Website Design, Development and Maintenance
1 July 2009
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This will probably make me sound really old but I was using email and
creating websites since before the Internet. My first website was
named "Gilligan's Island" and the server was a dual-floppy drive computer
located in my bedroom. I used my website to send
emails, trade computer games (some of which I had written), collect
pictures (all ASCII art because nobody had color monitors yet) and
generally try to impress my high school nerd friends.
Back then it wasn't called email, it was Netmail. And it wasn't called
a website, it was called a BBS (Bulletin Board System). The Internet
technically existed (it was called ARPANET) but nobody had heard of it
and it only existed on government mainframes. Instead of the Internet,
my BBS used a system called FidoNet which was basically just a bunch of
nerds with computers and 300 baud modems. Remember the 1983 movie "War
Games" with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy? As far as I was concerned,
that movie was second only to Star Wars.
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I was 17, what kind of art do you think I collected? |
It wasn't until almost 10 years later that the Internet started to gain
popularity. I lived and worked in the heart of Silicon Valley at the
time. I remember thanking that the Internet was finally catching on when
I first saw a news caster struggling to pronounce "http://www..." I had
already been working with the Internet for years so I knew that the "http://www"
part of a website's address is optional (the browser and server will usually
figure it out for you) but the news caster didn't know that and he looked quite
confused as he tried to spell out the entire URL.
In addition to network programming for computer games, I also worked at
Cisco for awhile making a device called a server load balancer. I
won't bore you with the details but it was a very impressive device at
the time. For the technically minded, I wrote a health monitor using
sockets and various TCP/IP protocols including UDP, SMTP, FTP and
HTTP. The company even awarded me some patent money for work I did
with regular expressions. I think it was a silly patent idea but Cisco
liked it enough to pay me for it.
As much fun as it was to work with all that high-tech stuff, I eventually
decided to give it up and grow Kona coffee instead. Kona coffee is a
premium coffee and it demands a premium price but the profit margin for the
farmer is amazingly slim. The best way to be profitable as a Kona
coffee farmer is to be vertically integrated. That means selling fresh
coffee directly to the consumer. A great way to reach consumers all
across the country is with a good website.
Leveraging off my vast experience as a network programmer I figured it would
be easy to design and build my own website. I had written plenty of
client side and server side software before so how hard could it be to
make a website? Well, I built the entire Kona Earth website by myself
but it was far more time consuming than I expected. The initial
web design was easy, it's the vast amount of technical details required
for implementation, security and maintenance that can be overwhelming.
Apparently I did ok though because my Kona Earth website won first place in
the Kona coffee website competition.
Word quickly got out among the other Kona coffee farmers that I had a
technical background and could make websites. I've had several people
ask me for help, including some of the large players in the industry, but
I've always turned them down because I was too busy with my own farm.
Now that I've finished major construction of my barn, I have time to take
on some extra work and develop websites for others.
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A few important terms
Ajax,
ARPANET,
AVS,
BBS,
CA,
CGI,
CSS,
cURL,
DDoS,
DHCP,
DNS,
DOM,
FTP,
GUID,
HTML,
HTTP,
LAMP,
MD5,
MIME,
MMORPG,
MySQL,
PCI,
PEAR,
PECL,
PERL,
PHP,
regex,
RFC,
RSS,
SEO,
SHA,
SMTP,
SOAP,
SSL,
TCP/IP,
UDP,
URL,
W3C,
XML
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How much does it cost to make a website?
Of course that's always the first question and of course the answer
depends on what kind of website it is. Making a small website with
nothing but a few pictures and simple HTML code is easy and something
most people could do themselves for free. I'll even help talk you
through it if you'd like. There are a lot of free solutions out there
but most aren't suited for a professional website.
Making a website with professional looking content such as Flash, CSS
and JavaScript is relatively easy for most web designers. Add a
shopping cart and the difficulty level jumps up dramatically.
Security issues are a big concern with any e-commerce site and should
only be handled by an experienced programmer. By that point you
might as well become a professional and use the entire LAMP stack:
Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
Companies such as Amazon, FedEx or Walmart spend millions on their websites
with a whole staff of full-time developers. Even relatively small
companies often spend tens of thousands on their websites. I don't want
to mention any names but I can point to several Kona coffee websites that cost
more than a luxury car. The expense doesn't stop there either, server
and maintenance fees for even a small website can add up to hundreds or
thousands of dollars per year.
For that kind of money it's difficult to get a website to pay for
itself. So what's a small time business owner to do? The first
step is to decide if a website would really help your business. If the
answer is yes, then it's time to decide what features you'll need.
Some businesses need little more than their contact info while other
businesses can benefit tremendously from a complex, full featured website.
It's important to spend appropriately for the type of online business you
expect to be doing.
A simple website with no shopping cart, such as
CaliforniaGoldenTrout.org,
can cost as little as a few hundred dollars. A more complex
e-commerce website, such as the average Kona coffee farm website, takes
longer to develop and can cost several thousand dollars. The
maintenance costs range from ten dollars to several hundred dollars per
month depending on the amount of traffic, page changes and administrative
tasks required. On average, a small business owner can expect to
spend about three to five thousand dollars for initial development and a
couple hundred dollars per year for hosting and maintenance.
Of course those numbers are rough estimates, the exact cost depends on
the specific details of a site. For example, Kona Earth has extensive
administrative features that help me a lot when it comes to running the
business but are invisible to the user. Some business owners want that
detailed level of control while others would rather have their website
run on autopilot.
I can help with all of your website needs.
Working with an individual developer can be a big benefit because not only
can I tailor the work to fit your needs, I'm also only a phone call
away. Whether you need a little help adding a
specific feature or you want someone to do all the work for you, either
way just let me know and we can work something out. If I don't have
the answer, I'll refer you to someone that does.
Check out my Website Development page for more details.
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To make the graphic on my Website Development
page, I simply disassembled and old cable TV box I had laying around then
I printed out some of my old source code on a piece of paper. I stitched
the pictures together in Photoshop and used a little CSS tweaking to get
the graphic lined up correctly and show off how talented I am.
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