Scaling the Web
Why, Where and How to Build Your Name on the Internet
by Shelly Tumbleson
Illustration by Chad Crowe

As the owner of a coffeehouse, you might not be convinced that you need any sort of Internet presence to help your business. Perhaps you've thought about it, but as the storm of acronyms and seemingly broken-English jargon heads your way, you decide it's something to do later, if at all.
   Despite the intimidation factor, those who have not entered the game should do so now. Having a Web site is a definite benefit to your retail business. It not only strengthens your brandname recognition, but it also provides quick and easy information for people who want to know about your operation. Even the most minimal Web page can provide a glimpse inside your store, your hours of operation, a map to your location and information on whatever accoutrements-board games, books, wireless ethernet, menu items, a list of neighboring businesses-will bring them in.
   A Web site also can highlight your activity in your community. Let's say you spend some of your profit to support a 10k run for a local or national charity. Odds are that other businesses that support the same venture are going to have their name and logo printed on T-shirts, flyers and in ads for the run, and they also can provide a link from their Web site to yours. Small- and medium-sized local businesses know part of their survival is based on the success of others around them. People who are drawn to supporting local business often take the extra time and spend extra money to support other local business. Having a Web site is a great way to show what your business has done to make your community a better place.
   And given the amount of money and effort you put into it, it's worth it.

Where to Start?
The first requirement is to create a name that you want identified with your coffeehouse. It's natural and expected that your Web site will be named after your store. Let's say your shop is named Red Crow Coffee. The most obvious name for your Web site would then be: www.redcrowcoffee.com. Keeping that in mind, point your browser to a place that registers domains. Go to a site like www.godaddy.com or www.register.com and use their tools to see if the name is available.
   Let's say that www.redcrowcoffee.com has already been taken. You can opt for the less catchy www.red-crow-coffee.com, if it's available, or you can continue to investigate other options. For instance, you may find that www.redcrowcoffee.net is available. Notice the use of dashes in the previous example. Dashes are the only recognized symbols that are "legal" for domain names.
   If you're wondering what .com, .net, .org and all those other suffixes are, they are called top-tier domains. There are several of them, and while they might be designed with a particular design in mind (.edu for educational institutions, .gov for United States government Web sites), you'll often find you can use whatever top-tier domain name you like. Having said that, it is more intuitive to find a Web site with a .com, .net or even .org than it would be with a .biz, or .info suffix. A top-tier domain can be purchased for $10 to $35.
   Be aware that every domain must be renewed annually. It's possible to buy your domain for more than one year at a time, but after it expires, you have a grace period in which to renew it. After that, anyone can buy it. The cost to renew your domain is generally what you paid for it to begin with. Some places will offer a slight discount for renewing for more than one year at a time.
   When you buy a domain, your personal information, such as home address and phone numbers, could become publicly available. Many sites that provide registration have options that allow you to hide your information from public scrutiny. While this service might cost a little bit more, it's worth it.

What Next?
So far, all you've done is drive a stake into the ground. You have a legal claim to an Internet domain name, but nothing else. There are still two more steps to going live: hosting and publishing.
   Hosting is a service for which you will typically pay a monthly or annual fee. Plans range from around $4 per month for a barebones hosting plan to $20 per month, which usually encompasses a series of features that you may or may not eventually grow into. It's always a good idea to talk to your hosting company about the features and benefits of each of their plans. Just because you're paying $20 a month for hosting doesn't always mean it's the best plan for you. On the other hand, a service that charges only $4 a month may lack features that you eventually will want.
   A hosting company tells the domain name servers (DNS Servers) around the world that they have your site. In short, hosting companies take the name of your Web site, www.redcrowcoffee.com, and convert it into numbers that other computers understand, then associate your hosting company as the destination for anyone who types your domain name into their browser. There are some national hosting companies. If you registered your domain at www.godaddy.com, you can have them host you as well. There are several hosting plans, and depending on the needs of your organization, you can pick and choose which is right for you.
   However, you may want to swing your business to a local hosting company. First, do some research on any company you're considering to host your site. Find out how supportive they are, what services they provide, guarantees, costs, how long they've been in business and anything else you can think of. Remember, this is the company that's going to ensure that the potential customer looking for your site at 1 a.m. on a Wednesday night will not be disappointed. You can find hosting companies in the Yellow Pages under "Internet."
   Regardless of who hosts your Web site, there is one small area where you'll need to put the cart before the horse, provided you already know the person(s) who will be developing your site. Your provider will generally need to know if you want your Web site hosted on a Windows server or a UNIX server (or it might be called an Apache server, which is correct). If your Web developer is going to make use of Windows-based technology like .ASP and Frontpage, then have your site hosted on a Windows server running IIS (Internet Information Services). If you don't have a clear and present need to use a Windows server for hosting your Web site, UNIX/Apache is a great alternative, especially if your hosting company is knowledgeable about it. If you're not sure who will be developing your site, let your hosting company know, and they can make whatever changes are needed when your requirements become clearer.
   There is one small caveat to inject here. Many companies, in their quest to maximize profits, will try to seduce you and your pocketbook into buying features that you probably don't need. The most common are plans that will "dramatically increase your Web traffic." If you buy into those plans, you have no way of knowing that your "increased traffic" is due to an actual person visiting your site, much less if the visitor is a potential customer. Until someone can prove otherwise, these sorts of programs might best be regarded as snake oil. If you want to increase visits to your Web site, investing in community events as well as traditional advertisements is infinitely more effective. And of course, nothing beats word-of-mouth advertising.

One More Step
Everything up to this point has been relatively straightforward. Buy a domain, have the domain hosted. Here's the tough part: designing and implementing your Web site. For the novice, this is by far the most intimidating and daunting area. One trip to a well-stocked bookstore will inundate you with more initials than the last time you spilled a can of alphabet soup on the floor: HTTP, FTP, .ASP, CSS, Perl, Python, PHP, MySQL, .NET, XML, XHTML, DHTML and the ever growing buzzword of "blog," just to name a few. Don't panic!
   This is where hiring someone to develop your site can come in handy. When approaching a contractor, use a few guidelines: Identify other Web sites you like and make notes on why you like them. Is it something visual? Do you like the layout? Is it the way information is presented? Are the colors particularly appealing? You may find that the way one site manages its presentation requires extensive knowledge of Flash, an interactive graphics program from Macromedia. If so, expect to pay the contractor more for that service, provided they know it. The more specialized a service is, be it JavaScript, Flash or Database Integration, the more that service is going to cost.
   When hiring someone to develop your site, the prices range as much as they do for car repair. And just as with cars (and with most other things in life), you get what you pay for. If you find a freelancer who charges a fixed price, look at other sites they've built and make sure it meets your needs. Also, ask if they use templates or recycle their material. If they give any indication that they do, find someone else-you don't want your yard of turf on the Internet to look like anyone else's. An experienced freelancer might have a pricing scheme as follows:

. Original Design/Art: $800
. Sitemap Design: $75
. HTML Template: $300
. Each page that draws off the template: $50 to $75

Note the use of the word "template" above. This isn't the same as recycling materials from another project. This type of template is created to make all of the pages on your site look consistent.
   These prices will vary immensely and only reflect the most basic services for a basic site. Much of what freelancers charge is based on their experience and how large the project is. Prices will certainly change based on the size and complexity of a project. If you find your site needs .ASP or PHP or Flash authoring, you can expect to pay someone $25 to $75 an hour; again, the rate will depend on the complexity of the project.
   Another thing to negotiate when working with a freelancer is maintenance. If you think your content will change on a monthly or weekly basis, be sure to discuss that. If the changes are text only, it's not uncommon to agree on a range of $30 to $50 a month for those changes. If the changes require creation of new graphics or manipulation of photographs, don't be surprised to find the rates climb by a hundred dollars or so. As with any other business, if you have changes that have to be done by yesterday, expect your Web author to charge you for that as well.
   While it may be tempting to pay $400 for someone to design and make your site, you should be skeptical that you're going to have a unique presence on the Internet, let alone have a professional relationship where you can have changes made when you need them and have artwork custom made for you.
   If you don't expect the content of your Web site to change much once it's done, stick with presenting your information with traditional Web authoring technologies such as HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). You don't need to worry about what each of those are, but be aware that anyone working on your site needs to know both. Your site can be designed exclusively with HTML, but CSS has been growing in recent years, and it's expected to continue to have a stronger influence in the immediate and foreseeable future.

For the Doityerselfer
If you're determined to publish and maintain your own Web site, congratulations! The great thing about learning HTML, the primary language that every browser requires to display information on your screen, is that there have never been as many resources as there are now. The variety of books and interactive CDs/DVDs has grown so that no matter how you learn best, there's a resource or two out there for you.
   That said, If you're determined to create your own Web site, you're going to need some software, a digital camera and a lot of patience.
   For authoring and publishing your Web site, invest in a Web authoring tool such as Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX 2004. There might be some initial sticker shock before you buy into this program, but Dreamweaver is the generally accepted leader in Web authoring software for most of the world. There are other editors, including Adobe's GoLive (with a future that is uncertain at best) and Microsoft's FrontPage, as well as some shareware/free editors out there. Not only are these lesser known products, but finding third-party help books and/or Web sites will be intermittent. Furthermore, unless you're dealing with a large company like Macromedia or Adobe, you're probably not going to have any technical support.
   The other aspect of your Web site is visual. Sure, you can create a nice, clean looking site using nothing but HTML, but it helps to display photos of the inside of your shop to draw customers into the environment you've worked so hard to create. To make a Web site truly complete, invest in an HTML authoring program, a mid-level digital camera as well as a graphics editing program like Macromedia's Fireworks MX 2004. You could use Adobe's Photoshop CS as well. Photoshop is an excellent program, but for Web work, Photoshop might be overkill in price ($589) and in features, whereas Fireworks MX 2004 is specifically designed for Web pages. Fireworks is also specifically designed to integrate into Dreamweaver MX 2004.
   The cost of Dreamweaver MX 2004 alone is $400, and the cost of Fireworks is the same. It's my suggestion that you invest in the Macromedia Studio MX. It's a package of Dreamweaver MX 2004, Fireworks MX 2004, Flash MX 2004 and Freehand MX. The cost for this entire package is around $1,000. While you may not use all the software to its full capabilities, it's a better investment than buying each product separately.
   All of this may seem overwhelming-and it is. In many ways, it's the road that never ends. The good news is that it doesn't take a whole lot of work to create a very basic and attractive page. In the beginning, expect to be frustrated but feel free to ask other Web authors a lot of questions. Even the most accomplished webmaster had to start somewhere and you might be surprised at how eager they are to help others. Then there are always books, online resources as well as classes at local community colleges. Once you get the hang of how to author HTML, then you can look at CSS, which is becoming more and more prevalent.

Finally
In a nutshell, there are three things to do: 1) register the domain you want; 2) find someone who will host your Web site; and 3) publish your site or have someone publish it for you.
   I cannot emphasize the following enough: Having a domain and a Web site is not going to make or break your business. Unless your only revenue channel is for goods and/or services sold only through your Web site, it's there as an accessory to your business. For the typical coffee- or teahouse, it's a chance to display the image you want to convey to your potential and returning customers. It's also a place to post store hours and features of your store, as well as any local and community events that you support or are involved with.
   At last, remember one of the most fun aspects of Web publishing is how dynamic it can be. While it isn't recommended that you change your site's entire appearance every month, there is a certain benefit to doing annual redesigns or adding sections that your customers have asked for. One of the most important elements to a successful Web site is the feedback you receive from your customers. Depending on how complex the suggestion is, you may just find that people are willing to help you for a nominal fee, or for a few cups of free coffee.