January 29, 2008

Two weeks have passed, give or take a day since the birth of my new website obsession. I have spent close to 80 hours on this project, mostly on research and plain old learning. I found myself wondering last night, how many other people are pondering the merits of 30GB of band width versus 30MB while kneading pizza dough in their kitchen? I bet it is more that you might think. With the Internet becoming increasingly vital to the average person's daily existence, more and more of us realize that continuing to rely solely on computer “nerds” and “geeks” will only barely keep us e-breathing.  In order to grow and prosper we must wean ourselves off technical life support bring ourselves up to speed with the science and the technology of the Internet.

Free Web Hosting is for Lightweights?

This is not strictly true; but, even though I am a novice I already find that my free web host cannot do all that I need it to do for the long term. ( “No, duh.” would be the appropriate response from an educated web professional.) While free web hosting is nicely adequate for many brochure style websites, for more casual bloggers, or for just-for-fun sites; the nature of my planned site (frequently changing page content, photos, videos, forum, blog, automatic email updates) will place too much demand on the limited flexibility and power of free web hosting. Additionally, I want a very clean look for my site and seamless functioning of all my site features. I find achieving this to be very difficult with my free web host putting their insignia all over my site and limiting the amount of screen space I may use. And, let's not forget the business part of this venture - my ads that are eventually supposed to pay for all this. If my site is going to have ads, I want them to be ads that I place on my pages, not my web host's ads. Anyway, I need a slightly brawnier hosting plan. So, I am shopping around.

The array of enterprising outfits just waiting to give my site a new home for a small monthly fee is astounding. So, I look to other sites to rate and review the hosting services. The rating sites are slightly fewer in number, but just as varied. I hardly find the same hosting company rated by more than one reviewer. And, those that are noticed by more than one reviewer get ratings so disparate as to make them almost useless to me. So, should I find someone who will review and rate the reviewers? All this seems at first profoundly silly, but actually it is just an indicator or how fast Internet options proliferate and how competitive the industry is. I persist in reading review after review and soon the opinions and information begin to become more cohesive. Here in this paragraph I have linked to several reviewing sites, but you should do a search and find and read more.

By now I have spent the better part of two days absorbing data on disc space, band width, up-time, support reliability, server platforms, shared hosting, dedicated servers, reseller hosting... the list goes on. In the end, I find my attention settling on just a few hosting services (HostGator, StartLogic, BlueHost, ANHosting and HostMonster) that seem to be recognized a bit more than the others and that are consistently reviewed well. It is true that this may be a function of marketing more than actual virtue of the service, but with a standard recognized name I can be assured of a basic level of quality. And, I have become acquainted with some of the basic features on a very rudimentary level; and this is good enough for me to make a commitment to a low cost hosting service. (There are several other high quality services I found intriguing but did not list here only because their packages did not quite suite my particular needs.)

Most web hosting services offer a money back guarantee period. 30 days is typical. A couple extend their guarantee period to a year, though this is unusual. Most services require a commitment of six months to a year, with longer contracts available. A few offer month to month service, or two to three month terms. The shorter the term, the greater the monthly cost, which ranges from around $3/month to $25/month. I'm looking in the $6 to $7/month range, and I am willing to commit to a year, knowing full well I am very unlikely to move my site within that time period unless the service is abominable. Besides, given my inexperience, a year is not too long a time to allow myself to develop a deeper understanding of web hosting features in general.

In the course of my research I happened upon a site that offers, in addition to a few hosting service reviews an abundance of super information(click here) for the newbie. Here you will find small bits of advice on web design, HTML, graphics and more. All this is presented in a way that is easy for a beginner like me to understand.

I hope to decide on a plan by the beginning of next week. In the meantime, I am working with the service that I have, but I am reluctant to invest much more energy in designing web pages I hate! I do it only because I now have a few people looking at them.

Adsense Update:

That is the good news! A few people, (yes that is YOU!) are looking at my websites. For those of you who are interested in the potential profitability of Adsense ads: My bottom line is looking a little better, but enormous room for growth remains: My income to date from ads is now $4.18, giving me a net capital loss of $49.82. It breaks down like this:

• 2 domain names (I could have paid less!)                       ($42.00)
  
• 2 additional domain names I had to
  buy because of trademark issues with the first names:      ( 12.00)
  
• Income from ads, to date                                                    4.18
                                                                                        _________
  Net Loss                                                                       ($49.82)

This is no cause for despair. It is normal. I did not expect instant site traffic with thousands of clicks on my ads. I did expect to put in a lot of time refining my site concept, blogging about it, posting articles where possible, and otherwise spreading the word about my project. One has to approach this just like any other job – with an objective in mind, a plan, and perseverance.

Next time:

• Settling on a new hosting plan?
• Blogging
• Page Design
• Adsense Update

Your newbie web developer,

Margaret Doran

Robots and Spiders and Metatags, Oh My!

January 26, 2008

These are just a few of the creepy crawlies you actually want hiding and sneaking around in your website. I have been running into the terms “robot,” “spider,” “metatag” and “crawl” for a few days now as I travel down the path to web designing enlightenment; and these words only just now begin to make a tiny bit of sense to me. From what I gather, robots and spiders are programs that interface(crawl) with a website and find the pieces of information(metatags) that are useful to search engines in deciding if and how to index (list) a website. Metatags are items of code (html) that are placed in the index file of your website (you use the text editor to do this). Think of metatags as food for the robots and spiders. If they find good metatags they'll send their buddies along for a taste too. This is what you want.

Today, through happenstance I found a website to analyze the metatags on my site (see http://www.scrubtheweb.com ) I give this site a thumbs up for providing me additional clues as to the nature of spiders and robots; thumbs up for manually submitting my URL to ten search engines; and a thumbs sideways for telling that I have a problem with two many title tags on my site header. (It says I have four where I should have only two. I went to the text editor for my site and looked at the html code; I see only two title tags, but what do I know. ScrubtheWeb is probably right. I'll figure it out later.) I give them a thumbs up for doing all this for free! They also offer a paid subscription service to further optimize search engine visibility. It may or may not be good, but I have no money for a paid subscription anyway, so I'll ponder that at a later date too. You can use your favorite search page to look for a meta tag analyzer. Some provide some level of free service and some are paid service only.

Next, Google Webmaster Tools is an excellent resource. I ran my URL through their diagnostic process. They instructed me in adding a metatag to my website. It was easy. They also recommend I submit a site map. This I put on my to do list. As usual, I don't fully understand how to go about it. We'll come back to that later.

About adding metatags and other items directly to your website's index file, I recommend that anyone who has been building a website using only your web host's wizards or other help features, take a look at your actual html code via your text editor. Don't do anything to it! Just look; sit with it for a while; and do this every now and then to lessen your anxiety about looking at the guts of your website. Try to identify the Head (look for <Head>. Scroll down and look at the Body (look for <Body> ) . Notice where your text appears. Note the code that surrounds any images you might have put on your site. It's not so scary. You can make changes right there if you want to.

As with a spoken language, you can become fairly proficient in HTML through immersion. For instance, simply be being exposed, I've learned so far that <P> separates paragraphs. And <BR> inserts a line break without paragraph spacing. Color and font codes easy to identify and change. Most web hosts provide an HTML guide of some sort, but in order for it to begin to make sense, you have to spend some time looking at your code.

Next, I am planning to put my original site back together and soon, maybe tomorrow or the next day, you'll be able to see it at http://www.MyScienceWebsite.com. Until I do that though .com will redirect you back here to .net.

Next time, I'll talk more about getting on the Google index, Yahoo index, etc, and about getting some traffic to my site. After that I'll dive into developing MyScienceWebsite.com for students, parents and teachers. And, you will soon see that I'll be including a lot of links in my blog entries. I have recently become informed that blogs are supposed to contain many links. For the uninitiated blog reader, the differently colored or underlined words you see in the text here are items you can click to see more information on the topic of discussion. This is supposed to be fun for you, the reader. So enjoy the soon to be featured links!

Finally, before I leave you, to the skeptics who may suspect that I pretend to the throne of the Web-Imbecile kingdom, you begin to see I truly am born to it. I am quite certain that I misunderstand and misstate a few absolutely vital bits of “information”, but, well, so what. I AM queen of my domain name and I say these things shall all resolve eventually... or will they? Stay tuned.

I conclude todays entry as your very inexpert web developer,

Margaret Doran

January 23, 2008

Trouble!

First off, when in closing the prior post I state “...and yet 24 cent richer...” I rely on the intelligent reader to grasp that I am actually just $38.76 less in the hole financially. And it does not get better.

Onward. I had a great name for my website.  You will not find it on this page anymore though, because it was so very good that SOMEBODY ELSE IS ALREADY USING IT (or rather, something very close to it.) This is a very good lessen for all web entrepreneurs.

The Tale of My Domain Name Woes:

11:42am

This morning I received an email from a business owner informing me that my website name infringes upon his legal claim to his business name. I am devastated. I have grown quite attached to my domain name. And I cannot believe my sloppiness in that I did not manage to encounter this other business while I was perusing other websites. This company is very well known right in the city where I am located!

 My embarrassment and disappointment aside, I now have to find a new name for my site and then register new domains and rebuild my sites. While the dollar cost is not great (about $12), it does put me further in the hole financially, Yes, now I am $50.76 in the red; and my own lost labor hours are significant enough that I am extremely grateful I did not pay a web designer.

12:00 midnight (January 24)

I have set up my new domain names and have begun rebuilding my blog site. I will rebuild the main site as an “experimental” site at http://www.MyScienceWebsite.com so visitors can watch it as it morphs into something real.. It will remain “experimental” until I have it fully completed. This is my idea so far.

Meanwhile, the other business owner has been extremely cordial with regard to my transgression, but I still feel awful. I am truly quite upset by this turn of events and will spend a whole day and a half in a funk. I make myself keep working though, but it is with no joy.

I feel the same things I think anyone does when being corrected: defensiveness, embarrassment, indignation, embarrassment, self loathing, embarrassment, and so on. The instinct to react defensively is strong. But, I am not in the right. I must remember my ultimate goal and behave as a good business neighbor. And, a positive thing is I have met, in a memorable sort of way, a valuable member of the science education and business community, (right in my very own town!). This could be important later. So, I tell myself that we all make mistakes and I have conducted myself with integrity and dignity. Time to move on. (and write this up in my blog in some sort of interesting way)

• (A word of wisdom about defending the right to use a legally purchased domain name - To those who might think that I am a bit of a pansy for so quickly abandoning my very clever domain name, I say this: I believe one must understand the difference between what is legally defensible, and what is wisely defensible when it comes to using a name that may bear some similarity to that of another business.
       While the name I initially chose is in fact similar to several other like businesses and websites, and the words are ubiquitous enough in our lexicon that I perhaps could have defended my domain name legally; the expense would have been great, not just monetarily, but more importantly in damage to my “good name” and standing in the community. Had the other business owner not been in my town and not been doing business in an arena that also engages my intended audience, both in the real world and on the web, I might have decided to use my original domain name anyway.
       Given my exact circumstances however, and my desire to have a positive image in my physical neighborhood and in the web community, I decided the wise and ethical course of action was to find another name. In the end, I too am a business woman and I decided this was best for my business. I find nothing too flowery about that.
       For those who encounter problems of this nature, take a look at http://www.chillingeffects.org for practical legal information on such issues, but consider carefully the full impact of any action you take. Do not act on emotion.)

A lesson to take from this is that I should have done a business name search at the beginning of my grand enterprise to ensure the reasonable uniqueness and availability of my site name as a business entity. (Here is a link to a site that offers such a service starting at about $200. http://www.legalzoom.com/sem/tmsearchpage.html?WT.srch=1&se=google&q=business+name+search&refcd=GO318091s_business_name_search
&tsacr=GO879757807&gclid=CIC4pKTckpECFRsTawodKEVZPA However, one should shop around and make sure the service is thorough.) I have decided to make the investment to secure my business name once my site is more fully developed. I am not doing it just yet because I may very well come up with a catchier name more well suited to my final web product.

Another lesson: I did something right in marketing. Word did get out about my new site. Maybe it was my husband, who emailed everybody he has ever met a link to my site and a slightly menacing recommendation that they visit it. Maybe it was my Yahoo profile that has a link to my site. I know in fact that it was in part because of links I posted on Yahoo Answers, as these show up on Google along with my site. Also, to be certain that search engines (like Google, Yahoo, etc.) could find my website, I, at every opportunity, listed “key words” on the various other websites that asked for them (web hosts, Google Adsense, other advertisers and so on). I do not yet have even a rudimentary understanding of how all this works, but those are the things that I did. 

As promised in my last post, What is WHOIS? WHOIS is “a tool used to look up information about domain names (such as transact.com.au) on the internet. A whois tool looks in online databases to get information about when a domain name was registered, who owns the name and how to contact the owner.”(ref. http://www.actewagl.com.au/education/Glossary/default.aspx ) To beginning web developers, anytime you are asked to verify your WHOIS information or update keywords, DO IT! This is how search engines find your site.

(My last post also mentions the importance of getting other sites to link to mine.  I'll leave this subject until next time.)

So, now I have to rebuild my website. This is a good time to point out that using a free web hosting service has its drawbacks. I do not have full artistic control over the appearance of my site. And I cannot upload web pages I design myself (yeah right, as if I have suddenly acquired that skill!). And, I do not have access to the full HTML code for the pages I design using the free web host's tools. To say it another way, if one(that would be ME.) has to close one's site, one is SOL and has no option except to build a new site from the ground up. Perhaps those who are more expert know ways around this, but I suspect those who are more in-the-know can afford to pay for web hosting. I have decided that as soon as my website can bring in ten or so dollars a month, I will upgrade to the cheapest paid web hosting.

Until next time,

Margaret Doran
Inexpert, and Now $50.76 in the Red, Web Developer

Watch as I Build an Educational Web Site 
(and make “money” with ads ?)

Read along as I, an utter Internet neophyte, hastily chronicle my amateur attempt to build a serious educational website and maybe make a little money with ads! Yes, it is possible to make money with ads on the Internet. A Good Morning America segment told me that one can make as much as three or four hundred dollars a month with Google Adsense! At least, that's what I thought I heard over the din of the dishwasher, bickering children and eggs cooking and that's what stuck in my memory. Wow! Three or four hundred dollars! Who could not use that?

Well, here I add my personal testimony to the veracity of the claim that there is fiscal opportunity on the Internet - today I made my first 24 cents! I am so buoyed by my windfall that I have decided to temporarily use my spare domain for this blog and, that's right, more ads.

Now I'll go back a bit to the beginning of my idea. My intent in developing my science website is to provide a free interactive educational resource for students and their parents to use while they work on their science fair projects and other similar school assignments. The slightly mercenary part of me put this gem of inspiration together with what I had heard on the morning news show about Internet ads. The result is this – a project that is a much bigger iceberg than I had planned to run my ship into, and so far, about as profitable as selling snow cones to penguins. But, I remain undeterred in my mission.

(For more on the mission of my website, click the Forum link on the home page at http://www.mysciencewebsite.com and read my post to Teachers and Parents.)

Here I am going to tell you in excruciating detail everything it takes to get my web site going. So far I would say it is not rocket science, but rather more of a jigsaw puzzle... the old one in the closet that you can no longer be certain has all the pieces. To those who may be considering a similar undertaking, I hope my foibles and successes will reassure and encourage you.  

Let me bring you up to date on my progress:

• I bought my domain names on the Internet last Tuesday, January 16, 2008. I paid a total of 42 dollars for both for a term of one year, but I could have paid as little as $12 for both had I shopped a little before buying. I bought both .com and .net so that, when my web site becomes hugely successful and known world wide, another entrepreneur cannot come along steal my domain name thunder (read my next post for a subsequent tale of tragic irony.)
• That same morning I applied to Google Adsense for an account so that I can display their pay-per-click ads and other features on my web pages. This is very simple to do and costs me nothing.
• Then upon realizing I was not likely to be approved for my Adsense account without an operational web site, I set about quickly building a web page. I decided to use Bravenet.com's free web hosting service because I had seen some other Bravenet sites and I was already familiar with the features Bravenet.com could provide. Out of necessity I learned how to change my Domain Name Server from the company where I had purchased my domain names to Bravenet.com. And I learned that I could, without too much difficulty build a web page or multiple pages using Bravenet's wizards and tutorials and a good deal of trial and error.
• Within two hours of the inception of my idea I had a website running.
• I placed some content on the site right away, including the cliché “Under Construction” and “Coming Soon” notes at the top of each page. I have since removed these notes even though my site is not complete. Apparently such phrases are tip-offs that a web site is not professional(see http://www.webdevelopersjournal.com/articles/domain_names.html.) And I have added to my to-do list, “make my site look more professional.”
• By my second day of working on my site I fully realized that I had, in my enthusiasm, not planned as well as I should have. I had not planned at all in fact. People who know what they are doing will tell you to design your web pages completely and have lots of interesting content on them before publishing them to the Internet. What I had done was to put up my site with just an idea and some ads; pretty unprofessional. I felt a little silly for my mistake, but I am not an expert, so I forgave myself quite easily for the blunder, decided to make the best of it and pressed on, spending the next few days building my site.
• Three days after I submitted my Google Adsense application (Friday, January 18 ) Google Adsense approved it, and I, with great eagerness, placed a Google search bar and an Adlink box on the home page of my site (Important: I read VERY carefully the terms of service before pasting these items into my site. Advertisers are particular about how their ads are displayed.) I had difficulty formatting the Adlink so that it would appear properly. So, I posted my problem on Google's Adsense Help Forum. I received a response from another Adsense user just a couple of hours later. With the advice I received there I was able to correct the problem (It turns out every web host implements the HTML code for the Adsense ads a little differently); and I found out that I need to know more (a lot more, since I started out knowing almost nothing) about HTML code. (Once I got my Adsense items to appear as I intended them to look, I enjoyed going to my site periodically throughout the day just to admire them.)
• Sometime around Sunday, January 20, I realized the layout I had selected for my pages from the Bravenet design wizard was not ideally suited to the needs of my site. I decided to use the visual editor to make changes manually to the layout. I learned that it can be done, but I don't know how. Learning how to use the visual editor to edit my pages to my exacting requirements is my next task, along with writing the text for my site.
• Ah, writing the text. I am so blocked in that regard that I am writing this blog instead. But I remain encouraged, at least in an over-all sense. Moment to moment I am excited or despondent, as I find this project is much more complex than I thought at first. For instance, I discovered early on that a myriad of other sites offer features and content similar to what I intend to offer. I felt so stupid. Who was I to think I had a good idea that no one else had or couldn't do better? But, after taking a break to regroup mentally, I scrutinized the other sites more closely and realized that while there were many good science web sites for students, no one was doing precisely what I intend to do. I felt good again about the worthiness of my objective, and so my optimism was revived. Despite the inevitable lulls in my enthusiasm I have decided my goal will be to do work of some sort, any sort, on my web site each day since I find that inspiration and motivation comes eventually as long as I keep moving.
• To that end, last night I learned how to put some amusing YouTube science videos on my site. I am not happy with how they are positioned on the page, with the scroll bars visible, but that speaks back to my issue with the page layout not being all that I need. They are fun to watch though. You'll get a laugh from the Wired Science video; and the other video is an “Oooo! Wow!” sort of viewing experience.
• Second in importance to writing my site text is marketing my site, in order to get people to visit. I found a decent guide to getting more site traffic at http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/resources/marketing/online-marketing/10-steps-to-getting-links-to-your-site.aspx. I'll write tons more about getting site traffic in later posts.

Next post:

• What I have learned about getting other sites to link to mine, and...

• Search engines (or What is WHOIS? Turns out it's important), and...

• Maybe, a new look (and a new name: http:www.mysciencewebsite.com) for my website based on what I learned today creating this blog.

Until then,

I remain your inexpert and yet 24 cent richer web developer,

Margaret Doran