1. You don’t have any customers or don’t want any. Sometimes this is how it seems to potential customers who are looking for you. Suppose I want to find a local Florist, where am I going to look? I’m going to turn to the web and do a search for florists in Trenton. It’s much easier and safer then risking paper cuts on the yellow pages. If a florist has decided that a web site is not for them, I may miss them altogether. One other nice thing about the web is that I can find information about their reputation as well. What do others think of you. It is in your best interest to place on the web, a site that shows your best side, and showcases your successes.
2. You feel your customers know too much about you already. One of the first thing I look for on a local company’s website is an “About us” or “Contact Us” page. Usually it’s because I’m looking for a physical location I can go visit. Yes even though I’m a creature of the Web, I still enjoy touching the “merchandise” or meeting face to face with the people or company I will be dealing with. People in general want to know who you are, they want to be able to find these things out with-out jumping through hoops too.
3. Your customers have never heard of the World Wide Web or are scared of the 21st century. Come on now, who are we kidding? Yes there are some who just don’t want anything to do with the web. There always will be, but keep in mind that the number of those who fit in this category are quickly dwindling. Are these the only people you want to reach? Most companies I know of are looking for the widest possible exposure. Don’t overlook the Web. Another thought to keep in mind is that the target age group for your business should not dictate whether or not you have a website, My mother, who is beyond retirement age, put together her own computer. The first time my preschool aged son spelled out his name was on a keyboard sitting in front of a computer.
4. All my potential customers know where I’m located. There are very few businesses that can say that everyone in their community knows who they are or where they’re located. Even if you’re establishment has been around since 1612, there are always new customers and potential avenues for growth that may be missed without a Web presence. The sign outside your building probably cost you a small fortune. Why did you put it there? How much effort or money did you put into designing it? Would you think of running your business with out one? How about your business cards? It is safe to say that one of the reasons you have these things is that people expect them, the same can now be said of the Web and a website for your company.
5. I’m not selling anything. Whether it’s mousetraps or ideas for improving them, you are offering something to others. Blogs have become the information source for many in your community, why not be a part of it? The florist I’m looking for may have spent a few moments of their time to post about the best flowers to give a sick friend or maybe they want to champion a “Beautify our highways with wild flowers!” campaign. As long as the message doesn’t get too militant, these insights into your companies opinions will draw potential customers to your door (or shopping cart.)

Maybe you can come up with a few more reasons why your company still does not have a website. Don’t waste too much time looking for them though, your competitors are snapping up customers that should be yours simply because they have made it easier for people to find them.

Next time I think I might take you on a voyage into the dark and scary world of bad web design and some simple rules to follow when building your own site.

Your web browser is a very powerful tool. It enables you to view many different types of files from within the framework of the browser.

For an example:

You can go to www.weuntangle.com/index.html and view my home page. This is expected, as it is a web page after all.

Now go here: www.weuntangle.com/examples/test.xls you will find that as long as you have Excel installed on your computer and are using Internet Explorer, you will be able to view this document “In Browser”

Your browser is capable of some terrific things. But it’s most primitive function is to show web pages, with all their links and pictures. Here is your most basic of web pages:

<html>

<head> </head>

<body> </body>

</html>

This bit of HTML scripting is very simple. Here are the components:

<html> </html>

This “tag” tells your browser that it is displaying an “html” document.

<head></head>

This tag is where bits of scripting and other tags go that pertain to background information for the browser. For instance you can place a <title> </title> tag in the <head> section and put a title at the top of the browser window.

<body> </body>

This section is where all the content of your page goes.
Now, the fun part. Open “Notepad” and type whatever comes to mind, once completed, save the document on your desk top. Name it “mypage.txt”

Close Notepad and return to you desk top. You should see you new document sitting there. If your desktop looks like mine, you may need to hunt for it.

Now that you see it, double click on it to open it again. What application is used? Notepad of course. Now close Notepad again. This time right click on mypage.txt and select rename on the menu that appears. In the box below your file rename it mypage.htm and hit enter. Windows will try to cover it’s backside by warning you that you could make this file unusable by doing this, but it’s ok. Click “Yes” and lets move on with our experiment.

With that done you should see the Icon that represents your file change to look like your default browser’s icon – that’s what we want, give it the old double click and watch what happens….

WOW! You just created a web page (OK an extremely mal-formed web page.) and without the taggings and sections we looked at earlier. This is because windows has associated the .htm (and .html) extensions to your browser and your browser is so nice that it is going to try and display the file no matter what. Remember that .xls file you opened earlier? Try this:

www.weuntangle.com/examples/test.htm (with Firefox it may complain before opening it)

Ugh! What a mess. What you just open is actually the Excel spreadsheet renamed with the .htm extension, but your browser tried very hard to display the file, simply because you told it to.

We are going to use the browsers ability to render pages to our advantage. The browser is very forgiving when it comes to webpage content, so it will try to render whatever is passed to it if it is named with an .htm or .html extension.

All this being said, Please take the time to learn html (or better yet xhtml) it will serve you well as you take on this serverless intranet project with me.

Note: you may belong to a company that has also locked down the types of files you can attach to emails. If this is the case you can sometimes rename your html and javascript files something like this:

Html file name:
mypage.htm

Renamed for emailing:
mypage.txt

When you later detach the file you will need to change the name back so you can use it.

Next up Javascript 101

Hmmm, Being the MAJOR skeptic that I am, I began looking at this simple comment that was left for one of my articles, it was left by someone calling him/herself GlenStef:

“Not sure that this is true:), but thanks for a post.”

Now this comment in particular was not all that funky, nor did it stand out as a particularly off topic thought. It was actually the fact that I had only just opened my site and had done NO advertising. The post that was being commented on had only been there a very short time. So my radar went off and I went over to our friend Google to do a little digging, here’s what I found:

1. Mister GlenStef has a lot of accounts in some extremely diverse blogs
2. Mister GlenStef has only a few things to say
   1. Greatings, Ugh, I liked! So clear and positively.
   2. yourSiteNameHere.com – da best. Keep it going!
   3. Hello, Thank you! I would now go on this blog every day!
   4. Everything dynamic and very positively! (even the smiley showed up in every place posted.)
   5. Not sure that this is true:), but thanks for a post. (Hey! that’s the one I got.)

   Looking at this next one, I don’t think it’s from the same spamming bot because I didn’t see it posted from GlenStef and it was more complex, but I did see it on several blogs when I was researching this:

   • I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
3. Mister GlenStef appears to have many pseudonyms:
   1. Elcoj – on several sites
   2. Streightepale
   3. Eremeeff
   4. AlexAxe (The site I got this one from was a veritable cornucopia of spam comments)
   5. etc. etc. etc…

All these are marks of a robot in action. Why go to the trouble of making all these posts? It’s a thing called search engine result placement. Most of these blogs include a link of some sort back to the commenter’s  “Home page” the more links to a URL you can get in the most number of diverse places, the more a search engine will view that link as relevant. All those links will (so the thought is) bump the URL up the Search Engine result list, putting more money in the spammers pocket.

As you can probably tell I am new to this whole Blog thing. Perhaps even naive, I don’t know, but I feel there has got to be some way to curtail these robotic spam comments. On the other hand do I really want to? Do all these spam postings from other sites make my article more meaningful on the search engines?

I was surprised to find that it wasn’t just the small little guys like me who were getting these posts and letting them through. Check out the policy blog site for Intel and you will find our friend GlenStef telling them the same thing he told me… I guess I’m in good company:

Intel Policy Blog

If you want to see more of this stuff, go to Google and search on “GlenStef” and “Not sure that this is true:), but thanks for a post”

I think I’ll spend some more time with this subject in the future, til then, enjoy.

Update: Here is a nice link you can follow for more information and some tips on preventing this kind of spam from messing up your blog:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_in_blogs

The short answer is: Yes I could. The longer answer is: Yes, you can too, and I am going to help you do it.

What makes this sort of Intranet possible is that your browser (we are going to look mainly at Internet Explorer) is capable of doing some amazing stuff thanks to the power of a Netscape creation called Javascript, and Microsoft’s browser extensions called Active X controls. Most of the work will be done with Javascript, but for the DB access we are going to need Active X.

OK I hear you now. “But I thought you said no servers?” Remember, we are building this Intranet for a small department or Business, and true to my word, NO servers will be used in the building of our website.

The DB that we will be using (and only if you want a more interactive site) is MS Access. If you have it installed on your PC you’re ahead of the game. If not, we will need to get a little more creative, but it is still very doable. (You will not need to go out and get MS Access if you do not have it.)

For an example of what can be done,  zip on over to Joshua Faulkenberry’s site and see what he has created. Come right back though, OK?

Here are some things you will need to make this work.

• First and foremost you will need a shared location for your files. The company mentioned above has a networked file share mapped as the I: drive on all the departments computers. So if I drop an Excel spreadsheet called “mysheet.xls” on this drive, everyone in the department can get to it by going to: I:\mysheet.xls
• Next you will need to have some knowledge of, or at least a desire to learn some HTML, CSS, Javascript, and a little SQL. I am going to help you here, so don’t run off just yet if you don’t know a lick of web stuff. I hope to make this a gentle learning curve. For you HTML experts, stick around too, I hope to make this a learning experience we all can enjoy.
• I would suggest you also become familiar with your company’s technology policies as well. Please don’t do this if you think you will run afoul of these rules and regulations.

As we go along we may run into more things we need. but for now, that’s it. Come back next time for our first look at what an Intranet is for and your first web page.

PixoPoint – Which is the site I used to create the theme I am using as of today.
- or -
Check out Yvo Schaap’s* site for a very easy to use theme generator.

the PixoPoint generator is more flexible – and as usually is the case has a bit of a learning curve if you are not into web development. If all you want to do is put a personal look on your blog then zip over to Yvo’s site. I was looking to make my blog look more like my main site, so I went with PixoPoint (by the way I like their name…) In the end when I am able to spend more time with the back-end of WordPress I will probably create my own theme (More to enable me to get rid of the PixoPoint links, not because I really need to.)

*(If that’s not your name please forgive and correct me)

The goal of this Blog in particular, is to allow me the opportunity to express my musings on the state of the WWW. In particular how the technologies available today and in the future of that thing we call the “web” can be harnessed by the small business. Inexpensively I might add.

Here are a few things I hope to be bringing to light:

• Do I really need a web presence?
• How can I get the most bang for my meager budget?
• What are my options when selecting where my site will be housed or hosted?
• What is Whois and Why?

I also have a few projects up my sleeve that I want to air in public. my apologies to any I may offend in the process.

• Can a small company or department within a company actually have an intranet without running a server?
• I am also interested in seeing if I can bring to life a small modular server using some pretty cool tech
  • GumStix or Beagle Board come to mind for this
  • Speaking of cool, check this tiny projector out. You can put it in your shirt pocket…

Well I think you get the picture.

I look forward to tackling these and other thoughts, I hope you enjoy the ride.

Steve