Do It Yourself

Today a coworker cornered me (and a fellow coder) to ask about “programming” his own web site.  How to submit a form, put it in the database, that sort of thing.  We spent the next half hour talking to him about sql injection, open mail relays, and buffer overflow exploits.  It may sound over the top, but it’s a reality – if you put a web page of any functionality up on a public web site, eventually it will be hit by hackers, and you have to be prepared for that.  So you either only ever put up stuff that you don’t care if you lose, or else you protect your stuff of value.

My point is that sometimes you don’t want to do it yourself.  Unless you’re prepared to hire a staff of software developers to build a site to your specifications, chances are very high that you’re better off piecing together some off the shelf software where somebody else has already done the hard work.

When can you do it yourself, and when you should you skip it?

Content

Content, the words and images that make up your site, should be what you’re the best at.  You know your business best, so you’re absolutely the one best positioned to talk about it.  This is also the reason that blogs are so popular, because a blog is really just a simple content management system – write up a couple of paragraphs of text at a time and everything else is done for you.

Design

What will your content look like?  Technically it always has a design, even if that design is “black text on a white background.”  How much design you add is up to you.  The most likely next step is to use a pre-made design template.  All the major content management systems and blogs have them, you just need to pick one out and fill in a few variables.

Of course, you may want an entirely unique design.  If you want to do this yourself you need to get your hands on an HTML/CSS editor and start reading up.  This is where you start to consider paying someone to do it for you.  Keep one thing in mind, though – the designer you hire might well be just filling in a template anyway without telling you.   If you feel that it’s a better use of your time to pay someone to do it, that’s your choice.  Others are more hands on and don’t believe in paying good money to do something they could have done on their own.

Software / Frameworks / Functionality

Surprisingly, having software that actually does something on your web site is a relatively easy do-it-yourself task.  Most hosting providers offer pre-packaged software installation packages, and all you have to do is click one.  Want a blog?  Not a problem, just install the blog software.  What if you need the image gallery instead?  No problem.  Once you’ve got one installed, then apply a design template and you’re in business.

You can most definitely bring a site up entirely on your own, and you shouldn’t be afraid to try.  It’s not about programming them anymore, it’s about configuring them.  Make a few choices, fill in some fields in a form, and you’re in business.

Hosting versus Registering : What’s the Difference?

Quick lesson, since this question comes up a lot.  To get up and running with your own domain on the web you technically have to do two things.  First you have to claim the name (“register”).  Second, you have to point it somewhere (“host”).  These are two pretty different things, but it’s easy to confuse them.  Both are usually handled by the same organizations, too, so it’s very easy to get yourself into a shopping cart where you don’t know whether you bought enough or too much.

Hosting

If you’ve got a computer, you could, right now, install a web server program, write up some content, and have a web site.  If your computer is on the Internet, it has an IP address like 209.191.93.53 or something.  You could tell your friends to type that address and, assuming that your service provider is not blocking the necessary path to make it happen, they’d see your stuff.  Congratulations, you are now hosting a web site.

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Wait wait wait, there’s all kinds of problems with this.  You probably don’t want to host your web site on a computer in your basement.  Not only will your service provider almost certainly block it, but there’s power outages and viruses and other issues to worry about.  That’s why there are companies in the hosting business.  You can pay them, and what you do is basically rent space on a machine of theirs instead.  Part of your service agreement with them is that they keep the machines on, and running, and free of viruses and security issues.

To buy hosting means that you’ve entered into an agreement with a hosting provider, and you’re paying them some amount per month or per year to use their machines.  They in turn give you one of those IP addresses, and a username and password that allows you access to the machine.  That’s how you’d move your content over to their machine.

With me so far?  Hosting just means making content available on a web server machine, whether it is yours or somebody else’s.

Registering

Once upon a time us old geeks used to trade IP addresses of cool sites to check out, because that was the only way around the net.  Then along came this great idea, kind of like a big telephone book for the internet.  What they did is to set up big machines all around the net who did nothing but run a big lookup program where you could associate a name to an IP address.  Computers would then hit those machines all day long asking, “What IP address is associated with this name?” and they’d get back the information they needed.  Presto, now you don’t have to remember IP addresses anymore and instead can just go to www.yahoo.com.

Registering a domain name means getting yourself into one of these servers.  Of course you can’t just insert yourself, otherwise everybody would insert themselves for every domain.  There is actually a process to it.  You have to buy the domain for a certain period of time.  This part is actually pretty cheap, and you can register names for less than ten dollars.  That’s one of the big reasons why so many of them are taken, because it’s so cheap to grab up a bunch.

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When you do register a domain you’ll be asked what IP address you want to assign to the name.  That’s where the hosting comes in, because if you’re hosting your site someplace then  you have an IP address all ready to go.  If you have that information, then once it “propagates” (meaning that all the name servers around the net have refreshed their information and know about you), then somebody will be able to type your domain name and get to your web site.

What if you’re not ready to host?

A common question is whether you have to do both at once, and the answer is no you don’t.  Every domain registrar will offer to “park” a domain for you, while you straighten out your hosting situation.  This is ideally to prevent a zillion broken web sites from littering the net, but really it’s for them to seize on the opportunity to advertise because what they’ll do is redirect the user to a page that says “Coming soon” and “This page brought to you by Us!” with liberal amounts of discounts and other marketing gimmicks.  Hey, whatever works.

In summary?  You can register as many domains as you want, and you don’t have to be ready to go live with a web site, either.  It’s a good idea, if you find a name that you like that is not already taken, to just go ahead and grab it.  How many names you can register is really up to your budget.  You should definitely try to find one that’s a keeper, though, and register it for a good long time if you’re serious.  You get the good discounts that way and you don’t have to worry about breaking out the credit card to renew it every year.

Once you’ve got the site, there’s many different ways to host your content ranging from pointing at a free service to actually having somebody build you your own site from scratch.  But more on that at a different time.

What’s Your Excuse?

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the productivity poster-boy. I’ve got as many excuses as the next guy. If I acted on half the ideas in my head at any one time I’d be a very busy, and hopefully very rich, geek. But like everybody else I throw roadblocks up in my own way toward getting things done. I’d like to think that the very existence of this blog is my attempt to fix that problem and maybe help some others get over the hurdle as well.

Here’s the thing. More often than not it is better to do a little than to do nothing. If you’ve got a name in mind for your web site, and you see that it is available, grab it. It might not be there tomorrow. If you think you might want to start a blog, why not head over to Wordpress.com and start up a free one, to practice?   If you need to showcase pictures of the products in your catalog, what’s better — looking at all the different image gallery software available and trying to decide which one is perfect, or actually putting one of them up so that customers can actually see your stuff?

The web is a very iterative, evolutionary place. Don’t be afraid to make some baby steps and learn along the way. You have to learn sometime, and better to make your mistakes now when your audience is small than later when (if you’re lucky!) a million people will see them.

See The Future, Not The Present

Like everybody else, I read much of the hype (and subsequent disappointment) about Apple’s announcement yesterday of the iPad (horrible name in my opinion, but more on that another time). What intrigues me, though, is the number of “How will this change the game?” posts that are met with people saying, “It won’t! It doesn’t even have Flash or a camera!”

I think these folks are missing the point. Apple didn’t unveil a product yesterday, Apple created a new market. Anyone who looks at this specific device and says “It doesn’t have this specific thing” are missing the big picture entirely. How many iterations has the iPod been through at this point? Oh noes, it didn’t have a video camera in the first generation! Well now it does. Did you not see that coming?

Here’s what I saw yesterday. I saw a very near future where the standard multi-purpose computing device is a tablet sort of thing. You can get your email on it, surf the web, listen to music or watch videos. In my own ideal one I’d also like it to work as a remote control, but nobody’s talking about that.  It’s a blending of netbook (“be online from anywhere in the house”), ipod (media player), and yes, Kindle.  It will be an ebook reader, of course, but for whom? I think of my kids, still 10 years away from college. When their time comes, I see them packing a single tablet computer from class to class, and on it are all their text books, complete with notes, study guides, pictures of the whiteboard the professor drew on, wake up calls for that 8am class and reminders of when homework is due… not to mention always-on access to Google and Wikipedia, plus of course IM and SMS for their friends.

Can the specific device introduced yesterday do half of that? Nah. But I don’t care. Because soon enough, somebody will.  Don’t forget that a big part of Apple’s influence in the world is not that they make the best of anything — many geeks will debate with you that they in fact have never made the best of something.  What they do best is make the first of something.  Not in terms of technical innovation, but in market.  The iPhone refined the standard for what you expect your phone to do.  It was through Apple’s power in the market that so many people got one and it became the had-to-have device.  Know what happens next?  Others “stand on Apple’s shoulders”, to steal a line from what Jobs just said about Amazon.  And then we get real competition.  That’s how it works.

What’s the lesson? If you’re going to play in the technology space, you’re going to spend a lot of time saying “What else is the other guy doing?” When you do that, don’t say “What exactly is he doing right now”, ask “How is what my competitor is doing changing the game by changing my customers’ expectations of what is possible? How can I leapfrog him by offering up the next generation?”  Look past what your competitors are doing, don’t just settle for a checklist of doing the same stuff.

Blog Everywhere

Should you have a blog on your site? Let me ask you this: how often will you update it? Where and when and how? If you plan to post carefully edited articles on a fixed schedule after they’ve gone through your editor and technical writer then it’s not really a blog so much as an online magazine.

Part of the appeal of blogs, particularly for individuals trying to develop a following, is personality. Style. Blogs started out life as online diaries. And what do you write in a diary? Everything. When do you write in it? Anytime. A blog entry is part “this was interesting to me” and part “I think my audience will get some value out of it,” and less of the “I read that topic x is trendig on google so I need to generate some articles on that.” You can always get some level of traffic by fooling the search engines and attracting people who’ve never heard of you. But to keep them coming back you need to demonstrate something special that they can’t get anywhere else. To do that you need to use your own voice an don’t overthink it.

This post, by the way, composed on my iPhone while lying in bed after midnight. Just saying.

Tags: blog, Content, strategy

Design Isn’t Everything (Except When It Is)

There was  a time when I would have said the design of your web site is the most important thing.  It is arguably the single biggest reason why I never went into business for myself, because while I can build everything you need behind the scenes, and I can tell you in great detail about what to build and how and why to build it, I have no skills in telling you what it should look like.  I have an opinion, of course – show me a handful of options and I can tell you which ones I like and which I don’t.  But could I come up with my own ideas that would be better?  Not often, and certainly not consistently.  (This, my wife will confirm, is the same way we decorated our house — narrow it down to 3 colors and let me pick one.)

But then I think, maybe that’s not entirely accurate (don’t let the graphic designers listen to this).  Every major online platform these days will start you out with a large selection of templates, providing a handful of different interfaces to pick from.  Maybe they’re not great.  But you know what?  They’re good enough.  Pick one.  Congratulations, you’re in business.

If your new site is primarily a blog, for example?  People are coming for the content, not the colors.  (As a matter of fact in the blog world most people probably aren’t even coming to your site, they’re getting your content from a syndicated RSS feed, but that’s a different post).  For a text-based site like a blog, you need just enough style to keep people interested.

If on the other hand your business is primarily visual?  Then maybe you’ve got a little different situation.  Say that you’re a florist, or a woodworker or a photographer.  These services are all defined by the quality of their output, and people want to see that.   There are image gallery templates, true.  Those will get you started.  But they won’t keep you alive forever.  People are coming to your site to be impressed visually, and they need the whole picture.  Your rocking horse is going to look ugly if it’s in a bad border on a bad textured background, even if the latter two weren’t ever really in your control.

How can you tell if you need a graphic designer before you launch?  You don’t.  How about that?  You are completely capable of putting up a web site using your own content, some clip art and a couple of free templates.  It may not last you forever – in fact it most definitely shouldn’t last you forever, just like we got rid of the avocado colored refrigerator when we bought the house whether it was still functional or not.  If you’ve got the money and you’re in a highly visual business like the above examples, maybe you go ahead and hire a designer because you know you’re going to need one sooner rather than later.  The big thing to take away is that you shouldn’t let the design be an obstacle to getting your site up and running.