The dream is that these simple little sites can be built for a few dollars and that they are very easy and quick to do. Never mind that Amazon spent almost $1M before they sold their first book and have plowed many many more millions into development since then. Never mind the vast hardware requirements needed to do some sort of Facebooky thing, or the social contact the website owner needs to have to get it off the ground (what is the price of user generated content, anyway?). This dream is flawed of course, and the person with the dream gets a sad look in their eyes when you crush this flawed little dream………

What can be done quickly and easily are the free website options that I have previously discussed. These are functionally more limited, but still better than nothing. This website is done with Wordpress and is not too shabby for the limited time I have invested into it. But what to do if you want MORE? What do you do if you want something with greater capability and you have the budget to pursue it? Well, then you need a development map.

The Development Map

A website is a project, and to do succesful project management you need to understand what you are trying to do, what you are not going to do, and what time and money you have ready to invest in it. DO NOT lie to yourself, or pretend that you will figure these things out later - remember whatever your estimates are, they are likely to be too low (for money) or too quick (for time). If you lie to yourself on top of that, you are doomed to fail.

Make a list - simple bullet points are fine - like this:

• Have blog
• products listing, with image thumbnails
• newsletter signup
• customer review section
• blue background with white lettering
• needs video section
• English only, no other language option needed
• does not need twitter box
• does not need forum
• does not need link to Facebook fan page

Your functionality will be different from this list, but you get the idea. The more closely you can define your project and what you want/don’t want, the better your web developer can do the work. If things are ambiguous or you succumb to feature creep - don’t be surprised if your project does not come out as well as you wished.

and my ‘update’

If you can’t tell, we are against the gratuitous use of flash. Unless you have $2000.

Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone - 26 steps to 15k a day
Brett Tabke, owner of the site WebmasterWorld.com wrote this seminal piece on new websites and how to succeed with them in the Google Rank. It was written in 2002 and still holds true today. Some of the 26 steps may seem a little dated, yet I don’t think so. I recently had an arguement with a colleage about website speed. He felt, that with 400,000,000 broadband users worldwide that there was less need to emphasize speed in your website. I disagreed, citing the rise of the internet browser on the mobile phone, and its corresponding lack of bandwidth. Google settled the issue later when it came out and said that sites that respond faster will be given a small ranking boost.

Beginners Guide to Website Marketing
This piece was written by Mack, the moderator on the New to Web Development forum, and it is another excellent article on the basic steps to organizing your site, its structure, and getting the word out about your site. It is a follow up to other articles of a similar nature that he has written in previous years.

Scams that you will need to avoid
Not a week goes by that some ‘kind’ soul will email or phone me to let me know that my site is terrible and it doesn’t rank in Google and they can make sure I am #1 for a small fee. The trouble is that this is a lie. Any time that a person guarantees you a listing result, that person is lying to you. Google does not sell rankings– to quote Google themselves:

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.

So there. Read more good advice directly from Google here (PDF)

Another favorite scam is the promise to send you thousands of visitors for a few hundred dollars. Watch your site stats boom! This scam is also worthless to you. The people scamming you will have bots (robotic users) clicking onto your site for a few seconds, then another bot will click and so on. Your traffic stats will be huge, but the traffic is worthless since these are robot visitors and they won’t buy anything. Why pay to lie to yourself?

A common scam is “:Submit your site to 1000s of directories for only $99″ or something similar. While I do think that submission to relevant directories is a good thing, these people are just going to spam all sorts of trash directories which will bring you no benefit at all. Who cares if you are in a directory in Mumbai when you are trying to be ranked highly for “plumber Tucson”? If the directory is not relevant, then it won’t matter.

As I get more scams sent to me, I will post them. If you have a favorite scam then just put it in the comment section below. If you want someone to find you relevant directories and help with your site, call us!

If you had a lot of funding, you could make a Superbowl commercial like GoDaddy has done and the world would beat a path to your site. If you are reading this, then you probably don’t have any money for that. So let me share a brief bit of strategy for how to promote your site, especially if you are a business operating locally.

Going Local

There are a number of directories online that focus on local listings. There is the familiar Yellow Pages, the similar Super Pages, plus Google Local, Yahoo Local and you can also find some other niche type sites like Yelp and a few hundred more.

Industry Directories

In every industry there are online directories that attempt to catalog the various sites into similar groups. This site would be fit into the Order Fulfillment section or Contract Warehousing. You should look to see what business directories are appropriate for your business. There are also the big directories like Business.com, Yahoo Directory, the DMOZ and Best of the Web. You will have to decide for yourself if the pay versions of these are worth it for you.

Your Printed Material

Don’t forget to put the web address of your new site on all of your business cards, invoices, follow up letters - in short every piece of paper that you send to a customer. Put it in the ads you run - print, radio or TV.

So that is a start, and I will try to post more later on some other simple and ethical techniques. Like all the subjects related to website building and promotion, if you don’t wish to do it we would be happy to do it for you for a small fee. I would estimate that it should not take more than 8 hours to get your site listed in the major local directories and a dozen smaller industry directories.

A simple website so that customers can find them online, with some basic brochure type functionality.
Recommendations:

1. Google Apps - this free service from Google will let you build a site with one of their many templates and you can make a site with a few or a few dozen pages and it will be very easy. Cost for the site $0!!  Cost for the domain name $10 per year with eNom (its integrated and easy).

• PRO- very simple and easy and good for a basic presence on the internet. Integrated email, documents, calendar all with a nice integration to your Blackberry or iPhone.

• CON - limited in what it can do, especially if you want some extra functionality.

2. Wordpress.com - this is a hosted service for the Wordpress.org blogging software. While you can download Wordpress software for free you can also have them host a site for you for nothing too. The free wordpress.com site will have an address like http://YOURSITENAME.wordpress.com and if you would rather have it be http://yoursitename.com that will cost you $14.97 per year.

• PRO - very reasonably priced and very flexible platform for making a site, a blog or some combination of both. Looks much more professional and polished compared to Google Apps Sites.
• CON - the free version has your site name in front of wordpress.com. Also the many plugins that are available for a self-hosted install are not available for this platform.

3. Wordpress.org - this is where you can download your own copy of the Wordpress software for installation on your own server. By self hosting you are now able to install as many of the thousands (literally!) of plugins that are available that will let your site do an astounding array of tricks. Want a Craigslist type site? No problem! Want a Twitter feed on the side? No problem! Want to completely change the look and feel of the site every week by messing around with the themes and styles sheets? No problem!

• PRO - Free. Immensely flexible platform that can be made to do almost anything. Huge community that supports it.
• CON - You will need to have your own domain name and server (dedicated or shared). You will need to install it (easy) and configure it to do what you want (not as easy). You will need to learn about FTP and using a text-editor to modify files. Expect to spend some time Googling phrases like “Help, my wordpress install is doing……”

There are thousands more software packages out there that can be downloaded and used to make a site with. I couldn’t possibly go into detail about all of them here, and honestly I have only used a few anyway. Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net) has more than 3000 results for the search “CMS” which is short for Content Management System. You can compare the various applications for free at CMS Matrix (http://cmsmatrix.org/matrix) and you can try many of them out at Open Source CMS (http://opensourcecms.com/)

If you are in Tucson and want a site, try one of these options above. If you are in Tucson and the thought of doing one of these sites leaves you a little worried, call or email us for a quote on your project. The next blog posts will cover ecommerce, getting seen on the internet and local promotion.

Rocky Mount/Edgecombe Community Development Corp.’s new Business Development Center in the Battleboro community held a free class for people that wanted to start their own businesses and 14 people attended. More on the class here. The basic thrust of the class was to give a dose of reality to those that want their own business - the class asked questions like:

Are you a self-starter?

“It will be up to you — not someone else telling you — to develop projects, organize your time and follow through on details.”

How well do you get along with different personalities?

“Can you deal with a demanding client, an unreliable vendor or cranky staff person in the best interest of your business?”

Do you have the physical and emotional stamina to run a business?

“Can you face 12-hour work days six or seven days a week?”

How will the business affect your family?

“The first few years of business start-up can be hard on family life. The strain of an unsupportive spouse may be hard to balance against the demands of starting a business. There also may be financial difficulties until the business becomes profitable, which could take months or years. You may have to adjust to a lower standard of living or put family assets at risk. Six students scored at a level where they are advised against going into business.”

If there is interest in the Tucson area for such a class, please leave your comments in the field below. If there is enough demand we will find a way to put it on. Please let us know.

Whew. You went from broke to rich in one paragraph. I guess my work is done here.

A time like this - major economic woes everywhere - is often when businesses get started. It is not because the climate is ideal (it is not!) but because we are humans and have a survival instinct. When people get laid off, they try and find work. When millions are laid off, then there is a lot of competition for even the crappiest of jobs. I know this personally from having advertised a crappy job and having a hundred applicants. It was unbelievable. So the next thing that will happen is people will decide to start a company because they can’t find work - or they will start hustling stuff on eBay that they buy at garage sales. Anything to eat.

One of the concepts behind ZonaShip is that we can be more than just a warehouse and order fulfillment partner. We figure we can help guide people that want to start their own business but are unsure of what to do. So go ahead and ask us a question - we will try and answer. ZonaShip is the 10th business that we have started, so we have a large collection of mistakes and remedies that we can share.

“After Black Monday … it’s harder for shippers to deliver packages,” Orakzai said.

United Parcel Service spokeswoman Stephani Oller said the company usually ships 15 million packages per day worldwide. Last year, on the company’s busiest shipping day, Dec. 19, it shipped 22 million packages, she said.

More here

I’ve got no idea.