What's Your URL?

It's amazing how reliant I've become on technology. Ten years ago, Google Maps didn't exist; now I can't live without it. Where's the nearest Quizno's? Look it up on Google Maps. How do I get to that address down in Baltimore? Look it up on Google Maps. It's amazing to me now how I used to have to pull out a map and try to locate an unfamiliar address. Now I just use Google Maps and my awesome TomTom One to find my way around. Sure, neither is perfect, but they sure beat the old paper methods (which also weren't perfect).

This info bubble on Google Maps has a link to Quizno's website so I don't have to call Quiznos to see what they serve or ask their hours.

In most cases, if a business has a website, Google Maps will have a link to it, right in the info bubble. This is incredibly useful, as I can then jump right to the website and find out everything I want to know.

This post isn't about Google Maps, but it is related. Since I rely on Google Maps so much for information on nearby businesses and services, it bugs me to no end that so many businesses don't have websites. At all. How do they expect people today to use their business if they don't provide them the information they need via the web? So, since I often need their services, I'm forced to pick up the phone and call them to ask a simple question: "How late are you open?"

Do I want to talk to them? No. Does the harried employee answering the phone want to talk to me? No. Does the customer waiting to be helped while the employee answers the phone want to wait? No. Who wins by the business not having a website? No one, except perhaps the business' competition who do have websites.

What are the barriers to having a website? Two things:

1. Cost
2. Know how

Cost

A website today can cost nearly nothing. While any minimalist website used to be inordinately expensive, today a simple one page website—sufficient for many businesses—can cost as little as a dollar a day, or even less. For example, Qwk.net, the hosting service I use, has a variety of plans that can be tailored to need. Their cheapest plan only costs $7.50 a month. With that comes 500 MB of disk space and five email addresses. And if you prepay, it's even cheaper! And if you need more, all you have to do is send them an email and they'll upgrade your account (as they did for me). But what one-page website will need more than 500MB of space? Zero. And you can have all that for about 25 cents a day. What employee would work for that little. And work 24/7? With no vacations? At the very least, it'll pay for itself in the time employees won't have to answer the phone and answer inane questions.

The next cost is registering a domain name. But that begs the question: do you even need a domain name? The answer to that is an unequivocal yes. It is much easier to remember myservice.com versus shushterisp.com/members/~joefry. The first is direct and logical. The second is ugly, implies nothing and easy to mistype or misspell. Register a domain name that is as close as possible in spelling to your business name: it'll pay off in the end.

Now, how much does it cost to register a domain name? Not as much as you might expect. There are hundreds of domain registering services on the web, but the one I use, directNIC only charges $15.00 a year for each domain name. For that price, you can register the three most common suffixes, .com, .net and .biz, all for under $50. But, really, you only need one (the other ones just make it more likely for your customers to find you). If your business can't afford $15 for a whole year, you've got bigger problems than not having a website.

So, setting up and operating (if you can even call it that) a website can cost as little as $105 for a whole year. And that's just via my off-the-cuff analysis. If you look around, you can do it even cheaper.

Know how

Okay, fine, websites are cheap. But that doesn't help if you don't know how to set up a website. How do I do it? What software do I need to buy? Do I need to be a super nerd? I can barely balance my checkbook! How can I do a website?

I'm not going to cover this comprehensively, but creating a single web page is amazingly simple. If none of your employees know how to set up a website—which is increasingly unlikely—you can do it yourself in under an hour. All you need to do is surf to a homepage that you find attractive. If you're using:

• Firefox (the best web browser): Go to the View menu and select Page Source (or just hit Ctrl+U). From that window, select File | Save Page As and select somewhere on your computer to save it to (such as C:\website
• Internet Explorer: Go to the View menu and select Source. That will bring up Windows Notepad with the page source in it. Save it somewhere on your computer, as above.
• Some other browser (Opera, Safari, etc.): The process is similar to both above. Following either of the above, you can figure out how to do it, no matter how non-techy you are.

Then all you need to do is open the page you saved in Windows Notepad (or whatever Linux or Macintosh users use) and edit it to insert your text. Gary Strawn and I stole HTML from each other for years this way. It's not illegal or even unethical. You can preview your edits by looking at the same file in a your web browser.

But before you do that, let me warn you: select a simple web page: no flashy graphics, no animated elves dancing around, no music playing in the background. Sites like those are most likely using something called Flash or Shockwave, which is way too complicated (and expensive) for you to use if your just getting onto the Internet. You shouldn't use anything more complicated than my home page (and, to be honest, my home page is probably too complicated for most neophytes). To make things as simple as possible, I've created a very simple web page that you can use as a starting point. Click here to see a very simple web page that I toiled over (for five minutes) just for you. Using the instructions above, you can rip off the page and tailor it to your desires. Ignore all the weird symbols like <p></p> and <br> (but don't remove them). They're called HTML and they're what power the Internet. Just insert your text between the symbols and you'll be off and running.

"But, HEY!", I hear you saying, "that web page sucks! It's so plain." Yes, but the point is that its simple and easy to edit. By modifying it, you can easily provide store hours and other information that your customers want and need. When you get tired of it, you can get one of your teenage employees to spruce it up. Or do it yourself. There are thousands of HTML tutorials on the web—one is bound to be your speed. Following almost any tutorial, you can eventually add attractive graphics and additional pages to your site.

Push it up

Once you're satisfied with your web page, you need to push it up (or upload it) to your web site. The first thing you need to do is rename the page from whatever you have it as to index.html. This is what web browsers look for when they reach a site. If you name it anything else, visitors to your site will get an unaesthetic listing of all the files on your site and will be left guessing what they're supposed to click on.

To upload the page to your site, you'll need to use a technology called FTP. Wait, don't run away! It's really simple. All you need is something called an FTP program. Some web browsers can even do it (but most don't). You can get various free FTP programs off the web, but if you use Firefox (and if you don't, you should) you can install a free add-on called FireFTP. It's amazingly simple to use. Whoever you get to host your site can give you additional details on how to "upload" your page. If you use Qwk.net, they'll be incredibly helpful and responsive.

Do it!

There, I've destroyed all your reasons for not getting a website up and running. In less than a year, it will pay for itself in inane phone calls your employees don't have to answer. And your new customers will be happy that they didn't have to call you to get the information they wanted. Really, it's so simple that I've offered to set up websites for businesses for free. All it took me was an evening and my PC.

A word of warning

The first and most important thing is to get a website up, just a single page. Don't insist on having a cool, neat or keen website. Don't try to make the world's best website right off the bat. If you do, you'll get frustrated and give up. First, get a Plain Jane website up. After you've done that, then you can go back on your computer and try to spruce it up. If you do, great. You can upload the new and improved page(s). But don't do that right off the bat, unless you know someone who knows what they're doing. First, just get a plain page up with just the vital statistics. Once you do that, you can incrementally improve your site.

As I stated above, I offered to help businesses get initial websites up. But always, always, they wanted to go super-splashy from the get-go. They wanted clickable graphics. They wanted sound files. They wanted interactive games. While all of those things are possible with even plain HTML, it's a mistake to employ them from the start. While I could do all these things, it was more than I was willing to do for free. Some backed off, and they never got any website up. Don't be obsessive. Get a simple website up. That's what's important. After that's in place, you can look into sprucing it up.