Spero Consulting

‘Web Site Design’ Category

A Busi­ness Man­age­ment Tool

Busi­nesses Are Miss­ing a lot of Opportunities

Because of the per­ceived costs of devel­op­ing and the per­ceived dif­fi­cul­ties of man­ag­ing a full-​featured web site, many own­ers and man­agers at small– and medium-​sized firms want only a sim­ple ‘web presence.’

Often that ‘pres­ence’ con­sists of a sin­gle page that announces, “we exist, here is our tele­phone num­ber,” or it con­sists of a few pages with not much more information.

Clearly, such sites are very cheap to develop and main­tain although per­haps ‘not main­tain’ is a more apt descrip­tion. How­ever, such sites do lit­tle or noth­ing to gen­er­ate rev­enue or cre­ate long-​term value.

In this post, we dis­pel a few of the myths regard­ing pre­sumed high costs and explain a few of the ben­e­fits of a full-​featured site.

Web Sites Shouldn’t Be Yel­low Page Ads

There’s a good chance that if your busi­ness isn’t web, infor­ma­tion, or technology-​related, then you are not famil­iar with the ease-​of-​use and capa­bil­i­ties of mod­ern, infor­ma­tive, well-​managed web sites. In fact, if all you know is “it’s some­thing with com­put­ers,” then you may believe that main­tain­ing a site is much more dif­fi­cult than it really is — or than it could be with a well-​designed site.¹

If the para­graph describes you, then you may think that some­thing that is the equiv­a­lent of a Yel­low Page adver­tise­ment is a suf­fi­cient web presence.

It’s not.

If your fam­ily is like ours, the Yel­low Page book never makes it into the house. It goes straight from the curb or the front porch into the recy­cling cart.

That’s not very dif­fer­ent than how web vis­i­tors, who don’t already know you, treat your min­i­mal web presence.

Now, we don’t fault site own­ers for believ­ing that a sin­gle page or a bare bones site is suf­fi­cient to gen­er­ate rev­enue. They may not know any better.

Out-​of-​sight, Out-​of-​mind

In fact, on occa­sion their prospects and cus­tomers may have men­tioned, “we found you from your web site.” How­ever, those own­ers have no idea of ongo­ing lost profit oppor­tu­ni­ties because unseen, poten­tial cus­tomers can’t find the infor­ma­tion they seek (and so, never call).

Those missed oppor­tu­ni­ties arise because most own­ers and oper­a­tors of small– and medium-​sized busi­nesses don’t spend their days surf­ing the web; so, they may not real­ize that many cus­tomers and prospects find web sites to be vital and inex­pen­sive (and in some case, irre­place­able) sources of infor­ma­tion (about prod­ucts, ser­vices, and orga­ni­za­tions). So, those own­ers and man­agers may be unaware of the lost oppor­tu­ni­ties to con­vert web vis­i­tors into actual, pay­ing customers.

For­tu­nately, we think that lack of that aware­ness can be over­come by ask­ing those indi­vid­u­als a few questions:

1. When you, your­self, are look­ing for infor­ma­tion about a prod­uct, ser­vice or orga­ni­za­tion and you find a site that con­sists of a sin­gle sta­tic page, how often do you con­tact the site’s owner?
2. How does your sin­gle page dif­fer­en­ti­ate your firm or orga­ni­za­tion for your com­peti­tors, whether they are local, national, inter­na­tional, or on-​line?

While it is pos­si­ble to (psy­cho­log­i­cally) ratio­nal­ize a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to the first ques­tion, that’s much more dif­fi­cult to do with the sec­ond. If your sin­gle page or unin­for­ma­tive site doesn’t seem to hurt you now, then you bet­ter hope that your com­peti­tors don’t start lever­ag­ing the web to their advan­tage. (Of course, we would argue that an unin­for­ma­tive site is already hurt­ing sales more than you know.)

Also, note that we could rephrase or re-​spell the above sub­ti­tle as “Out-​of-​site, Out-​of-​mind,” because that’s often what hap­pens when cus­tomers leave an unre­mark­able ‘web pres­ence.’ They for­get that you exist.

“We Can’t Afford it.”

Oh really?

When we hear that sen­tence, we won­der: how can you not? Espe­cially for firms where a sin­gle addi­tional sale (gen­er­ated) from an enhanced pres­ence would pay for the entire site.

For many firms, such myopic per­cep­tions per­sist far beyond web site and mar­ket­ing deci­sions; so, it’s worth empha­siz­ing that cost min­i­miza­tion does not imply profit max­i­miza­tion. In other words, min­i­miz­ing expen­di­tures doesn’t max­i­mize prof­its when the mar­ginal amount spent would gen­er­ate greater mar­ginal ben­e­fits. It’s the very def­i­n­i­tion of being penny-​wise and pound foolish.

We under­stand that for projects like web sites, the mar­ginal costs are incurred imme­di­ately, and they are more pre­cisely known than the ben­e­fits, which seem to be less cer­tain and amor­phous, but still it is 2010, after all, and there are sev­eral hun­dred mil­lion PCs in the USA and (we’re guess­ing) tens of mil­lions of cell phones with web brows­ing capabilities.

For rel­a­tively expen­sive goods or ser­vices a sin­gle addi­tional order can recover all upfront design and devel­op­ment costs, and that is true for indus­trial firms, swim­ming pool builders, and many other types of prod­ucts and services.

That’s a sin­gle new order over the life of the site that could eas­ily, eas­ily last for five-​to-​ten years.

Now, we could cre­ate a full-​fledged, cost-​volume-​profit analy­sis and assume cer­tain con­tri­bu­tion mar­gins (roughly, rev­enue — vari­able costs) and cal­cu­late break-​even points and prob­a­bil­i­ties of achiev­ing those points, but if your busi­ness needs only one or two addi­tional (i.e., mar­ginal) sales over five-​to-​ten years then it seems rather obvi­ous. (For lower priced items, the break-​even num­ber of mar­ginal orders increases but then the upside poten­tial is much greater, too.)

More­over, in cer­tain cases, our argu­ment becomes sub­stan­tially more persuasive:

1. Rep­u­ta­tional effects & (what we would call) high ser­ial cor­re­la­tion): If your busi­ness or orga­ni­za­tion serves a mar­ket where rep­u­ta­tion mat­ters – where a sat­is­fied cus­tomer is likely to rec­om­mend you to a friend, neigh­bor, or col­league – then one addi­tional web-​generated sale could eas­ily lead to many addi­tional ones. So, given that you pro­vide excel­lent ser­vice, one new cus­tomer who found your firm via the web could eas­ily turn into a neigh­bor­hood or com­mu­nity of non-​web-​based customers.
2. Avail­abil­ity of a New Mar­ket­ing Ini­tia­tive: many suc­cess­ful and long-​standing firms with­out sig­nif­i­cant web pres­ences often ignore this oppor­tu­nity, espe­cially indus­trial firms. Sup­pose your orga­ni­za­tion has a rel­a­tively con­stant cus­tomer base, and those cus­tomers are well-​served by the usual, per­sonal sales tech­niques. Often sales man­agers and own­ers or mar­ket­ing man­agers ignore the oppor­tu­nity to sell to a new mar­ket seg­ment, and an inex­pen­sive but effec­tive way to test new mar­kets is via a web-​based campaign.

For exam­ple, due to recent high energy prices and to gov­ern­men­tal reg­u­la­tions, many man­u­fac­tur­ers have had to make their prod­ucts more effi­cient (con­sider just about any­thing that con­sumes power in an office or fac­tory). Exist­ing cus­tomers may or may not be con­cerned with such advances or changes, but poten­tial new cus­tomers that have new sus­tain­abil­ity or green ini­tia­tives might be. So, a web site, which doesn’t alien­ate exist­ing cus­tomers, but addresses the needs of green and sus­tain­able firms offers a huge oppor­tu­nity to cap­ture sales and reach (or cre­ate) new mar­ket segments.

We can imag­ine a reader protest­ing that our analy­sis con­sid­ers upfront costs but ignores recur­ring costs. For a nor­mal small or medium-​sized busi­nesses, a well-​designed, self-​managed site can have recur­ring costs as low as $150 PER YEAR. (With a full-​fledged web store that processes trans­ac­tions on-​site – rather than, say, at Pay­Pal – recur­ring annual cost increases to between $500 — $750.) Yeah, it’s that cheap.

Ancil­lary & Oper­at­ing Benefits

A well-​designed site offers more than mar­ket­ing ben­e­fits. It can pro­vide bet­ter ways to con­duct busi­ness, and those meth­ods can lead to improved effi­cien­cies and more real­is­tic cus­tomer expectations.

With easy-​to-​create password-​protected pages, one can show actual cus­tomers more infor­ma­tion than generic, web-​site vis­i­tors. So, cus­tomers can receive answers to frequently-​ask ques­tions or have access to ref­er­ence mate­ri­als with­out inter­rupt­ing your day or one of your employ­ees. (Or, with­out requir­ing you to answer the same ques­tion for the 1,400^th time.)

For long-​term projects, a site that explains the process – the num­ber of steps, the time-​frame, and the usual rea­sons for delay – cre­ates more real­is­tic cus­tomer expec­ta­tions and per­mits them to find answers to their ques­tions. We think that it is often lost on small-​business own­ers that dur­ing, day, a con­struc­tion process, cus­tomers have almost as much aver­sion to mak­ing calls as you do to answer­ing them. So, why not try to elim­i­nate those calls by pro­vid­ing an alter­na­tive source of information.

Forms: a site with well-​designed con­tact forms per­mits you to know some­thing about your prospects before the first tele­phone call, includ­ing: who they are, where they are from, what they seek, and which pages they have vis­ited. Such forms can be very short, like our con­tact page or a sim­ple request for infor­ma­tion or they can be long and multi-​paged, like a sports reg­is­tra­tion form. Regardless of their size and scope, there is only one answer to the (lead­ing) ques­tion: isn’t it bet­ter to know some­thing about prospects before mak­ing that call?

Upon sub­mis­sion, good form soft­ware for­wards web vis­i­tors to rel­e­vant web pages, and it also per­mits cus­tomized, auto­matic e-​mail replies. Almost all form soft­ware will send an e-​mail to some­one within the firm when­ever there is a new sub­mis­sion, and that recip­i­ent can depend upon the data that were col­lected. (By the way, many of the form gen­er­a­tors that we use are free. The most expen­sive one is $125.)

Cal­en­dars: for busi­nesses that require appoint­ments, why waste your’s staff time sched­ul­ing ses­sions when many cus­tomers are will­ing to make their own reser­va­tions on-​line. (So, let’s get this straight: you can buy an air­line ticket or a hotel reser­va­tion on-​line, but you can’t make a hair-​cut appoint­ment with­out call­ing someone?)

With full-​featured cal­en­dars, it is quite easy to show avail­abil­ity and per­mit web vis­i­tors to make requests. That’s a con­ve­nience for your cus­tomers who desire it, and it let’s staff mem­bers focus on value-​added ser­vices. For other types of firms, shared resources can be more effi­ciently used with pri­vate ver­sions of the same cal­en­dars. In fact, one cal­en­dar instal­la­tion can pro­vide both types of sched­ules: pub­lic or pri­vate, password-​protected or not.

On-​line Trans­ac­tions: mod­ern web stores are secure, rather inex­pen­sive, and very easy to main­tain; so, it is sur­pris­ingly sim­ple to sell goods and ser­vice on the web; how­ever, your orga­ni­za­tion does not need a store to pro­vide and ben­e­fit from on-​line trans­ac­tions. With Pay­Pal, it is quite easy to send e-​mail invoices and per­mit cus­tomers to pay on-​line. As we fre­quently say, 97% of some­thing is bet­ter than 100% of nothing.

Caveat Emp­tor

Of course, not all web sites are cre­ated equal. So, when choos­ing a site designer or builder or devel­oper, be sure that you are get­ting the ease-​of-​maintenance of a well-​designed con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem. Oth­er­wise, you’ll get a web pres­ence, which may or may be inex­pen­sive to main­tain, but you will not get an effec­tive, ada­p­at­able busi­ness man­age­ment tool. To see what it avail­able, visit our web design cen­ter at Design​.Spe​r​o​Con​sult​ing​.com.

As always with our longer posts, we’ll likely update and edit this dur­ing the next few days.

In E-​mails & on Web Sites

As Dreaded E-​mail Attachments

Each week the ele­men­tary school sends at least one e-​mail with a vari­ety of PDF files attached. Those files remind us of noth­ing more than elec­tronic bar­na­cles that cre­ate fric­tion on the inter­net and waste space on hard dri­ves. (It’s not the only vio­la­tor, just the most recent.)

Usu­ally those sep­a­rate files – which must be saved and opened, or at least opened – are sim­ple announce­ments from the school or from one of the par­ents’ asso­ci­a­tions. There is no com­pelling rea­son why those sim­ple, text announce­ments could be eas­ily incor­po­rated into the e-​mail mes­sage. That action would save each of the 300-​or-​so fam­i­lies at the school a decent amount of time every week.

Now, such a change might seem triv­ial – if you are not the one open­ing the PDFs. In addi­tion, such a change might be inef­fi­cient if it overly-​burdened the sender, but elim­i­nat­ing most or all of the PDFs requires noth­ing more that one per­son open­ing the file and copying-​and-​pasting the text into the mes­sage. In this case, the process is so easy that for each attached file, the cost:benefit ratio is about 1:300, and that is a nice effi­ciency gain.

Actu­ally, that minor cost could be com­pletely elim­i­nated if the e-​mail sender requested that the announce­ment be sent to them as e-​mail mes­sages, rather than as PDFs.

Of course, if such files are more than infor­ma­tional, if they are elec­tronic ver­sions of paper forms, then it may be incon­ve­nient to incor­po­rate those forms into the message’s body. BUT, if those forms are rou­tine, then rather than hav­ing each recip­i­ent open, print, and fill-​in the paper form, the sender could direct the reader to an on-​line form to complete.

In this case, forc­ing 300 fam­i­lies to print a page isn’t par­tic­u­larly green, cheap or con­ve­nient. It is not green because it wastes paper and ink. It is not cheap because it wastes paper and ink. It is not con­ve­nient because it requires print­ing, walk­ing to the printer, retriev­ing the form, com­plet­ing it, and, in this case, ensur­ing that the child returns it to the school. (In other cases, a stamp and enve­lope are required.)

On a well-​designed web-​site, such forms can be eas­ily replaced with their elec­tronic equiv­a­lents: sim­ple; easy-​to-​use; click, click, click, and you’re done. They sur­pris­ingly afford­able to gen­er­ate and edit.

When we have men­tioned sim­i­lar phe­nom­e­non to other orga­ni­za­tions and clients, we usu­ally get a response, like, “you don’t under­stand, we have 30 dif­fer­ent forms.”

Not-​so-​close inspec­tion usu­ally reveals thirty sheets of paper in dif­fer­ent fonts and lay-​outs col­lect­ing about 95% of the same infor­ma­tion. Often, all of those forms can be com­pressed into one or two on-​line ver­sions with dif­fer­ent drop-​down sub­jects, etc. Of course, like just about any other com­puter file, once an on-​line form is cre­ated, it can be copied and edited to cre­ate a sim­i­lar, deriv­a­tive form.

At one orga­ni­za­tion we were able to nearly elim­i­nate the need to print paper ver­sions of reg­is­tra­tion forms. Besides improv­ing the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, that change has sub­stan­tially improved the effi­ciency of col­lect­ing and aggre­gat­ing data. No need to retype the data into an Excel spread­sheet when it can be down­loaded from an on-​line data­base or can be auto­mat­i­cally sent (via email) to rel­e­vant parties.

By the way, in Decem­ber we wrote about the prob­lems with using e-​mail as the firm’s or organization’s cen­tral infor­ma­tion sys­tem. You can read about it here: Inex­pen­sive but Valu­able Web-​base MIS.

On Web Sites

There are times when only the PDF ver­sion of a file will do. How­ever, being forced to click a link on a web site to read text through a PDF viewer or browser add-​in or to down­load a form is very inef­fi­cient for web site vis­i­tors and nei­ther effec­tive nor effi­cient for the site’s owner.

It’s cheap, it looks that way, and, most impor­tantly, it turns away vis­i­tors. That’s because many vis­i­tors won’t down­load or open such files so, they never see what you have to say. More­over, for those per­form­ing web searches, many poten­tial vis­i­tors don’t become actual vis­i­tors because as soon as they see “PDF” in the search result, they start scan­ning down­ward for the next result.

Except for cer­tain spe­cial mate­ri­als, like, say, mate­r­ial that you are only allowed to dis­sem­i­nate as a PDF file – e.g., some aca­d­e­mic jour­nal arti­cles or legal doc­u­ments – any­thing that can be com­mu­ni­cated within a PDF file can also be com­mu­ni­cated in a web page, and no knowl­edge of html or any other com­puter lan­guage is required.

If you can do it in MS Word, you can do it with a good con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem. Not only are you likely to get more hits from within search results, but you are also likely to have an increased poten­tial for hits because it is much eas­ier to search-​engine-​optimize con­tent on web pages rather than in PDFs.

Of course, if PDF file con­tent is con­verted into web page con­tent, there is no rule that pro­hibits post­ing the PDF file, too. (In addi­tion, there are a num­ber of free web plu­g­ins that allow vis­i­tors to con­vert web pages into PDF files – if you like that kind of thing.)

While some (obsti­nate) read­ers, may not con­sider this to be the most press­ing of causes, it is one that is sim­ple to imple­ment and ben­e­fi­cial to all par­ties involved.

If you would like exam­ples or demon­stra­tions of on-​line forms, please down­load this PDF form, com­plete it, and mail it to us. Just kid­ding, please con­tact us, instead.

We have suc­cess­fully com­pleted the redesign and devel­op­ment of Rasp­berry Photo’s improved and expanded web site.

Rasp­berry Photo is a por­trait pho­tog­ra­phy firm located near Pitts­burgh that spe­cial­izes in pho­tographs of chil­dren and families. It is owned and oper­ated by Bon­nie DeMat­teo.

Bon­nie wanted her new site to:

1. Show­case many beau­ti­ful por­traits in her grow­ing portfolio;
2. Allow clients to view, com­pare, and pur­chase portraits;
3. Be easy to self-​manage; and
4. Be search-​engine optimized.

We were able to meet her requests while seam­lessly inte­grat­ing the appear­ance across the site’s dif­fer­ent pur­poses and functions.

The main site pro­vides the ease-​of-​use, search-​engine opti­miza­tion, and dash­board infor­ma­tion of a well-​buit con­tent man­age­ment system.

The slide shows that appear (on the home page and under the gal­leries links) are easy to man­age and can be cre­ated from within Adobe Light­room, a pop­u­lar batch-​image pro­cess­ing pro­gram among pho­tog­ra­phers, or they can be cre­ated and edited from within the con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem. They’re very cool and sur­pris­ingly sim­ple to manage.

The client proof­ing area is a full-​featured, Flash-​based store that can be eas­ily self-​managed and adapted for other types of prod­ucts and ser­vices. For a busi­ness like Rasp­berry Photo, the actual prod­ucts are pri­vate pho­tographs that appear in password-​protected gal­leries, but is a sim­ple set­ting, and depend­ing upon your busi­ness, all prod­ucts could be made pub­lic and avail­able for sale to any­one on the web.

To keep costs low, the proof­ing shop­ping cart directs clients to Pay­Pal to com­plete their trans­ac­tions. It is seam­less and auto­matic and clients don’t need a Pay­Pal account: credit or debit cards work just fine. (To host actual trans­ac­tions costs about $500/​year, and in this case, offers no real benefit.)

Visit and let us know what you think. Visit our design cen­ter for more infor­ma­tion on our web-​related services.

We think that the new site is wor­thy of her por­traits, and we’re glad that she does, too.

Our web design site, Design​.Spe​r​o​Con​sult​ing​.com, is now open to the public.

Pre­vi­ously, to pro­tect pro­pri­etary infor­ma­tion, we had password-​protected much of it. Now, it’s avail­able for the world to see.

Cre­den­tials are still needed to explore the back office; so, con­tact us if you would like to see how easy it is to man­age your own site.

After shov­el­ing sev­eral hun­dred cubic feet of snow for the Basen­jis this late night/​early morn­ing, we didn’t attempt to go to sleep.

Instead, we did what we often do when work­ing on a project late into the night; we turned on Red­eye on Fox News.

If you haven’t heard of it, it’s on at 3:00 AM Mon­day — Fri­day (actu­ally Tues­day through Sat­ur­day) and hosted by blog­ger Greg Gut­feld, of TheDai​lyGut​.com.

It is by far the fun­ni­est show on tele­vi­sion: top­i­cal, irrev­er­ent, acer­bic, teas­ing, and some­times mean-​spirited.

Besides Greg, there are two other reg­u­lars, pan­elist, Bill Schulz, and ombuds­man, Andy Levy.

Each night, at least two other panelists-​guests appear, and most of those guests are reg­u­lars – appear­ing every week or every cou­ple of weeks. A few of those guests are Fox News anchors and reporters and a few are come­di­ans and a few are from other pro­fes­sions, e.g. a priest, a coro­ner, a Con­gress­man, etc.

We’d describe the show anal­o­gously in two dif­fer­ent ways. Nei­ther which may make sense to oth­ers, but then it’s our little-​read blog; so, we don’t care.

First, if tele­vi­sions shows were like peo­ple, it’s what the early, ado­les­cent Sat­ur­day Night Live would grown into had it matured and stayed funny. Note that we use the word ‘matured’ very pre­cisely. We mean had the show’s for­mat matured from skit-​based to news pan­elly, and had it’s world-​viewed matured, from some­thing for teens and twenty-​somethings to some­thing for forty-​somethings who have been mugged a bit by reality.

We cer­tainly don’t mean mature with respect to the behav­ior or demeanor of the hosts and many of their guests. That gen­er­ally remains ado­les­cent and juve­nile but in a good way, and that’s the sec­ond way we think about it. If you, dear reader, hung-​out with smart, witty, funny, and occa­sion­ally mean kids in high school – you know, before those kids became self-​conscious or seri­ous or moody or thought that oth­ers cared about what they thought – then you may like it for the same rea­son. It’s what hang­ing out with those kids would be like if those kids grew up, became edu­cated, learned a bit about the world, and (gen­er­ally) had some­thing worth say­ing, but didn’t lose their sense-​of-​humor or rudeness.

So, if you hated those kids in high school, you’ll hate the show; how­ever, if you were one of those kids in high school, you’ll likely love the show. If you won­dered where some of those kids went, well it seems that few are on tele­vi­sion at 3:00 AM and haven’t changed very much. If your sched­ule isn’t as flex­i­ble as ours, you prob­a­bly won’t want to stay awake for it, but it is def­i­nitely worth record­ing and then watch­ing the next night when the sup­posed come­di­ans are on television.

Check out var­i­ous seg­ments on the show’s web site. The robots are con­sis­tently hilar­i­ous, and the priest, Father Mor­ris, gives amaz­ing answers to very dif­fi­cult and per­ni­cious the­o­log­i­cal ques­tions. Lately, those ques­tions have been posed by the robots. (Don’t ask.)

Today is the show’s third anniver­sary, so to Greg, Bill and Andy, con­grat­u­la­tions on your suc­cess and on your new table and keep up the good work.

P.S. The Daily Gut web site really sucks. We could do much better.

Inno­v­a­tive Man­age­ment Solu­tions ~ Cre­ative Web Design

We have changed our site’s and the firm’s motto to bet­ter reflect our broad busi­ness mix. We have dropped the nar­rower “Thought before Cal­cu­la­tion” for the more gen­eral “Inno­v­a­tive Man­age­ment Solu­tions.” Inno­va­tion isn’t always thought­ful, but in our case it is.

Plus, we have added “Cre­ative Web Design” to rec­og­nize a large part of our prac­tice. Through sheer serendip­ity, we design and develop the kind of web sites that “every­body wants.” Our sites are good-​looking, orga­nized, easily-​self-​managed, and search-​engine opti­mized. What’s not to like?

There is a short arti­cle about sus­tain­abil­ity in ‘The Jour­nal Report’ sec­tion of today’s edi­tion of The Wall Street Jour­nal. We think that is worth men­tion­ing, espe­cially to small busi­ness own­ers and man­agers of small, not-​for-​profit agen­cies and organizations.

The arti­cle is enti­tled, How Green Should My Tech Be? It Depends on the Tech. The author, Robert Plant, lists and pri­or­i­tizes four cat­e­gories of tech­nol­ogy projects from ‘no-​brainers’ to ‘distractions.’

We are writ­ing to men­tion a ‘no-​brainer’ that he doesn’t. Small and medium-​sized busi­nesses should con­sider out­sourc­ing their server oper­a­tions to shared host­ing accounts (and/​or ded­i­cated servers).

“What’s a shared host­ing account” you ask? It’s a lease of server capac­ity – usu­ally with lim­its on monthly band­width and on hard drive stor­age. Like cell phone com­pa­nies, web host­ing firms offer tiered pric­ing pack­ages based upon expected usage, but many very small busi­nesses need only with the cheap­est packages.

For small busi­nesses with small infor­ma­tion sys­tem needs – web server, e-​mail server, etc – the energy costs of oper­at­ing their own server 24 hours a day, 365 days per year, are likely greater than the annual cost of a shared host­ing account.

Depend­ing upon the con­fig­u­ra­tion and age, elec­tri­cal con­sump­tion can cost between $200 — $400 per year for a sin­gle server, and many small busi­nesses can obtain an appro­pri­ate shared host­ing account­ing for well less than $200 per year. Like we said, it’s a no-​brainer: no (sep­a­rate) hard­ware costs; gen­er­ally no soft­ware costs, espe­cially for those using open source web appli­ca­tions and servers; and no repair costs.

Now, of course, lower util­ity bills aren’t nec­es­sar­ily bet­ter if other costs are higher or if the real­iz­ing sav­ings requires one to assume addi­tional risks, but shared host­ing accounts are, in fact, less risky than run­ning a server from a back office or closet. Among the benefits:

• Reli­a­bil­ity and uptime are greater and aren’t affected by local power, cable or tele­phone outages.
• Through a rep­utable host­ing com­pany, your server will be located in a well-​managed, well-​maintained and well-​designed server farm with redun­dan­cies, back­ups and speeds of repair that you could not rival with­out a large invest­ment and near obses­sive atten­tion to it.
• There is little-​to-​no risk of fire or theft of equipement, and your server man­age­ment con­soles can be accessed from anywhere.
• Depend­ing upon the num­ber of employ­ees, your firm’s poli­cies and pro­ce­dures, and you dis­ci­pline adher­ing to those pro­ce­dures, data may be safer.
• If required for web-​based trans­ac­tions, sta­tic IP addresses and SSL cer­tifi­cates are avail­able for shared host­ing accounts, too.

While it is out­side the scope of this post, medium-​sized firms with greater infor­ma­tion demands should con­sider leas­ing ded­i­cated servers at such server farms via the same types of web host­ing accounts: annual cost approx­i­mately $5,000 or so.

One note of cau­tion: like any­thing else, the cheap­est host­ing ser­vice isn’t always the best. Get a rep­utable one that replies quickly to inquiries and ser­vice requests, prefer­ably in Eng­lish. For that we whole-​heartedly (and with­out com­pen­sa­tion) rec­om­mend Fused Net­work.

P.S. For small net­work backup needs, con­sider some­thing energy-​efficient like the Acer Aspire Easy­S­tore AH340. We love ours.

We applaud Google and its threat to leave China as a response to recent hack­ing attempts.

Last month, we wrote about A Rise in Inter­net Hack­ing Attempts at this site, and all of those hits seemed to orig­i­nate from within China. (Whether they were spoofed or not, we can’t tell.)

The num­ber per day peaked over the Christ­mas break and has since decreased.

We have no idea if there is a rela­tion­ship between what Google dis­cov­ered and what we noticed here. We doubt it because we’re tiny and have almost no fol­low­ing and in two years have writ­ten only four or five posts crit­i­ciz­ing China. How­ever, we have not seen sim­i­lar attacks at any of the other sites that we maintain.

We would like Google to pub­lish a list of offend­ing IP addresses to shine fur­ther light on the issue and so that folks like us can see if there are any matches.

For the last six weeks or so, we’ve seen a huge increase in the num­ber of inter­net hack­ing attempts of our site.

We don’t take it per­son­ally, and we doubt those attempts are related to any­thing that we do or say, but we have very nice ways to track both “eye­balls” and robot vis­its to this site; so, we notice such things. We’re sur­prised that the trend at our site, which we first observed in the begin­ning of Novem­ber, seems to be accel­er­at­ing in recent weeks. (If we did take it per­son­ally, we’d be a bit flattered.)

Here’s a sam­ple from one of our sta­tis­tics pack­ages from early this morning:

While there are a few legit­i­mate queries on the list, notice the attempts to access data­bases and upload files.

The best that we can deter­mine, and we’re no expert on the sub­ject, most of those attempts come from bots in China. (If they are not from China, then some­one is spoof­ing Chi­nese addresses and host­ing ser­vices because when we click on the blue num­bers shown above, we get “whois” reports, and they all spec­ify Chi­nese locations.)

To us, it is a reminder to keep strong pass­words, run server and appli­ca­tion exploit scan­ners, and deal with a qual­ity host­ing firm that’s look­ing out for us, in our case that’s Fused Net­work.

Mak­ing Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy Work for You…Finally

We’re not sure if our vague title is a good one because regard­less of the for­mal­ity of their other “infor­ma­tion” sys­tems, every firm and orga­ni­za­tion already has at least one rel­a­tively inex­pen­sive, web-​based, man­age­ment infor­ma­tion sys­tem (MIS). That sys­tem is e-​mail, includ­ing the mes­sages and the myr­iad of hideous, incon­ve­nient, and awk­ward Word, Excel, and pdf doc­u­ments that are so often attached to said messages.

The low cost of e-​mail-​as-​information-​system isn’t the issue. At issue, is whether greater ben­e­fits can be real­ized by using more appro­pri­ate web appli­ca­tions that can be imple­mented at very low mar­ginal cost: both finan­cial and human-​effort-​related costs. The systems/​applications are cheap and easy-​to-​learn.

E-​mail as the Cen­tral Ner­vous System

It’s our con­tention that most man­agers, includ­ing “IT” man­agers, don’t rec­og­nize e-​mail for what it is.

It is the metaphor­i­cal cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem of their firms and orga­ni­za­tions. (We have in mind the somatic ner­vous sys­tem, whereas trans­ac­tion pro­cess­ing and data-​processing, in gen­eral, remind us of the auto­nomic ner­vous sys­tem.)

With­out that recog­ni­tion of e-mail’s cru­cial role, there is no rea­son to search for a sub­sti­tute that is supe­rior at cer­tain infor­ma­tion pro­cess­ing, trans­mis­sion, reten­tion, and retrieval func­tions. (Oh well, we guess we’ll con­sider it our lit­tle secret, share it with that hand­ful of peo­ple who read blogs on the inter­net, and con­tinue to profit from that realization.)

We ask: if senior man­agers both in and out of “IT” did rec­og­nize the true use of their firms’ e-​mail sys­tems, how would they jus­tify silly, fear-​of-​litigation-​based, 60-​day e-​mail “reten­tion” poli­cies? We don’t think that they would. In which case, they might stop toss­ing the prover­bial baby with the bathwater.

By that we mean senior man­agers under-​estimate or com­pletely ignore the long-​term ben­e­fits of reten­tion because (1) the seem­ingly pri­vate, per­son­al­ized nature of mail, (2) the form of those mes­sages obscures their infor­ma­tional con­tent, or (3) they may con­clude that the attach­ments are saved; so, what’s to lose.

We argue that vol­umes of qual­i­ta­tive infor­ma­tion, includ­ing valu­able insti­tu­tional details and his­to­ries and assump­tions, are lost when mes­sages are deleted or when Word doc­u­ments are deleted or purged when an employee quits, is fired or is trans­ferred or when oxymoronically-​named “reten­tion” poli­cies are ruth­lessly applied to mes­sages on a mail server.

No, we don’t think that would hap­pen if those mes­sages were viewed for what they are: an inel­e­gant, qual­i­ta­tive infor­ma­tion sys­tem and data­base, rather than mere correspondence.

Of course, almost all orga­ni­za­tions – par­tic­u­larly large, multi-​locational ones – have other sys­tems that col­lect and trans­mit enor­mous sets of data over the inter­net. Some­times those sys­tems trans­mit infor­ma­tion, too, but trans­mis­sion of valu­able infor­ma­tion is prob­a­bly a much smaller activ­ity than most assume). In that sense, we would dis­agree with those who argue that mod­ern times present some dan­ger of infor­ma­tion over­load, because there is rarely infor­ma­tion overload, but with­out a bit of expe­ri­ence and a clear thought-​process and a bit of self-​confidence, it is quite easy to become over­whelmed with irrel­e­vant data, (or so we’re told). That “over­load” that some folks face is sim­i­lar the old adage about “not see­ing the for­est because of the trees.” With respect to irrel­e­vant data, it’s more of an issue of not being able to see the beau­ti­ful maple for­est because of all the weed sumac trees.

To be clear, there’s a time and place for and value to data pro­cess­ing, but too often folks – who should know bet­ter – con­flate data pro­cess­ing sys­tems and infor­ma­tion sys­tems. In fact, most firms don’t refer to data pro­cess­ing as “data pro­cess­ing” any­more – many call it “infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy” or “IT” or some such thing. Our point is that not all data and records are informative. In fact, we would argue that most records in such mis­named “infor­ma­tion sys­tems” are irrel­e­vant for the typ­i­cal and impor­tant oper­at­ing and invest­ment deci­sions that mid­dle– and senior man­agers make. (In our expe­ri­ence, that infor­ma­tion comes from e-​mails and attach­ments and not through either silly, eso­teric dash­boards or the mass of details recorded via mil­lions of transactions.)

Again, data-​processing is valu­able for a vari­ety of pur­poses, pri­mar­ily record-​keeping and book-​keeping pur­poses, but “pro­cess­ing” data doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily con­vert it to infor­ma­tion – if it is never con­sid­ered as a fac­tor in a deci­sion. (One our pet peeves involves that fact that few sys­tems design­ers begin their projects by ask­ing: what deci­sions do you make and what deci­sions could you make (or make bet­ter) with more refined information?”

We men­tion data pro­cess­ing because we think that if a man­ager can’t dis­tin­guish between data-​processing pro­ce­dures from infor­ma­tion sets and sys­tems, then it likely that such a per­son may also ignore the impor­tance of e-​mail as the cen­tral infor­ma­tion sys­tem because the con­tent of those mes­sages aren’t viewed for what they are: fields and records in a large, unwieldy, and self-​deleting data­base. (Self-​deleting where such reten­tion poli­cies exist.)

We are very inter­ested in help­ing firms and orga­ni­za­tions make opti­mal deci­sions with the “opti­mal amount” of rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion, and we’re espe­cially inter­ested in devel­op­ing con­trol sys­tems that sys­tem­atize, facil­i­tate, and moti­vate such decision-​making by sub­or­di­nates. (FYI: in our mind, infor­ma­tion sys­tems are a type of con­trol sys­tem. When they are well-​designed, they help orga­ni­za­tions accom­plish their goals; so, they meet our def­i­n­i­tion of con­trol. Also, note that we put “opti­mal amount” in scare quotes because that deter­mi­na­tion of opti­mal, in and of itself, is a very sub­tle issue that has strate­gic, tac­ti­cal, and oft-​ignored behav­ioral impli­ca­tions.) The cru­cial man­age­ment issue is: when given the organization’s goals and strate­gies and resources and con­straints, what sys­tems – includ­ing infor­ma­tion sys­tems, and mech­a­nisms are avail­able to effi­ciently and con­sis­tently imple­ment those plans to max­i­mize the organization’s long-​term value. Unfor­tu­nately, the MIS por­tion of that prob­lem is often del­e­gated and not prop­erly con­sid­ered, e.g., “I don’t know much about com­put­ers. That’s an IT issue.”

It is also unfor­tu­nate that because e-​mail serves other pur­poses like com­mu­ni­ca­tion to assist with imple­men­ta­tion and coör­di­na­tion of plans, etc., and because it is the default and de facto key man­age­ment infor­ma­tion sys­tem, we con­tend that lit­tle con­sid­er­a­tion is given by any type of man­ager to find­ing “bet­ter” replace­ments for e-mail’s infor­ma­tion trans­mis­sion role, includ­ing the easy stor­age and retrieval of all of the insti­tu­tional knowl­edge and details found in mes­sages sent and received among peers, supe­ri­ors, and subordinates.

But, no wor­ries, we have a solution.

A Bet­ter MIS than E-​mail

That above-​mentioned lack of con­sid­er­a­tion is shame­ful because nowa­days, sur­pris­ingly afford­able, very user-​friendly, open-​source soft­ware and web appli­ca­tions exist that bet­ter serve the MIS purpose.

Those appli­ca­tions allow orga­ni­za­tions of any size to very effi­ciently and effec­tively cre­ate and use internet-​based infor­ma­tion sys­tems, and those surprisingly-​inexpensive meth­ods have the poten­tial – nay, the high prob­a­bil­ity – to pro­vide tremen­dous long-​term benefits.

• The best part is that there is very lit­tle – actu­ally, noth­ing for most employ­ees – to learn. If they can write e-​mails, cre­ate MS Office doc­u­ments, and attach files, they already have the exper­tise that they need to use a dif­fer­ent plat­form. (We’re amused by the fact that it doesn’t seems that most devel­op­ers of those sys­tems appre­ci­ate their use­ful­ness of them as the front-​end of data­bases because they tend not to be employed by large organizations.)

Note: we’re not rec­om­mend­ing the whole­sale elim­i­na­tion of e-​mail. Instead, we rec­om­mend replac­ing it for cer­tain func­tions with web-​based pub­lish­ing sys­tems that, for exam­ple, will auto­mat­i­cally notify intended recip­i­ents that new con­tent is avail­able, which if you think of it, is very sim­i­lar to receiv­ing an e– mail mes­sage. (Here’s one sign your firm may need a dif­fer­ent sys­tem: if impor­tant top­ics gen­er­ate an nearly end­less chain of mes­sages and replies. Those chains should be com­mu­ni­cated and stored out­side of an e-​mail sys­tem but we don’t mean in MS Office-​based doc­u­ments. We mean web-​based pub­lish­ing systems.

• The other best part is that every­thing that employ­ees write or com­ment upon is search­able (by them­selves and oth­ers) because it is stored in a well-​protected, cen­tral­ized, free, open-​source data­base. (We use MySQL to store our musings.) If per­mis­si­ble, that access is imme­di­ate and per­ma­nent. So, what is assumed and dis­cussed today is not lost in the future. That means that insti­tu­tional knowl­edge can be saved and cheaply re-​used thereby mit­i­gat­ing the age-​old prob­lem iden­ti­fied by George San­tayana: “Those who can­not remem­ber the past are con­demned to repeat it.”
• The other best part is that form of the qual­i­ta­tive data and infor­ma­tion and the result­ing data­base is dynamic and adap­tive (and infor­mal) so that infor­ma­tion cre­ators and providers, say, finan­cial ana­lysts or sales­men, can (rather uncon­sciously) add to and change the struc­ture with­out any inter­fer­ence or delay by “IT” depart­ment admin­is­tra­tors. Respon­si­ble users with the cor­rect level of per­mis­sion can re-​categorize con­tent and add new key­words or fields (as eas­ily as they add new “records” that fit exist­ing fields, top­ics, and categories).

Note that the last bul­let is enough to send most “IT” man­agers into apoplexy.

The sad fact that many such “IT” man­agers would never per­mit such evo­lu­tion­ary processes when learn­ing occurs and/​or as the envi­ron­ment changes is the huge oppor­tu­nity cost of their rigid, bureau­cratic nature and processes. (We ask as an aside: how many “IT” folks start projects by ask­ing: “what deci­sions do you make?” or how many con­sider the behav­ioral impli­ca­tions of sys­tem struc­ture and design? How many pro-​actively ask whether infor­ma­tion require­ments have changed with­out prod­ding or requests by oth­ers? Maybe they should write the acronym, “iT” or just plain “T” because in our mind, there is lit­tle empha­sis on pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion – lots of data, to be sure, but not much info.)

Despite our well-​reasoned and con­vinc­ing prose, we’re skep­ti­cal that large, bureau­cratic orga­ni­za­tions would ever con­sider using such excel­lent sys­tems as a replace­ment for some cur­rent func­tions of e-​mail. (So, we’ll focus our mar­ket­ing efforts on small and mid-​sized firms that, with any luck, will grow into intelligently-​managed, prof­itable, grate­ful, and gen­er­ous large firms.)

Obvi­ously, many large orga­ni­za­tions spend mil­lions if not hun­dreds of mil­lions if not bil­lions of dol­lars on data pro­cess­ing, but, again, we don’t data col­lec­tion and trans­ac­tion pro­cess­ing. We mean the actually-​used man­age­ment infor­ma­tion sys­tems, and are we writ­ing about intel­li­gently gen­er­at­ing, sav­ing, and access­ing both qual­i­ta­tive and quan­ti­ta­tive infor­ma­tion. That means mak­ing every word that would have otherwise-​appeared in an erst­while MS Word doc­u­ment is imme­di­ately search­able by any­one (with per­mis­sion) by post­ing it to a cen­tral data­base using a web form/​editor that looks very sim­i­lar to Word. The future is now – if your firm and staff is ready for it.

If fact, the rec­om­mended pro­ce­dures aren’t much dif­fer­ent than writ­ing this post or read­ing this post or search­ing our site or receiv­ing an RSS feed on par­tic­u­lar cat­e­gories or top­ics or tags.

That’s why we see the cap­ture, trans­mis­sion, reten­tion, and retrieval of both stan­dard and non-​standard qual­i­ta­tive infor­ma­tion as a huge ben­e­fit to firms hooked on some­thing as inef­fec­tive as e-​mail.

With inex­pen­sive form-​generation soft­ware and with (auto­mated) scripts, it is quite easy (and cheap) to cap­ture quan­ti­ta­tive infor­ma­tion as well as stan­dard­ized, qual­i­ta­tive infor­ma­tion and data. How inex­pen­sive? You would be amazed!

Con­tact us for more information.

We’ll likely add to this post and con­tinue to revamp it in the near future.

Copy­right © Spero Con­sult­ing 2009

We have been exper­i­ment­ing with new graph­ics soft­ware and fil­ters and decided to up-​date our template/​theme at Spero Consulting’s web site.

The theme is mostly blue on 80% of the PCs at world head­quar­ters but has a strange, pur­plish cast on our other screens.

We will make changes as we find items that annoy us, and we ask reg­u­lar vis­i­tors and friends for feed­back and to report any prob­lems. Thanks.

We have com­pleted the re-​design and the devel­op­ment of Insight Rising’s web site, and it is live and look­ing good – if we do say so ourselves.

Insight Ris­ing is a sus­tain­abil­ity con­sult­ing firm based in Pitts­burgh, PA. Its motto is: Busi­ness Con­sul­tants for Sus­tain­able Prof­its.

The firm takes a common-​sense approach to sus­tain­abil­ity and “going green,” i.e., that the intel­li­gent choice of sus­tain­able poli­cies and pro­ce­dures are both short-​term profit– and long-​term value-​maximizing.

Its founder and CEO, Bob McNe­ice, believes that because of the wealth-​maximizing effect of such poli­cies, their adop­tion is inevitable; so prospec­tive client firms and orga­ni­za­tions should “go with the flow” to a sus­tain­able and prof­itable future. That’s why the rotat­ing header shows var­i­ous pho­tos of water – mostly flow­ing, although a few are thrown in just because they’re beautiful.

The var­i­ous shades of blue through­out the design tem­plate evoke feel­ings of water and the earth when viewed from afar, i.e., the “Blue Mar­ble,” and the green high­lights com­ple­ment the scheme and remind one of the link between sus­tain­abil­ity and good envi­ron­men­tal prac­tices and… profits.

The firm’s new logo is based upon the famil­iar, Apollo-​era photo of the earth ris­ing above the moon’s sur­face: stark, alone, self-​sustaining, but clearly ris­ing. In our ren­di­tion, the prac­ti­cal, no-​nonsense motto replaces the moon’s hori­zon. We like it! (Thanks NASA.)

While the tem­plate design is the most obvi­ous change to a return­ing vis­i­tor, the state-​of-​the-​art content-​management sys­tem (CMS) and easy-​to–self–man­age back-​office fea­tures will pro­vide the largest long-​term ben­e­fit to the firm, i.e.,

• Adding or edit­ing text, or post­ing pho­tos, graph­ics, or videos, is now as easy as attach­ing them to an e-​mail mes­sage or insert­ing them into a Word document.
• Chang­ing the menu struc­ture or hier­ar­chy can accom­plished with a few clicks of the mouse.
• Search engine opti­miza­tion is built-​in, and the site’s rank­ing within a search results page is avail­able with a mouse click or two.
• Track­ing vis­i­tors and refer­rers is sim­i­larly easy and straight-​forward.

And, as we explained in last month’s announce­ment of Spe​r​o​Con​sult​ing​.mobi, vis­i­tors on cell phones are auto­mat­i­cally redi­rected to a sim­pli­fied, cleaner, smaller, phone-​optimized tem­plate at InsightRis​ing​.mobi.

We think that the entire pack­age is very cool and very sophisticated.

It’s like Bob said, “You’re right. It’s want every­body wants” (in a web site).

We are happy to announce that we have added a new web site exten­sion, Spe​r​o​Con​sult​ing​.mobi, which pro­vides an “opti­mized” expe­ri­ence for vis­i­tors view­ing our site on a (mobile) cell phone.

“Phone vis­i­tors” who enter the site via either the .com or .mobi exten­sion, are now auto­mat­i­cally redi­rected to a scaled-​down, graphics-​free design theme. That speeds page load­ing and reduces data-​related costs and should be more leg­i­ble for those tiny screens.

Com­puter users on desk­tops, lap­tops, etc., can view the new mobi-​optimized theme using the “switch site” wid­get on the left, and phone vis­i­tors can use the gen­er­ated bar code to save the site in their phone.

If you are a reg­u­lar vis­i­tor, please let us know how it looks and runs on your cell phone, includ­ing whether the con­tact form loads and is usable.

P.S. As you can imag­ine, each cell phone will dis­play each theme dif­fer­ently. Visit ready​.mobi to see an cell phone emu­la­tor for four or five dif­fer­ent phones.

That issue of non-​standard appear­ance per­me­ates design deci­sions for reg­u­lar .com sites, too. Con­sider how all of the dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of desk­top and lap­top and net­book mon­i­tors, screen sizes, set­tings, graph­ics cards, browsers, and light­ing con­di­tions show each web page dif­fer­ently, and then appre­ci­ate that design­ers must pro­duce an optimal-​looking site (on the client’s machine), which must be robust across the rea­son­able com­bi­na­tions of those items. By “rea­son­able,” we mean that if a vis­i­tor is using a mono­chrome 600 x 400 screen mon­i­tor, then they are unlikely to pay our con­sult­ing or design rates; so, we’re not par­tic­u­larly wor­ried about their vis­i­tor experience.

P.P.S. This is def­i­nitely some­thing that we will offer to our web design and devel­op­ment clients.

Who Uses MySQL?

You do every day and every time you visit this site or mil­lions of oth­ers on the web.

Not that it mat­ters and not that we fol­low such mat­ters very closely, but until today we have never agreed with any of the Euro­pean Union’s anti-​trust actions against U.S. firms. How­ever, today The Wall Street Jour­nal reports Deal to Buy Sun Meets Oppo­si­tion From EU.

While U.S. anti-​trust author­i­ties approved the merger, the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion is con­cerned about the anti-​competitive effect of Oracle’s pro­posed takeover of Sun Microsys­tems because Sun owns MySQL data­base soft­ware, which is very pop­u­lar open-​source soft­ware and pow­ers many, many dynamic web sites. (We say my-​sequel while other pro­nounce it my-​es-​que-​ell. Whatever.)

Unlike html-​based sites, dynamic sites write pages “on-​the-​fly” by query­ing MySQL data­bases. (Actu­ally, there are hybrid sites, too, that cre­ate, cached, html ver­sions of the data­base calls and queries.) In fact, for many dynamic sites, the search engines don’t actu­ally visit pages, and some­times don’t query the MySQL data­base; instead robots are directed a copy of an XML ver­sion of the site’s content.

If you see the asp exten­sion on an inter­ac­tive form or page, then you know it is a MS-​based active server page. While there are a few other appli­ca­tions, if you see no exten­sion or a php exten­sion, then there is a very high prob­a­bil­ity that the page or form was gen­er­ated from data stored in MySQL, and if it is an inter­ac­tive form, then when you click “sub­mit” the form entries are being sent to a MySQL database.

Any­way, when the acqui­si­tion was announced we won­dered how it would affect the future avail­abil­ity of MySQL. Ora­cle claims that it is not an issue, but we also won­der about future improve­ment and devel­op­ment, too. Ora­cle and the U.S. Jus­tice Depart­ment have con­cluded that other open source soft­ware will take its place.

We’re not as sure because the open-​source and free nature of MySQL makes it the data­base on the web. It’s fast, it’s free, it’s large-​scale, and industrial-​strength. What’s not to like? (HTML based sites are sooo sec­ond mil­len­nium, and Flash-​based sites are like stereo-​typical blond beau­ties: pretty, but dumb, par­tic­u­larly with respect to search-​engine-​optimization.)

MySQL is the “M” in LAMP (Linux-​Apache-​MySQL-​PHP) servers/​web plat­forms. All four com­po­nents are open-​source and free and state-​of-​the-​art and per­mit web host­ing ser­vices to offer shared host­ing sites for only a few dol­lars per month. (LAMP and WAMP and XAMMP and var­i­ous other bun­dles can all be down­loaded for free and installed on home or com­pany servers, and all work flawlessly.)

We don’t have much expe­ri­ence with expen­sive, large-​scale data­bases like Ora­cle, but in our view, these var­i­ous AMP pack­ages are far supe­rior to their equiv­a­lent Microsoft prod­ucts (and, of course, far cheaper).

All of our web design and infor­ma­tion sys­tem design work uses MySQL com­bined with either free or very inex­pen­sive web appli­ca­tions and form gen­er­a­tors. The form gen­er­a­tors are very sophis­ti­cated and per­mit writ­ing and query­ing of the MySQL data­bases. It’s very easy for small and mid-​sized firms to leap-​frog large, bureau­cratic orga­ni­za­tions to obtain afford­able, cus­tomized, and state-​of-​the-​art web-​based sys­tems for both inter­nal and exter­nal users.

It’s a great time to be alive and to con­sult on these issues. Along with other open-​source soft­ware and appli­ca­tions, MySQL is a large part of the beauty of it all.

Our largest web project to date is now live at ArcofWPA​.org.

It con­sists of six inde­pen­dent sites for Aad­van­tage, Inc.; its four sub­sidiaries; and a shared on-​line trans­ac­tion cen­ter (for dona­tions and purchases).

Each site uses the same con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem, but the sep­a­rate instal­la­tions improve secu­rity, espe­cially when one site is a web store and another site includes a com­mu­nity chat room for fam­i­lies and parents.

The store is a sim­ple, easy-​to-​administer shop­ping cart inte­grated into the con­tent man­age­ment system.

All of the sites share a com­mon theme that gives a casual, hope­ful, and invit­ing appear­ance. The back­ground, which resem­bles denim and gives it a casual feel, is actu­ally the repli­ca­tion of a sin­gle hor­i­zon­tal line from a photo of a per­fect, blue sky. (As it turns out, there are a lot of col­ors in a per­fect, blue sky.) The light behind the tag line of ‘help­ing oth­ers help them­selves,’ is a dis­tor­tion of the sun from the same photograph.

Those fea­tures com­bine with the bright, solid, metal­lic header logo. It floats above the back­ground and con­tent box and illus­trates that Arc/​Aadvantage is here, avail­able, and ready to help.

Other func­tions include time-​saving fea­tures, like on-​line job appli­ca­tions and cal­en­dars – all designed to improve orga­ni­za­tional effi­ciency and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. (At a dif­fer­ent site, we know some­one who goes their organization’s web site to enter reg­is­tra­tions and appli­ca­tions that are still sub­mit­ted on paper.)

Finally, we’re using the same open-​source web appli­ca­tions and incred­i­bly inex­pen­sive form builders and data­base pro­grams to build man­age­ment infor­ma­tion sys­tems. Obtain­ing the state-​of-​the-​art, whether for pub­lic web sites or pri­vate infor­ma­tion sys­tems, has never been cheaper or more within the reach of small and medium-​sized firms.

Con­tact us for more infor­ma­tion or to gain access to our design cen­ter.

Pre­vi­ously, we main­tained a site, http://​Try​.Spe​r​o​Con​sult​ing​.com, which per­mit­ted poten­tial clients to inves­ti­gate the back office of our con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (CMS). We also cre­ated a sep­a­rate site, http://​Test​.Spe​r​o​Con​sult​ing​.com, where users could try dif­fer­ent themes or skins. Those themes could pro­vide some inspi­ra­tion for the appear­ance a site owner is seek­ing. They can be cus­tomized or sim­i­lar themes can be inde­pen­dently designed.

Recently, we com­bined those two sites into a sin­gle com­pre­hen­sive one: http://​Design​.Spe​r​o​Con​sult​ing​.com. Besides pro­vid­ing access to the back office and to the var­i­ous themes, it pro­vides exam­ples of our work and exam­ples of commonly-​sought fea­tures, e.g., maps, con­tact forms, etc.

If you are inter­ested in vis­it­ing it, send a note, and we’ll send a user name and password.

There is no oblig­a­tion, and other than send­ing cre­den­tials, we won’t con­tact you unless you con­tact us (unless you are abu­sive, of course).