Most websites seems to be classified by their use such as ecommerce, news, or corporate.  From a developer standpoint use or purpose is the most important aspect in deciding the best method or tool for developing the web site. The tool then becomes the major determiner of cost.

A Dreamweaver site consists of content, navigation, coding and design.  Dreamweaver is a good tool because it separates the design and content.  The design look can thus be constructed and placed into the templates.

A Dreamweaver CS site will always be the cheaper method if the design features are moderate and the amount of content is small and primarily text-based.  Dreamweaver offers strong integration of graphic design and flash or flash video with text but the process is manual.  Page templates and library items make building a moderate amount of content manageable and efficient.  This method is best for basic static sites that do not require frequent updates or changes.  Developers often refer to this type of website as online brochures or brochureware.  If the company has a good set of brochures that process is relatively inexpensive.

When the client wants a website that can deliver lots of content and with changes made by staff, then a content management system (CMS) application is the best choice.  If a client wants to restrict content to certain groups, the choice of a CMS-based system is a given.    If only a portion of the site is to be dynamic or restricted then a limited CMS like Coranto can be used.  Coranto works well for a dynamic newsroom application on an otherwise static website.

A secondary cost with dynamic sites is the requirement for hosting that supports configuring the server for an application and supports the use of databases. CMS applications such as Drupal, WordPress, or Joomla are open source and well supported.  Good hosting companies for these applications are Webmasters or GoDaddy.  Most hosting companies charge $150 to $250 a year for business hosting of a website with database.

Lastly, most companies are poorly supported for photography of their products, services and operations. The cost of using a paid photograph on a site can cover the much of the cost of getting a good commercial photographer to document your products and services.

But there is more.  I decided I needed a plugin for doing slideshows.  I was able using the Plugin menu in WordPress 2.9.1 to search for the plugin, download and install it, and then activate it all from the admin Plugin menu.  That is truly impressive!!

Overall, I am truly impressed with WordPress.  With just a little bit of work, I was able to install 2.9.1 WordPress on a WAMP test server.  Here the process was a little more difficult as I had to do the 5-minute installation and set up the database.  WordPress uses a “secret” word set up to provide added security.  So it was not as simple as setting up a Drupal site connnection, but the documentation was excellent and worked.

The only trick I noticed with setting up WordPress on the Webmasters server was that the graphics did not work immediately.  I had to fool the server by doing a CHMOD on the content section to 777 and then back to 775 toavoid the prohibited message on the graphics.

I was also IMpressed with how nicely WordPress handles graphics and photos (Media).  You can upload a graphic by just clicking on the add an image link above the post box and a Lightbox2 style upload box appears with a browse button to let you find the graphic and upload it.  It then automatically opens a dialogue to handle the caption and other data.  Smart!  Getting graphics and images  set up correctly in Drupal is a major difficulty.

Working with the WordPress theme is almost exactly like Drupal 6.  Most of the color scheme is in the images and most of the  layout is in page includes.  Unlike Drupal, there is one main style sheet that has most of the style.  I modified the Harmony theme to change colors and the style sheet was clearly annotated  for the page sections.  Although I use the Web developer bar on Firefox for CSS, it most mostly not necessary with WordPress.  I found that since the style sheet was so clearly annotated, I could find most items without having to use the “View Style Information” option in the Developers bar.  WordPress 2.9.1 is IMpressive.

First is fixed costs. Hosting, domain names,and email are the main elements involved in the commercial support of a Web site. Some companies or businesses may want to host the site on internal Web servers, but I oppose that idea for security reasons. A public Web site should be on public servers and set up to support a diverse audience. Most internal IT departments are not staffed, equipted or trained to provide support to a public Web sites. Secondly, commercial hosting and Web support is so inexpensive that providing IT staff to support a Web server is just not realistic.

The Web site itself has three major areas of costs – content, design and technology. Is the content readily available or will staff time be required to find and formulate the content? Is the design readily available based on company branding and product brochures or will it have to be created and approved? Lastly, what technology or programming will be required to provide components of the site such as content management, document management, search, analytics, or video streaming?

In developing content for a Web site, Compton Communications uses a content plan. The plan lays out the specifics of text, headlining, photography or graphics needed for each page of the site. An overall diagram depicts the page names and organization of the pages. Many companies have the material, but it may take a good amount of time and effort to locate branded narrative or copywrite the materials for the Web.

Most companies are lack good photography of their products, services, personnel, activities, etc. making design more costly and time consuming. Businesses with good branding programs can save significant money on design as exact colors, logos, supporting taglines and photography are often available in corporate reports or product brochures. In some cases, companies may have used a variety of agencies to develop product brochures and they have a variety of brands. Providing quality photograph may be expensive, but vital to building a quality site.

Technology is a feature not readily apparent to many in building a Web site, but the choice of Windows or Linux in Web server types can severely impact costs in development. The more applications the commercial hosting firm makes available to the Web server, the lower the costs. There are quality applications to provide content management, photo albums, blogging, etc. that are available no cost, but the application configuration and customization may add significantly to project costs. For example, the search function is vital to a site that has more than two-levels of content, but not all vendors provide a quality site search application. The same applies to site statistics, extra expense may be required to get the quality of statistically support desired by the marketing department.

A common feature on most web site desired today is Web videos. Most commercial servers support video streaming from Web servers without any special applications needed. However, video may require special encoding or page development to work properly and support a wide variety of Web browsers. Videos longer than two minutes should be encoded in flash and this may require special equipment and software.

What’s all this cost? Well nothing. A Web site should be able to save on the costs of printing brochures and product sheets every quarter, of distributing and saving news releases, of providing customer telephone support and troubleshooting. A quality Web site should save you money in the long run.

1) The terms you want to be top in Google are nowhere on the site. The Google spider is pretty smart when it comes to what is on the Web site, but it is lousy at reading intentions. If the page title and headline do not say “Web development”, the index is unlikely to present your link under that category. Also, like any search engine, if the term is only used once in the text; it does not generate prominence in the index.

2) The term is not one of your keywords. Additional weight is given to using keywords in the head that match the page contents.

3) Your site has no logical sitemap, index linking or Google XML Sitemap that the service can use to get your content indexed. Some sites (not the ones I build) seem to smash the visiting Google spider on the homepage. The linking is only in a complicated javascript or CSS formulation that points to destinations unknown. Somewhere on the page there needs to be linking to the subpages. The more those links match the term desired to be indexed the better. By this time the reader should be saying that the spiders seem to be pretty dumb – i.e. we not only need to link to the page with the term, but name the page and headline the page with the same term. I will pause a moment for your A-ha moment. YES

4) Is your new site the lonliest site on the Web? Google gives prominence to sites that are well linked with other sites that also have the term. Today, few companies that are launching a new site invest the time and effort to see what the competing content is. A linking campaign is one in which you request links to your site from other indexes or sites that cover the term you think is important for your site. Rather than spending time and effort on expensive search engine optimizations (SEO), you will find it is very effective to get links from major sites that dominate your term or topic.

5) Since most competing sites are not going to give you links that boost your rankings, you need to conduct a launch campaign to registered your site in most search databases, and get links from news and general information sites.

I used XOOPS as an online newsroom application, but I found to be too labor intensive to keep going.

I am now using Coranto again for the news and WordPress for the blog. Coranto is open-source software and has a Web-backend system build specifically to handle news.

So why have I been out of the net (literally) for a year. First we had the launch of the new MPRI website, a defense contractor that I supported at the Pentagon. The launch was followed rapidly by integrating another company into the MPRI Web site and then followed a third company in the fall. The last half of the year was a big blur.

The first half of 2007 was not much different. I am working on trying to be able to do a Web project and still keep my other activities going. But it is tough.

Somewhere in the last year I also managed to get in two seminars on New Media. It convinced me that blogging was better than trying to build newsletters, especially online. Newsletters gather news for dissemination at a specific time whereas blogging is a more immediate and tailored method of disseminating news.