I've got my web page. What Next?

This is a living document. The latest version can always be found at http://www.alanrowoth.com/Web201.shtml. Please work from the online version, rather than this paper handout as the online version is loaded with live links and is updated often. This paper is already out of date. Comments and suggestions are welcomed by the author, Alan Rowoth

Master of my own domain

If you haven't already registered for your own domain name, you should definitely think again about doing so. Having your own domain name (i.e. BingCrosby.com) offers you a lot of benefits. The first and foremost is indirection. You can move your site from ISP (internet Service Provider) to ISP without ever distrupting the flow of your email and web traffic. Another benefit is that you can make it easy to type and remember. Try not to use hard to spell words or abbreviations in your name if you can help it. Build Visibility and name recognition. For anyone who plans to stay in music for several years and make a few bucks at it, I think it just makes sense to have your own domain name. It costs $35 bucks a year for the name. That's less than a vanity license plate. (And a LOT less than it would probably cost you to reprint all your promo materials with a web or email address.)

Domain name registration changed a while back. There used to be just one place where you could register your domain name, but now there is a list of registrars that you can purchase the name thru. All are working with the master domain list of the internet, so don't worry that someone else could register your domain with a different registrar. I can't tell you much about the different registrars. I first worked with is Network Solutions and they are fine. Lately, I've been using NameSecure as they include some excellent Value Added services for free. Most important is Virtual Domain redirection, which allows you to host your own .com virtually anywhere on the web. This is useful and can be a real moneysaver.

Many web hosting services will try to get you to have them register the domain name for you and charge you extra for virtual hosting your site. The Network Solutions web site does a bit of the same thing by trying to sell you their dot com essentials package for an additional $35 or so a year, but their web page indicates that they now include virtual hosting free with any domain name registered thru them. I imagine that their competitors are probably doing the same thing. This used to cost extra, but competition appears to have driven the cost down to nothing so that the registrars can feature compete with one another.

There are a number of registrars or registrar resellers that offer domain name registration for as low as about $7 per year, but all of the deals that I've seen at that price have hidden gotchas or extra fees for the level of service that Namesecure provides. I did a quick search for independent registrar ratings, but the pages I found all seemed to be sales hype for one registrar or another.

Web Hosting

There are hundreds of places where you can host your page. Most of you get free Web space from the ISP that you use to connect to the internet. Anyone who owns an Apple Computer running OS9 or above also gets free webspace from Apple. There are dozens of providers like ProHosting who host web pages either for a small fee or for the ability to "pop" advertizing to people who visit your site. I use Pair.com to host the folkmusic.org site and have been very happy with their service. I'm currently paying $5.95 a month for that one. Pair is great with virtually no down time, great access and durability. I couldn't recommend them more highly. Their email and account management tools are also excellent. Another longtime friend to the folk community, Brian "Breadman" Wolfsohn, also offers competitive web hosting rates as well as web design services and more personalized help service for musician web pages. For more info, visit his site at Cusfolks.com.

ZDnet has an online article about choosing a web hosting service, but it is two years old and only compares a handful of providers. Still it may provide some food for thought.

Publicizing your page.

Ringing Phone There are 3 primary routes that lead viewers to your website.

The first is putting the link on all of your printed materials and products. Your web address and email are as important as your phone number and they probably cost you less to use for communication.
Second is crosslinking. Convince your vendors, customers, fans, and friends to link to and publicize your site to their contacts and widen the circle.
Third is search engines. This is about the only way that someone who hasn't heard of you is going to stumble across your site.

You can also purchase conventional billboard, radio, tv, and print advertizing to promote your domain. This is sparsely used by independent musicians because of the high cost, but it's not unthinkable. Press releasing for other newsworthy career events should always include your URL though.

Search Engine Strategies

Search engines use a wide variety of criteria to relevance rank their results. These also change from time to time so it's sort of a moving target. Here is a table describing some search engine features. Common algorithms that engines use to rank sites may include some combination of

Frequency and matching of keywords or keyword pairs in the Page Title (Remember that the <Title> is your bookmark name!)
Frequency and matching of keywords or keyword pairs in the body or first 200 words in the page body
Frequency and matching of keywords or keyword pairs in the keywords Meta Tag of the page
Frequency and matching of keywords or keyword pairs in the description Meta Tag of the page
Language specified in language Meta Tag of the page
Content rating in content Meta Tag
How recently or how frequently the page was updated
How often their users have pursued that link from the engine
User content ratings
Connection speed
Affiliation with partner sites
Personal evaluation score from content critic associated with the site

This is by no means a complete list, but it gives you an idea of some things to consider. You should also be aware that many web crawlers (or spiders) associated with search engines, may not drill down and follow graphic links or dynamically served pages on your site. Always provide text link alternatives to imagemap links and be aware that certain page types or extensions (like .asp, .shmtl, and .phtml) may be ignored by those crawlers. Don't firewall your important searchable data behind those bulwarks. These robots aren't too smart...

Include a robots.txt file in your web directory so that visiting crawlers can find out more about the content you want (and don't want) indexed.

Want more insight on successful search engine placement? Read these pages:

Meta-Tags

Meta Tags are text added to the code of your web page. Invisible to the web user, they are utilized by search engines and other web resources to describe your data. They are plenty of meat for a tutorial all their own. Read this tutorial and follow the links. Then do a couple of web searches on content similar to yours and see what type of descriptive tags they use to get their high search engine ratings. (Remember, you can view the source code of any web page thru most browsers just by picking that option from the view menu of your browser. Whenever you see a page with a neat feature, you should get in the habit of checking the code to see how they did it.)

The Meta tags for this page are:

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Alan Rowoth, LPL, Liverpool, FolkBiz, folk_music, folkmusic, folkmusic.org, folk, folk music, Peltonia, Auburn, Freeze Frame, Allinger, photos, tutorials, macintosh, sound, lighting, Folk Alliance">: Provides search engines with a list of keywords and keyword pairs that folks might use in searching the page. Overused words (more than 3 times) may be interpreted as spam by some search engines. Suggest keeping length to 500 characters or less.
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="A tutorial by Alan Rowoth, describing strategies to enhance the content and visibility of home grown web pages. Includes meta tags and online payment options.">: Text Description of the page contents and purpose. Often returned word for word by the search engine to prospective viewers. Should be short and concise or it may be truncated.
<META NAME="copyright" CONTENT="Copyright Alan Rowoth 2000">: Identifies holder of the page copyright.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Reply-to" CONTENT="alan@alanrowoth.com (Alan Rowoth)">: Provides a mailto: link for those who may be searching for the person responsible for the page content.
<META NAME="rating" CONTENT="General">: Rating tag prevents some "kid-friendly" filters from blocking access to your content.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="content-type: text/html; charset= ISO-8859-1">: Identifies the character set that should be used to display the content.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="content-language" content= "en">: Identifies the language of the page
<META NAME="distribution" CONTENT=global>: Identifies the intended distribution of the page to users
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="all">: Tells Robots and webcrawlers that they are permitted to scan and index the content of the page.

I am not the ultimate guru of Meta tags. I found these in various places and decided to assemble and implement them on my pages. I'm sure that there are others and different ways to format that data, but I know it's better to have the tags than not to. I put Meta tags on every web page I create, not just the Top page in a site.

CGI programs

CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface. These are programs or plug-ins external to the web server itself that do other jobs for you like sending email, processing form data, or counting page visitors. CGI's must be installed by the webmaster, although some virtual hosting accounts include the ability to create and load your own CGI programs. Most often, these programs are installed and selected by your ISP. For instance, AOL has CGI programs installed for page counters, password access, guestbook, and forms processing via email, but they don't let you add your own CGI's. AOL also offers classes and online tutorials on web page building to their members, as do many other ISP's.

It is important to remember that CGI programs are environment specific, so you can't count on copying someone else's code to see how they did something. They also often use invisible template files to process the data sent to them. See your webmaster with specific questions about how to implement a certain CGI feature on your site. (or interact with others on the same host and learn from their code.) Homegrown CGI's often written in PERL and may take the form of text files that are interpreted and compiled upon execution or they may be compiled into binary executeables already. It is very enlightening to view the source code of CGI programs, but often this is not available to the user. There are many chapters of PERL mongers scattered around the world. Here's a map so you can see if there is a group in your area.

JavaScript and Java Applets

Java is a crossplatform language developed by Sun Microsystems that has found widespread usage both on the web and in device control applications. Sun is now promoting a related spec they call JINI for home control and networking of all sorts of smart devices with distributed intelligence over self describing networks.

Java can be integrated into your web work in several ways with a variety of Java Enabled web browsers. The simplest and most universal form of Java is JavaScript, which can be embedded in text form, right into your web pages. This is the easiest to learn and implement because it is essentially self documenting and easy to find and study. Java programmers can also precompile Java Applets (which run on the client side) or Servlets (which run on the server side) to perform more advanced functions that in the past always had to be CGI driven. The problems with Java Applets are manifold. Each platform has slightly different Java machines. (There are 3 that run on the Macintosh alone.) and Applets may perform unpredictably from browser to browser. Microsoft in particular has tools that create broken java code which works in their broken implementation of Java but no one elses. Some novice PC users also try to create Java code thru Visual BASIC and wind up including bits of Visual BASIC code which is not supported on non-Windoze systems. Java crashes can lock up machines and permanently drive users away from your site. Be sure that what you GET from Java is worth what you may be giving up. Server based Java Servlets are much less crash prone because you only need to debug them for your server, not for everyone's browser.

Another frequent use of Java applets is to create web based animations although sometimes the same effect can be achieved thru the use of animated GIF files or server push animations.

If you want to start with Java, visit Suns page for Java Newbies. Java adds a great deal of power and flexibility to the web experience, but implementations are currently somewhat fragile and troublesome. Don't get in over your hear unless you need the additional capability that Java offers.

Server Side Includes (SSI)

Another useful tool for creating dynamic web contect is Server Side Include. This, again, is server specific and you must consult the reference for your specific platform and server before you start writing code for it. There isn't a huge risk of incompatibility problems because once the code is debugged on your server, it should work repeatably. In fact, server side include is sometimes used to resolve browser compatibility problems by serving up pages customized for different user agents (browsers).

SSI is a preprocessor for certain pages, that adds or changes content on the pages as they are served. A few uses for SSI include:

Serving differing content to members and nonmembers or onsite versus offsite users.
Adding custom headers, footers, backgrounds and other page attributes to each page in a site.
Updating page modification dates automatically.
Customizing multimedia content for a users connection speed
Customizing formatting code for specific browsers (frames/noframes or Explorer Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) versus Netscape Layers commands)
Restricting security sensitive content to specific IP numbers
Serving content specific to the referring page that lead the user to this page.
Allowing different individuals to be responsible for "content capsules" within the web page without giving allowing them to change the overall look and feel.

The possibilities for Server Side include are almost limitless. So much so, that I process all the pages at my site thru SSI before I serve them. I could change the look and feel of my entire web page just by changing one text file that is loaded into all of my pages as they come up. We have to send all of our dialin users to a web based authentication before they can access library databases from home. All the external users get the authentication links while all of our onsite users go directly to the resources. My navigation bars are all SSI based and loaded into the pages. Each NavBar can be changed on every page with a single code change. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that this is cool technology. It does have to be enabled on your site and many larger sites only preprocess certain pages, usually designated with a .ssi or .shtml extender or a hidden execution bit in the page header.

Consult your server documentation for implementation notes on your server. To stimulate your creative thinking, here are a couple of more Server Side Include tutorials on the web.

RealMedia, Shockwave, MP3, and Apple Quicktime

People have been delivering audio and video content over the web for a couple of years using RealPlayer, Shockwave, Mpeg Level 3, and Apple's Quicktime, but it's just in the last year or so that this technology has really taken off. The growing number of users with a high bandwidth internet connection is growing rapidly and they are the target market for this technology. Users with a 28.8 or even a 56k modem can barely sip at these files, but cable modems and DSL telephone modems mean that it's finally possible to receive audio/video broadcasts in real time thru your computer system. For proof of that, check out Jesse Berst's article on Internet Audio or the online collections of the Library of Congress. For some of the coolest video content around, check out the TV commercials archive at the Ad Critic.

To prepare your content for online delivery you'll need creation tools. Sadly, they are proprietary and require separate software for RealMedia, Shockwave, and MP3 encoding, so you'll have to get software for each round of media creation or pick one format that suits you best. In the past, RealPlayer and Shockwave have enjoyed a certain advantage over other formats. They were the first to market with streaming server technology and they delivered (barely) acceptable quality in multimedia. More recently, MP3 (Mpeg level 3) has taken off as the format that most people seem to be gravitating toward. There are players and encoders for all the major computer platforms and the sound quality, while still selectable, is generally more palatable to the listener. The growth of sites like MP3.com and napster.com have created huge groups of listeners, roving the web for content. The Internet in general has spawned a generation of more avid media junkies, many of whom are now surfing the web, watching TV, and participating in other activities all at once. Here is a comparison of MP3 encoders for the Macintosh and a link to some Windows encoders. Probably the easiest to use encoder (and a great sounding one) is Apples free iTunes software. They don't currently make it for PC, but they may well be doing so soon to support their new iPod MP3 player.

MP3 Alternatives

After a close call with Napster, Sony and the other music giants are understandably nervous about the proliferation of media "swappers" on the internet and are working frantically towards an alternative that affords them a greater degree of control than the popular MP3 format. You may want to read up a little bit about SDMI (the Secure Digital Music Initiative) and Liquid Audio. Neither is a big player now, but they have considerable corporate funding behind them and it's certainly too late to count them out of the race. Since the demise of Napster, dozens of peer to peer sharing (stealing) networks have emerged in an effort to fill that void. I haven't used them and can't really speak to their strengths and weaknesses. I'm not excited about SDMI, but realize that if people can't respect intellectual property rights without rigid enforcement, something of that type may be our only safeguard.

Show me the MONEY!

One of the most problematic difficulties for small site web entrepreneurs has been finding viable strategies for payments in Cyberspace. The US remote payment model is primarily "owned" by MasterCard/VISA and this can be an expensive club to break into. Here is Jerry Nusbaum's take on SDMI. When I spoke in 1999 at the MidWest Regional Folk Alliance (FARM) conference, I sat in on an excellent workshop that Lou and Peter Berryman gave on controlling costs and managing your career cost effectively. There was lots of great info in the presentation, but the crown jewel of the talk was that CostCo offers an attractively priced service that musicians can use to accept credit cards for their merchandise. It requires that you become a Costco executive member ($100 per year) Then, for a $25 dollar startup fee and a competitive commission structure, with a minimum monthly transaction rate, you can accept credit cards, both over the web and at live gigs. Costco executive membership can also hook you up with 7.2 cents per minute long distance service and even health insurance at reduced rates. For info on their credit card arrangement, check their web page.

Most credit card processing deals require you to lease expensive card terminals that you can't even use when you are on the gig. With Costco you don't even have to have the terminal. You can use the old fashioned manual pressure card swiper, or even build your own. Peter has one that he built for about $2. I asked him to put the plans up on the web, but I don't see them there yet. To submit the card numbers for payment, you then use a computer software like MacAuthorize ($300) to submit the card numbers for processing via your computer. Check out the Tellan web page. They have free demos onlinethat you can check out.

With the Costco plan, you wind up paying almost 60 cents per transaction in processing fees on a $15 CD, plus whatever it costs you to send out the order. This is still FAR less than what most online fullfillment services will charge you and you control your own inventory and your own customer list. The BIG plus is that the Berrymans indicated that their CD sales went way up as soon as they started taking credit cards. I have heard this over and over from performers, that accepting credit cards can boost sales 100% or even more. Lou said that they were very concerned about the $400 upfront cost for this, but that the increased sales paid for it in no time. For the musician who is selling CDs constantly off the stage and has a decent sized mailing list, I think it's a nobrainer. For musicians who seldom tour and basically have no venue for selling their product, it may still be of borderline efficiency. Many of my musician pals are using other vendors for their credit card processing. Two of the most popular are CDBaby and CDStreet. CD Street has the added advantage of allowing you to accept credit cards for off the stage sales as well, so they may be more suitable for musicians who need to process credit cards for fans buying music at gigs. Both of these cost more per transaction than the Costco plan for high volume users, but provide an excellent starting point for musicians who aren't doing a lot of volume, but need credit card processing as they build their careers. CD Baby charges $4 per disc sold in fees. CD Street charges 20% (which comes out to about $3.20 per disk if you are selling them at $12.99.) An added benefit of CDStreet is that they also allow you to accept credit card sales on gigs. For low volumes this is great, but you can see that if you sell more than 40 disks a month or so, the Costco plan will allow you to keep a good deal more of the profit on your sales.

Alternatives to Credit Card processing

This impediment to online commerce wasn't lost on the Internet entrepreneurs. Now that thousands of folks are buying and selling items over ebay and other auction sites, handicrafters and artisans are selling their work throught their own home pages, and other new internet business keep springing up; it seems like everyone needs some form of electronic payment option over the web. Startups have been rushing in to fill the gap with a plethora of options. Beyond the obvious proliferation of Internet banking and bill presentment services like

My personal favorite is PayPal. I got involved because I heard that PayPal could pay tolls and vending machines from my PayPal enabled Palm Pilot organizer. So far, They haven't come thru with Macintosh software for that feature and I have yet to see any PayPal enabled CocaCola machines, but I've been using PayPal very successfully to buy and sell CDs, Magic cards, and other collectibles over the Internet. You can respend that money over the internet without ever touching it, or you can get them to send you a check of any part of the balance when you feel like cashing out a little. The best news is that they are currently running a $10 referral special so that each new user gets a $10 credit and the referrer gets $10 for each PayPal user that they recruit. This means that, if someone comes to your site and orders a $15 CD, the first one actually costs them $5 and they are sending you $25 instead of $15. This is a limited time offer and it can't last forever, but it's kind of nice right now. I also expect that this customer recruitment model may find other adoptees in the near term and you might want to be poised to take advantage of them as they arise.

[disclaimer: I am confident that these guys are bonafide players in the new internet economy. But that doesn't mean that they can't go out of business sometime in the future if they mess up or their business model fails. Plus, I'm sure that they aren't FDIC insured, but if you keep your balance low and use them as a way to send "instant cash" over the internet, I think that this could be a very cool thing. (and might even make a couple of bucks for you by signing up some of your fans.]

Another contender is iPin. This is a bit more involved as it requires specialized coding and installation on your web server, as well as ISP participation, but it offers some lure to the user because it's pretty transparent and it can be used to provide for Pay content in real time on the web. (Online concerts anyone?) I haven't fully investigated it and it appears that, unlike paypal, they charge the vendors a surcharge like MC/VISA do, but it is an alternative that you may want to look into.

Other electronic cash alternatives include eCash and DigiCash. If you want to step a little further, you can look into online barter sites like BarterTrust.com or any of the others on Krislyn's list of business barter sites. Before you delve into that you might want to go to your local public library and borrow a copy of "101 Ways to Grow Your Business With Barter : A Guide to Thriving in the 90's and Beyond (Stepping Stones to Success Series)"

Disabled Access

Here are some web accessibility guidelines for making your content available to disabled people using the internet.

Validate your HTML code

You should check your code with a variety of different browsers on different machines to be sure that there are no surprises. Another useful tool is to Validate your HTML code with a program that looks for syntax errors, open attribute tags, and other nasties. You can buy local validation softwares that run on your machine, but I usually just use one of the free online checkers. They can be a bit picayune and cryptic in their ability to suggest code corrections, but it's nice to see where you have problems in the code and then it's usually not so hard to find answers for the problem. Most browsers are somewhat forgiving of code problems, but they are very inconsistent in what they forgive. New technologies like Cascading Style Sheets are often incompletely or inaccurately supported in browsers that are always trying to one up the competition with more features. In general, I suggest ignoring future technology and new HTML extensions like XML and DHTML until they are universally supported by the majority of the browser base. It's very frustrating to base your site design on a technology that is never widely adopted and ultimately dropped. Wait until the marketplace proves any features that aren't invisibly supported on the server side of your site.

Add full text searching to your site

There are a variety of ways to add search capability to your web site, in fact many web servers have search CGI's built in. (Check with your webmaster...) My full search engine of choice is Atomz.com. It's free for sites under 500 pages and I love the way it works. I'm hard pressed to think of any site that wouldn't be enhanced by this simple, free addition. Check it out!

Using Website statistics

All the commercial web servers have the ability to capture web hit statistics with varying degrees of depth and precision. You can usually optimize these logs to your liking. I periodically download them and analyze the web site usage. The program I use is called Summary Pro for the Mac, but they make versions for all the popular platforms including Windoze and various flavors of linux and unix. It costs anywhere from $60 up thru $250 or more depending on which version you decide to buy. The reports are voluminous and very interesting.

There is an alternative to capturing your own weblogs and analyzing them yourself. You can sign up with TheCounter.com and let them provide a free visits counter and web site statistics for you. I'm not sure exactly what the tradeoff is, but it seems like a pretty nice free service to me. I manage my own website statistics currently, but I've just decided to subscribe to this and have it track a site or two for a while to check it out.

Email distribution lists and discussion groups

There are several alternatives for creating your own email distribution lists or discussion groups. The most popular softwares include listserv and Majordomo for Unix boxes Also, ListStar, Macjordomo, and LetterRip for the Macintosh.

An easier way to handle this is with a web based list provider. The best know of these is egroups.com and you can set up lists for free, in exchange for letting them place text ads within your list content. For $4.95 a month, they will deliver the messages without advertizing. Given the hassles of maintaining your own listserver software, this alternative is probably best for most folks who don't operate their own server farm.

Help me make this handout better

Was this useful to you? This is a living document and I hope for valuable feedback from folks who use it to enhance and update it. Please let me know if you have suggestions or corrections for the information presented within.

Thanks!
Alan Rowoth alan@folkmusic.org