Welcome to the January 2003 issue of the CyberArtisans monthly newsletter!

Our goal is to present information that will be useful to you as a web site owner. If these newsletters are not useful to you, please forward this to a friend who will find it useful. To unsubscribe, follow the directions at the bottom of this email.

Today's topics
Web Content
E-Commerce and the Holidays
Spam and Anti-Spam, or Why Your Email May be Disappearing
BNI

Last issue I mentioned that a previous issue was inadvertently numbered incorrectly but noted that nobody caught that. Unfortunately, in the same issue, I announced that it was the December 2000 issue of this newsletter. Quite a few of you caught that, and that error led me to this month's topic:

The Content of Your Website

Website technology is so new (well, at least compared to print technology) that we tend to get caught up in the techie stuff and forget that the real purpose of a website is to convey information. And that means that all the old-fashioned issues of good writing rear their ugly heads:

• Good grammar
• Good spelling
• Good organization
• Accurate information

Remember, if your visitors can't understand what you've written on your website, or if what you've written is inaccurate, no amount of technology can fix this. It's almost painful to watch an expensive Flash movie and realize that some of the words in the movie are misspelled. All that money for the fancy technology and nobody bothered to spell-check the text!

Back in the Stone Age (that is, before the web), I made my living as a tech writer, translating engineering English (yes, I realize many believe that to be an oxymoron) into mere-mortals English. Now years later, it's still a useful skill, helping to make sure the websites I build really convey the information their owners intend them to. Which is why I really should have known better than to add something at the last minute (like "December 2000") without double-checking it before sending it out.

E-Commerce and the Holidays

If you read the papers or listen to the news, you know that the holidays were not kind to those retailers who depend on this one time of the year to carry them through to profitability. However, you may also have noticed that holiday sales on the web nearly doubled over last year. There's a reason for this – e-commerce works. And it works because:

1. The cost of entry has come way down. There are now lots of ways to set it up depending on the number of transactions you expect to do in a month and the value of the average transaction.
2. The mechanisms for doing e-commerce are now easy to implement and very reliable.
3. The number of people comfortable with buying (and using a credit card) on the web has now reached critical mass. At least among those Americans who have been computer users for a while, it's now relatively unusual to find someone afraid to use a credit card in a web transaction. This is a complete reverse of the situation only a couple of years ago.
4. The protections against credit-card fraud have matured to the point where a careful retailer can limit his/her exposure to a very comfortable (although non-zero) level.
5. The number of large and small e-commerce retailers has reached critical mass – it's no longer a gimmick, it's just another way to buy things.

If you are considering taking the plunge, look at the e-commerce section of our website for lots of useful information.

Incidentally, yesterday's (Monday, January 27) Wall Street Journal had an entire section devoted to e-commerce. Their lead story pointed out that merchants are considerably more at risk than consumers when it comes to credit card use online. Moral: ask your web developer about credit card fraud protection and don't be satisfied with a "Don't worry about it" answer.

Spam and Anti-Spam, or why Your Email May be Disappearing

Spam (unsolicited and unwanted email) is a growing problem. Unfortunately, many people don't know that anti-Spam software is also a growing problem. It works like this: People complain about the amount of Spam they are getting, so your ISP installs anti-Spam software. That software uses a system of rules to determine what is Spam, so you get only the email that passes the rules.

Here's the catch: Nobody has succeeded in coming up with a set of rules that always lets the good stuff through and only stops the bad stuff. So some Spam still comes through, and some email you wanted to come through gets dumped. That's right – dumped. Your correspondents may or may not get a notice that their email never reached you.

As a side-note to this, many ISPs are also limiting the size of the email they will accept. For ordinary email this is not a problem, but if you regularly send and receive images and files, this could stop them cold. And again, you may or may not get notice that this is happening.

Business Network Int'l

Some of you may be familiar with this organization, known informally as "BNI." The organization has chapters throughout this country and the world (most recent count is 2,600 chapters). Each chapter is a group of business-people who meet once a week to trade business referrals. Only one member of any business classification is permitted in a chapter, so there is no direct competition within the chapter.

Our chapter meets Thursdays at 7:00 AM. That's right, the meeting starts promptly at 7:00 AM, which means we get out of bed at some ungodly hour before the heat comes up or the sun shines. Why so early? Well, few people are willing to drag their butt out of bed at that hour week after week without seeing results, so you end up with a crowd of truly dedicated people who really work at exchanging good referrals. And since the meeting ends (again promptly) at 8:30, there's little or no interference with the business day.

If you are interested in joining a BNI chapter, go to http://www.bnimass.com if you are in the eastern Massachusetts area. Otherwise, contact me for information.

If you are in the Greater Boston area and looking for a reference to a reliable professional in any of these fields, contact me:

Thanks for joining us this month. See you next month.

Jonathan Spencer
CyberArtisans Web Developers

http://www.cyberartisans.com/
617-965-4110