Choosing a Webmaster

Everybody seems to have figured out that they really need to have a website for their business these days.

Excellent.

So they go out and throw thousands of dollars at the first person they don't understand. Because that means that person really knows what they're doing, right? RIGHT?

Not so excellent.

Then they figure out that they've made a mistake and are genuinely eager to correct it. To do that, they need another webmaster.  But they still have no idea how to choose one and they don't want to make the same mistake again. Plus they blew their budget on the first webmaster. So they decide that they're trapped and live with whatever mess they're original webmaster made.

Very not excellent.

If you choose a doctor, you know this person has, at a minimum, graduated from medical school and received a license. If you choose a lawyer, you know this person has, at a minimum, graduated from law school and passed the bar. Webmasters don't have any minimum requirements. Anyone can announce that they are one. So, how do you choose?

You Are Not Stupid

New clients often tell me how stupid they are because they don't know anything about how websites work. As if I could do their jobs!

There is no reason to expect that you should somehow simply have an understanding of website design. It's a skill like any other. The people who know how to do it sat down and learned it, just like you learned the skills necessary for your job. Your webmaster should be able and willing to explain what they are doing and why in terms you can understand. You are not required to blindly accept anything they say and sign anything they hand you. You don't need to understand all the technical details of how everything works, but they should be able to clearly explain what a domain name is and help you choose a good one. They should also be able to explain the benefit their choices have for you, not just for them.

When you ask questions of your webmaster, you should get answers, not technical obfuscations. Say you ask: Will I have to check another email address?

Bad Webmaster: Gobbledygook flux capacitor temporal shift tardis YOU MUST GIVE ME $500 MORE DOLLARS TO SAVE YOU FROM THE EMAILS gobbledygook blarg.

Good Webmaster: Not if you don't want to. I can set you up a professional email address, but forward the messages to your GMail account so you only have to look in one place.

Retain Control

Not owning your website address (domain name) is like not owning your business name. Do not sign on with a webmaster who does not give you complete control and ownership over your domain name and your hosting account. In the best case, even the most professional and qualified webmaster can get hit by a bus. In the worst case, your webmaster may turn out to be both incompetent and vindictive. If your webmaster wants to create a hostage situation, walk away. Period. Before committing to a webmaster and/or a hosting service, make sure of the following:

1. Your domain is registered in your name, not the webmaster's.
2. The email address for the domain admin contact is yours, not the webmaster's.
3. You have the login and password to access a domain management area where you can change nameservers and/or transfer the domain. You don't need to know what to do with this information, but you must have it available if you want someone else to be able to help you.
4. Your hosting account is in your name, uses your email address, and is on your credit card, not in the webmaster's name or on their reseller account. This is crucial if you ever need to get account information from the hosting company. I recommend not using a webmaster that hosts sites on their own server.
5. You have the login and password to access your hosting account. You don't need to know what to do with this information, but you must have it available if you want someone else to be able to help you.

In general, websites follow the money and the primary email address. make sure that both are yours.

Your website should also be yours. Webmaster will often put a small credit for themselves on sites they build. This is okay, but you should be able to remove it if you wish. The webmaster should also not claim copyright for any content you've written yourself or any artwork created for you. If content or artwork has been licensed from elsewhere, you should have a copy of those licenses for reference if needed.

Get What You Pay For

Certain large companies have taken to sending salespeople out to small businesses to pressure the owners into paying hundreds of dollars per month for a poorly designed web page. They claim that they are doing huge amounts of search engine optimization (SEO) work and suchlike for this money.

This is ridiculous. They are doing no such thing. They are certainly not doing hundreds of dollars per month worth of work. A well-made website with good SEO work built into it will do just as well or better.

For most small businesses, shared hosting is fine, comes with all the tools you need, and costs about $10 per month or less.  If you are paying more than that per month, something is wrong.

In general, your webmaster should not be collecting monthly maintenance fees from you unless there are some very specific tasks they perform on your site every month. For example, if they update your calendar of events each month, then a reasonable monthly fee is fine. Otherwise, you shouldn't be billed unless you ask them to do something for you.

Competence Counts

Websites aren't just pretty. They need to work. It can be difficult to tell if a webmaster is technically competent from the outside, but there are some clues you can look for. Ask them for links to sites they've built.  When you look at them, don't concentrate so much on whether you like blue or not.  Look for signs that this person knows what they are doing.

• Do things line up and appear to be the same size?
• Are the fonts consistent,or do they change at random?
• Are images scaled correctly, or do they look stretchy or distorted?
• Are there typos?
• Do links go to the right places, or are they broken?

Even people who don't know anything about websites know they want to show up on Google. Determining if your potential webmaster knows about good SEO is trickier, but there are some clues you can look for.

• Check the page titles by hovering your mouse over the browser tab. They should all be different and contain reasonable search terms for the site.
• If you have a browser that will show image properties, make sure that the images have alt tags that contain reasonable search keywords.

•  Look for large blocks of text that are actually pictures of text. Search engines can't read these and a good webmaster will avoid them in favor of actual text unless the client insists on them for some reason.

You should also ask your webmaster if they speak any web development programming or scripting languages. You're looking for answers like: Javascript, PHP, Perl, Python, AJAX, ASP, etc. You don't need to know what these are, but it's tough to build a good website these days without getting into at least a little bit of coding, so your webmaster should have some experience in this area.

Providing Guidance

Ultimately, the decisions about your website will be yours, but a good webmaster will let you know if you are making a choice that will cost you in terms of usability or search engine rankings. As a test, tell your potential webmaster that you want the name of your business to be in very large text on every page and that you want it to blink. If they don't at least suggest that you rethink that decision, you need to talk to someone else.

There's more, of course, but it's hard to check for unless you already know what you're doing. Hopefully, this information will help you choose the right person to get your business online.

A Bad Night on World of Tanks (Trigger Warning)

I while ago, I posted about how much I was enjoying playing World of Tanks. I still am enjoying the game, but last night, a player did something that made me consider never playing it again.

I knew what I was getting into when I started playing an online game. The gamer community is not the most courteous or politically correct group of people one will ever encounter. They insult people. They talk trash. They rant. They whine.  OK, fine. Whatever.

They also employ no shortage of racial slurs, sexist language, and rape references. Not fine, but the game has limited communications and I don't control the universe, so I just try to ignore that stuff.

Last night, however, one of the players took it too far. He "raped" me.

I was driving a type of tank called a tank destroyer. This tank is not very maneuverable and its gun doesn't turn all the way around. My tank was damaged in such a way that I couldn't turn or move, rendering me unable to defend myself from anyone who wasn't directly in front of me. An enemy tank approached me from behind. Instead of destroying my tank by shooting it, he instead announced via chat that there would now be butt-rape, and proceeded to kill me slowly, a few points at a time, by ramming my tank repeatedly and rhythmically from behind. It was icky, to say the least. There was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I felt like vomiting. He clearly intended it to echo a rape (as he explicitly said so) and he succeeded.

I understand that these are competitive and aggressive people. I understand that they enjoy putting aside the rules of courtesy when they play and reveling in being assholes. I wish that they would understand that behavior like what I encountered last night is not being an asshole. It's not gloating.  It triggers reactions that extend well outside the scope of the game and persist long after the round is over.  If this person had been able to see me and the effect he was having, I believe (hope) that he would have stopped immediately and apologized.

I wish that these folks would understand that, despite the low incidence of women/girls in these games (gee, I wonder why that could be), there is a sadly high likelihood that there is a survivor of rape and/or sexual abuse in any given round. This includes the men/boys. There is a line that has nothing to do with politics or correctness. Crossing it doesn't make you edgy. It makes you ugly and violent.

Um...Burger King?

OK, I'm not sure why this needs to be said, but apparently Burger King needs to be reminded that they sell food. That people eat. With their mouths.

When I was younger, Burger King ads featured delicious-looking flame-broiled hamburgers and a song about how they'd make my burger however I wanted. The song was so catchy that I can still sing it all the way through without even thinking, so it's not like it wasn't working.

Then, they got a new ad agency. Who decided that the best way to get people to buy burgers was by showing me an incredibly creepy plastic-headed king with dead eyes and an "I like to wear skins" grin. I don't know...maybe lots of people thought it was all edgy or something, but I haven't set foot inside a Burger King since I started associating it with waking up to find a plastic-headed serial killer in my bedroom, as depicted on one of the commercials. Burger King even calls this thing "The Creepy King" so it's not like they don't know. At any rate, I'm not eating anything that The Creepy King hands me, that's for darn sure!

Recently though, Burger King had a marketing epiphany. They decided to ditch The Creepy King and instead try to get me to buy burgers by ... wait for it ... showing me Steve Tyler of Aerosmith TOUCHING MY FOOD. Now, think what you will about Aerosmith's music. The fact remains that Steve Tyler makes a point of being a very very dirty boy. He's not clean. He's not nice. He's not safe. So, why in the FDA would I want to eat anything that he's been even marginally involved with? WHY?

Then, there is the "Mr. Beckham Goes to Burger King" commercial. David Beckham is drop-dead gorgeous and I'm always happy to see him show up on my TV, but the commercial is about the entire staff of BK failing to serve him food.

Burger King: You sell the ability to walk up to a counter and get a reasonably edible burger for a relatively small amount of money in a short amount of time.  At least, you used to. I never go to Burger King anymore, because I really can't figure out what it is you do now. Well done.

The Pareto Principle For Developers

For those who don't know, the Pareto Principle is that thing that says 80% of effects come from 20% of the causes. So, while ten goths may have collectively used all the eyeliner, two of them (we'll call them the Bogart Twins) used 80% of it between them. 

The Pareto Principle has been applied to software developers by saying that we spend 80% of our time on 20% of the work for any given project. I've come to the conclusion that this is hooey. We do not spend 80% of our time on 20% of the work. We spend 10% of our time doing the entire project and the remaining 90% is consumed by some minute detail that should have taken five minutes and ends up eating three days.

I once did a little project where I knocked out the code that did the actual work in a couple of hours. I then spent days battling the generic installer so I could deploy the thing. Which was frustrating, but not even close to the stupidest of the examples I can offer.

If you want to see me levitate with anger, let's talk about the time I couldn't get something to be the right color. It was a simple RGB setting. It was even called RGB. I checked my value over and over again. I tried multiple syntaxes. I pored over the documentation. I cursed the gods. Eventually, I stumbled upon the problem. Some clever soul had decided that RGB values should really be specified in alphabetical order, i.e. BGR.  They also decided that this was so obviously correct, it didn't need to be documented. I'm not making this up.

I've also spent absurd amounts of my time filling out structures. Filling out structures isn't a problem. Needs to be done. However, filling out structures where many of the members must be set and there is only one valid value for each one and it's cryptic and it doesn't default and you have to go look up what The Magic Value is for each one of them makes me want to take up drinking just to see if it all makes more sense with a bottle of Scotch in me.

I could go on. And on. And on and on and on and on and on. We all could. As I publish this, I'm actually a bit concerned that the planet will be knocked off its orbit by the sheer force of all the programmers nodding their heads.

So remember, when you pay a programmer for an hour of their time, remember: 90% of that is to pay a person to sit at a desk with their head in their hands weeping at someone else's remarkable stupidity.

Thanks, but no thanks.

I saw yet another TV show last night where a man looked earnestly into a woman's eyes, told her that he'd wanted her from the moment he saw her, and she melted.

I just don't get it. If somebody wants me the moment they see me, then they don't want me. They want my hair, or my ass, or my breasts, or the way I echo something that's already in their head. This is not something for which I melt.

I want somebody who has wanted me since they read my source code, or heard me speak about good design principles, or saw my thoughts on women's issues, or found out that I think it's really important to be kind to the people around you. Something besides a visual impression reacting with their own preconceptions.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but, "You have beautiful eyes," doesn't even catch my interest, let alone make me swoon. I'm much more likely to roll my "beautiful" eyes and get on with what I was doing. Because I'm doing things. Things that do not involve sitting around waiting for some random guy to decide he might be willing to hit that. Or even to have coffee with that.

I run a business. I write code. I participate in my community. I garden. I cook for pleasure. I play World of Tanks. I read. I do things with my family. It takes a lot more than a vague compliment about my looks to get my attention these days. Especially since I don't consider the fact that said random guy thinks that his opinion on my looks will be important to me to be a compliment in the first place.

I'm complicated. I'm sophisticated. I'm engaged in many activities and interests. I'm multi-dimensional. I'm variable. I'm articulate. I'm interesting. Yes, I'm also pretty by some standards, but if that's why someone is interested in me, then I'm not interested in them.

I've reached a stage in my life where I require someone who wants to be with me to engage with me as a whole person. Anything less is just a waste of my time and energy, and those are precious commodities.

So, no, I'm not a bitch because I don't consider Random Person thinking I'm hot to be a high-priority event that deserves my attention. It's just not very important to me compared to the other things in my life, like the people who have actually gotten to know me. Sorry.

How To Be Cool

My partner told me a story today about a guy he knew in high school and recently reconnected with on Facebook. This guy was really nice. He was kind even to people who were not kind to him. He did his best to like even people who did not like him.

He grew up to be an investment lawyer. A very wealthy and successful investment lawyer. He accomplished this not through the kind of reprehensible investment strategies that have so damaged our economy, but through slow, smart investments. Investments that made money for him, his clients, and generally strengthened the economic environment in which he moved.

He leads a full and well-rounded life. He earns a good living. He has a family. He writes and plays music. And he's still a really nice guy.

When my partner reconnected with him, he was welcoming and glad to be back in touch. He sent some of his music. He still speaks to people with kindness, even though he is well out of the economic class of many of his friends. He provides good and thorough investment advice when asked without being superior or dismissive.

He was a good boy who has grown into a good man.

At the end of the story, my partner bowed his head and said, "And this is the guy I ditched in high school because I didn't think he was cool."

How World of Tanks Ate My Brain

For about two years now, my best friend has been playing World of Tanks. He's been playing a lot. And by a lot, I mean he recently played his 4000th round. I was really surprised by this because, while he likes tank games, he doesn't like online games that you play with groups of other people. I kept expecting him to get fed up with that part of it and move on, but he didn't.

About six months ago, he started telling me hopefully about how you could now "platoon" with another person so both of you would always be on the same team. "Oh crap," thought I. "He wants to me to play some stupid-ass video game."

I hate video games. I like playing card games on the computer, but I really dislike most video games. I hate games you can't pause. I hate playing against other people. I hate games where you have to drive. I hate games where you have to shoot. I I have terrible problems with directionality, reading maps, and orienting myself in first-person view games. World of Tanks has all of those things.

Needless to say, I declined to platoon.

A few weeks ago, I was in a particularly good mood and as he was finishing a round of the game, I said I wanted to try playing a a round. He couldn't hand me laptop fast enough. So, I played a round of the stupid game. Then he tried to get the laptop back. Which didn't work out well because it turns out that I love this game. I shouldn't love it. It has everything I hate in a game, but somehow they managed to balance all the elements in such a way that I'm having an absolute blast playing it.

Currently, I've got an M3 Stuart. Some of the players know everything about the actual tanks, but I'm doing pretty well just to remember the name of the one I'm driving. The game has tried to be pretty good about replicating the actual capabilities and features of all the tanks in the game, but where it really shines is where they decided that purity just isn't fun.

When you enter a round, you are on one of about 20 maps with 29 other tanks, 15 to a team. The other tanks may or may not ever have been on the same field as yours in real life, or even in the same war. WWI American tanks are mixed with WWII German tanks. Chinese tanks are teamed with French tanks. The only thing that controls which 30 tanks end up in the same round is that they fall in the same range of  capabilities. A Tier I tank doesn't find itself in the middle of ten Tier 7's, which just wouldn't be any fun at all. None of the maps are real places and none of the battles ever happened. The rules are simple and the possible strategies are endless. Some people can't drive. Others can fire accurately while driving backwards in a circle. Those who get killed continue to shout advice at the survivors via chat. It's exciting and addictive and a giant pile of fun.

However, this game is eating my brain, especially when I'm driving my car. I find that I am taking corners tightly and carefully to avoid ambush. I am certain that all bushes conceal an enemy about to fire on me. I have to resist pausing before I crest hills and stop myself from hanging sharp rights into fields to avoid staying on the roads. I have to remember that my 2002 Taurus cannot crash through walls or drive over other cars. I wonder why my artillery is not taking out the oncoming traffic.

I plan to continue playing this game, but if you are driving through my area, be careful. I may be "hull down" on the other side of a hill or camping in the bushes waiting to strike.