for yourself with enough time and resources – but they’re already setup for you and ready to turn on.  This is a very popular and useful option for quickly setting up a blog, image gallery, or content management portal.

The advantage of server side programming, of course, is that you can quite literally do everything that you can imagine.  That’s the fundamental reason why the web is what it is, because every day someone is coming up with something you never knew you could do before.

The downside, though, is that the commitment is pretty large.  You need to know *how* to program. You need a hosting provider that allows you to run your programs.  You need to then get the programs running, which is not always as easy as it sounds – take that from a programmer with 20 years under his belt.  Even when it’s up and running you still don’t get a break because then you have to monitor for performance and security holes and memory leaks …  This is why there’s such a job as “web developer.”  You almost certainly don’t want to take this on yourself.

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Step 3, AJAX (aka The Cloud, Web 2.0)

Give yourself a pat on the back if you already thought “If server side programming is such a highly regarded commodity, what if people setup programs to do the most common functions, and then used that JavaScript stuff to execute them?”  You just thought up AJAX, the latest craze in web development.

No idea what I’m talking about?  I just got through saying how JavaScript is great as long as it can talk to the server programs, but server programs are very expensive (in terms of resources) to maintain for yourself, right?  Imagine somebody’s in the business of making those programs available.  That’s cool for them, they can hire programmers to watch the site and keep it running and keep the hackers out, all that good stuff.  But instead of then running a business on top of that, what they do is make those programs available to you, the small business owner.  You put a bit of JavaScript on your page that makes a call to this other service and presto, you get all the benefits of that service without the downside of having to maintain it.

Want a specific example?  Imagine that you want to run a mailing list so you can send out a newsletter.  You need to put a form on the web site to collect email addresses, and you need a database to store those addresses.  You need to handle it when somebody wants to unsubscribe from your list, and you need to generate email messages and blast them out to your subscribers.  So what if somebody did all that for you?  You just have to put a little “widget” on your page that invokes this other service, and it’s all done for you.  Very handy.

This is central to the concept of what’s often called “cloud” computing.  There’s a lot of redundancy on the web.  Plenty of blogs, slideshows, “news tickers”, mailing lists and so on.  It just doesn’t make sense for every small business that wants to get online to shoulder the burden of developing programs to do this.  So the web has moved into what many call it’s “2.0” phase where you start by asking, “I need to do X, is there already a service out there that I can use that does X for me?”

The advantages should be obvious.  Your time to market is diminished drastically.  You can bring a fully functional website up with advertising, blog, rotating slideshow, you name it – in a matter of hours.

Disadvantages? Somebody else wrote the code, so you’re limited by what they offer.  Maybe you hate the look of the widget they want to drop on your site, and you can’t configure it.  Chances are very good that if the service is not something you have to pay for, then there’s going to be an advertisement on it that your users will see (after all, these services have to make money somehow).  If you can’t find a service that suits your needs, then you have to decide whether you need it bad enough to make it yourself.

In conclusion, I hope that didn’t muddy the waters for you even more.  If you’re putting up a web site these days then you’re really pretty firmly in step 3.  Even if your hosting provider offers no PHP or other server-side solution, no one-click installs, you could still cobble together enough functionality using Web2.0 services to bring a very respectable web site up.  You just need to start thinking about what functionality your site will have (will you have a blog? news ticker? mailing list?) and who you’re going to link to in order to get it.

Good luck!

I kept trying to explain that when you *tell* somebody your address, like, verbally, then you don’t spell it and you don’t tell them about the spaces and the apostrophes, so “Bob’s Shoes” and “bobsshoes” are basically the same thing.  His point was that depending on which one you typed into the search bar, Google returned different results.  Therefore it was important to control which one the user was more likely to type in.

This all being within a week of launching the site, which barely has any content.

It is easy to get caught up in the trap of “If I’m going to do this I want to do everything perfectly.”  Guess what? You’re not going to, for a number of reasons.  First because you don’t know how to be perfect at it, there are too many variables at work.  Second and even more importantly, there’s no such thing as perfect because you’re aiming for a moving target.  Did you know that Google and the other search engines change their ranking algorithms?  There is no perfect set of rules for how to optimize.  It’s an ongoing process.

This mentality extends to your whole online experience if you let it. Every blog post takes 2 weeks, 5 editing passes and ends up reading like  a magazine article.  That’s nice for quality, but all your readers see is one post every two weeks.  You’re much better off with a couple of posts a day, both to get your SEO up and to stay in touch with your audience.

Friend is new at this blogging game.

For a while, probably a long while, expect to get few to zero hits on your new site.  You need to build up content for the search engines to care about you, and you need to develop a following that actually remembers you and comes back for more.

It’s like opening a new restaurant, I told my friend.  At the beginning, especially if all you do is throw an Open sign in the window and never do any advertising, then it will take people a little while to find you.  And by “find” I mean do something more than walk past you on the street and maybe look in the windows, I mean sit down and become a customer.  Or, in this case, become a reader.  Maybe comment on some of your posts, get engaged in some discussion.  Nothing sadder than blogs with no comments.

Of course, there are plenty of ways to “advertise” your new presence without having to pay for actual adds.  The social networks are the logical place.  You’re on Facebook, Twitter?  Tell people about your posts.  You’re bound to get some clicks, even if it’s just your friends.

Two major obstacles with this plan:

First, you need a following on those services as well.  How many Twitter followers do you have?  That’s roughly how many people – at the most – will see your story.  Perhaps you’ve got more friends on Facebook?

Which leads to problem #2, don’t spam your friends.  Your friends aren’t necessarily your customers (they might come to your restaurant to support you, but if you expect them to eat there every night they’re going to feel put upon and stop coming).  Maybe you have one friend in your group, in real life I’m talking about now, who belongs to one of those well known multi-level marketing gimmicks?  And who, every time you together, is trying to sell you something and tell you how you too can be a distributor and earn fabulous prizes by hosting your own parties?  Yeah, nobody wants to hang out with those people for long.  Likewise, your Facebook friends don’t always want to hear your business posts, either.  They may not always tell you, which is why I am.  Friends are a resource to be used, but not taken advantage of.

In summary, patience is a virtue.  I think I should trademark that, I’m pretty sure I’m the first one to say it.   Focus on finding a voice.  Generate content.  Try things.  If you build it, they will come.  I am on fire today, there’s another brilliant idea that I just thought of!