Mike Blonder: Thoughts on Technology, and the Web

A customer service representative at one of the top domain registrars in the U.S. tried to convince me this morning that none of the top search engines will place a web site, without a domain registered for at least 5 years, within the top 10 results for any search category.

A comment such as the above is indicative of how low web 1.0 has fallen. The fact is that web 1.0 has been completely consumed by pure business interests that appear to lack any interest in technology as anything other than a tool to generate revenue. There's nothing wrong with using technology to generate revenue, or even to argue that technology for business has no other purpose than to contribute to the job of making money; however, I argue that an intelligent appreciation for technology, and a real interest in it, will lead to lots and lots more money than the other approach. I like to make money too, but I understand the valuable role that technology can play to make my money-making job easier.

If this representative's comments are true, then we can conclude that the days have passed when entrepeneurs can safely consider the internet as a very low cost vehicle for starting a business. After all, pre-registering a domain name for 5 years is at least three, if not a full five times more expensive than pre-registering the same domain for a single year. Typically, any and all closely related names will be registered at the same time. The result can be a bill that approaches $500.00, or more, for nothing more than a five year registration for the domain names.

In my opinion, this representative was simply reading from a script. The registrar in question requires that customer service representatives push any/all customers to increase their term of domain name registration. Extending the registration term is an easy way to make more money off of the same account. It has not been my experience that the search engines are checking the whois registries for term of registration when rankings are set for web sites, but maybe I'm wrong.

On the other hand, I am noting the very disturbing fact that the search engine programs are indexing the information on the web sites but doing nothing with the information, apparently, unless/until the site owner spends some money to pay for ad clicks, or other types of ad campaigns. I say that I am noting this fact as I have reviewed raw access logs and witnessed sites being indexed, without updates on keywords, etc. I consider this practice to be very unfortunate.

The information indexed should be incorporated into a site profile for every site indexed, and not just for the smaller number of sites that buy advertising. If the search engines continue to go this route (a kind of "denial of information") web 1.0 will become a dinosaur as it will lose much of its value as the information repository that was the case in the past.

© Mike Blonder, 2006, All Rights Reserved

Small businesses who are considering the purchase of a shareware package for a shopping cart system for an estore ought to think long and hard about a few things:
1) Documentation may not exist
2) Implementing the system may require "second order" customization, meaning changes to the package code itself
3) Search engine friendly pages may not be an option
4) Server load may be heavy at busy times

Documentation may not exist
Since the package is actually a series of software programs that work together to process the sale of an item, absence of documentation will not be an issue for you if you are, yourself, a programmer, or if you number programmers among your staff. In every other instance, missing documentation means that repairs, modifications and additions to your site will require excessive amounts of time and effort. Should you find a programmer with whom you can work to tweak the program, you may well have to live with that person for ever, at least as far as your website goes.

Implementing the package may require "second order" customization, meaning changes to the package code itself
Once the underlying code of the package is modified, what was shareware is now "unique_to_you" ware. Features of the package, such as the control panel, may not work properly as the result of customization. Once again, if neither you, nor any member of your staff is a programmer, whoever modifies the package will need to be your friend, perhaps for ever.

Search Engine Friendly Pages may not be an Option
The web pages published by the package will include information pulled from a database along with HTML tags and scripts (programs) that manipulate the database information along with the tags.

All of these operations will be performed "on the fly" or, in other words, on demand; page addresses may string together several parameters, meaning the code required to collect the database information, with a result that the address of the page is very long and, necessarily, unfriendly to search engines.

Server Load will be Heavy at Busy Times
Memory will be needed to run the programs that will make the package work. At times when your site is busy, package performance may be at its worst. Visitors will wait and then wait some more for pages to serve, etc.

For all of the above reasons I will only use packages that are well documented. In addition, the packages I use will output static HTML pages that will be friendly to search engines and a light load for the web server. I also strictly limit customer expectations to features that can be enabled from the package's control panel.

You can find out more about my web publishing efforts at Best Plain Web Pages.

A shopping cart system that meets my criteria is ShopSite

© Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved