market continues to dive!

[Michael]

> A small note -- in-laws can be ex-in-laws . . . and from the dealings with
> one "soon-to-be" ex, they can be a major pain the arse . . .

Been there, done that, may never recover financially. ;)

> Anyway, there still lies a huge untapped market out there for small
> business, but trying to get out there is a tough nut to crack.  I'm a web
> designer/programmer and I'll pitch ideas and show people what a
> professional site is and then they turn around and have the kid down the
> street fire up Microsoft Frontpage to put up their corporate web site.
> Ugh.  I expected during the dot-com craze to see large companies hammering
> small business opportunities into the ground.  I expected a smorgasboard
> "pick what you need and you'll have a site in 3 days for $500" to be pushed
> through, but the big guys were too busy working on the other big guy sites.
>  What usually ends up selling sites for myself, is just sitting down and
> doing a site and saying "now isn't this better?"   Once reality sets in
> they usually come back down to earth.

I agree that small businesses are the way things are going. There will
always be a few mega-sites like Amazon but they tend to hire their own
crew. Appealing to the average person that wants to sell on Ebay and have
a small website is where most of the business is right now. Really it's a
healthier Internet that way.. it's just more foot work.

One of the sites I did for a full-time job was considering paying half a
million for someone to come in and replace the perfectly functional code
with something hammered out in Frontpage because some business magazines
were babbling about M$ as usual. I offered to rebuild the same site from
the ground up with everything perfect for their goal of B2B interfacing
etc for $50,000 and they turned me down. I think the truth is that it
isn't so much cost as much as not wanting to get left out. They all have
to jump off that Microsoft bridge.

On the other hand I've found that a good many sites are almost exact
copies of each other and by writing reusable code I can offer quite a bit
for your $500 price tag. I'd honestly like to eventually get the average
fully customized small business site down to $100 by that method.

Along with showing examples of my own work compared to the usual Frontpage
crap I also like to olffer a free security review. Take a quick peek at
their site and usually you'll see it full of security problems. List them
out nicely and mention what kind of liability etc can be involved with
some of those common holes and sometimes people see reason. Really it's
amazing how many sites you can just go and copy all their content,
customer contacts, or worst of all credit information.

> Which leads me to another small grovel -- why does everyone treat
> computer type things as "you just punch a button and it spits out"?
> There's like a huge perception problem, because of things like
> "Frontpage" that devalues what others do.  Nobody expects to be able to
> tear into their new bazillion valve, ultra-expensive car with a
> Chilton's manual in hand.  Likewise you don't go down to the local
> butcher because you're having chest pains, yet when it comes to
> computers people will just about do anything else besides what needs to
> be done.

Most people don't understand computers and aren't experienced enough to
tell the difference between a quick-and-dirty program and something elite.
Many of them go by eye candy which is why you see so many utterly crappy
sites with overly fancy graphics. Unless you stress how important
stability, security, maintainability, etc are most potential customers
don't know until they've already been burnt a couple times.

In a way I think the computer industry needs a (free) professional license
that actually matters. You have to many people cranked out from college
that think real programming is Frontpage and Visual Basic with no idea
that any OS's exist besides Windows and maybe MacOS. The people who only
went into the field because their consul told them the job market was good
in tech. Then they get A+ and Microsoft certified and go charging out to
destroy the market. We need something like the law or medical bars that
certify the individual is reasonably skilled and has professional ethics.