There are 153 villagers currently online. 'ello again!
Latest ATF News: 3/8/2025 - Welcome, Douglas Cafe!
Latest ATF News: 3/8/2025 - Welcome, Douglas Cafe!
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August is John-Paul's birthday month... If you send him a card, be sure to sneak a buck or two inside of it. He likes that :)...  |
AUGUST WEBMASTER MUSINGS I remember sitting here with the mistress long ago working on the new layout for this web site. We had a design (based on Amazon.com and Barnes and Nobles) and we had a concept, but not much else. Sure, there would be the pictures, and yes, we would have our folke indexes and newbie guides, but what would keep our friends coming back often? The key to a good web site, other than "easy to use" design, is content. If the content doesn't change regularly there is no reason for a visitor to return regularly. Obviously the photos were a massive amount of content but there would be months during off season when there were no faires to attend and thus no new photos to add. At some point Willa got the idea that we should do a weekly newsletter and so it began... One a knight is never enough, but once a week is far too much... Long time visitors of AtTheFaire will recall our initial launch with "Version 2.0" on January 1st, 2001. At that time we promoted a new weekly newsletter but it was soon determined that trying to come up with a half dozen stories every week was just too much for us to handle with all the other "real world" things going on in our lives. So, the newsletter quickly became a biweekly publication. Even with this reduced schedule there have been a few missed issues. Do you see where this is going? To build a web site... One of my pet peeves is seeing webmasters gripe about how expensive it is to run and maintain their site. After all, web hosting is dirt cheap these days. We resell web accounts on this server for as little as seven dollars per month (with no preset hard drive storage or bandwidth quotas to get in your way). That hardly sounds expensive. For most normal web sites I still remain skeptical about the expense of actually running a web site (unless, of course, they are using a more expensive hosting service). I would like to share with you some of the expenses that we have had with this web site. Obviously there is the cost of computer equipment and Internet access, but we would have been paying for that anyway so it doesn't really matter. We could talk about how much our time is worth and agonize over how many hours we put into maintaining the site, but don't we do this because it is a hobby that we enjoy? Of course it is, and of course we do, so that doesn't really matter. You don't see someone complaining about going to Disneyland by saying "my time is worth a lot, so I can't justify not being paid for spending an entire day there without getting paid for it." Silly, isn't it? So what's the problem? Well, we can continue this site as-is for years to come simply by coughing up seven dollar each month and spending a few hours of time here and there to work on new content. We have bigger plans, though. There are many parts on this site that we didn't create. The banner exchange, for instance, is a script by a programmer in Omaha, Nebraska. For many months we ran it unregistered but I finally got around to sending in the fifty dollars to buy the program.
Our exchange has shown over 327,000 banners since April 1st, 2001. The members get to have their banners displayed over 2,500 times each day generating a lot of new traffic to the member sites. We don't make a dime on this, so basically we are paying to promote other sites. Next we have photo software. Creating a web page with a few dozen pictures from a family vacation is fairly easy and there are many free packages out there which will do this. Managing over 20,000 digital pictures is an entirely different situation. I have literally spent the last few years trying to find a program that would handle the amount of images I have automatically. Finally I found Stone's PhotoToWeb package for Mac OS X. After using the trial for awhile (which would eventually stop working), I purchased a license.
The software was pricey but it came so close to perfect for what I needed to do that I thought supporting the author would be a good thing. Now that I bought the product he considers my feature requests much more than he would someone who was just using the demo for free. Another piece of the puzzle was software for downloading pictures and organizing them.
GraphicsCoverter is used to preview the images and sort them into their proper folders, while Cameraid was used to download photos from my old digital camera. Today I use Cameraid to rotate and rename the images from my new camera. Should I mention the investment of $700 into a new camera and two extra memory sticks at $260? Well, if I wasn't into taking pictures and sharing them I certainly wouldn't have spent that much money. However, I'll stick to software directly used in building this site rather than hardware. As you can see, the real cost in having a large scale web site is not in the site itself but in the tools used to maintain it. We spent $300 on Dreamweaver in order to start building this large project, for instance. There are also some future items that are needed to take the site to the next level.
We need the database program so we can automate the Faire Folke section. Right now we have to edit over one hundred pages manually but FileMaker would allow us to simply maintain the entries in a database then have it generate the HTML pages. That would save a lot of time (and time is money, right? :) The Dreamweaver upgrade, while not actually necessary, is going to add a lot of new features that will make updating the site faster too. This is where you come in... As most of you know, I was laid off from my job a few weeks ago (just thirteen days short of my six year anniversary). My income is currently zero while I search for a new job in Des Moines which means site expansion is taking a backseat to things like food and rent. I do have a lot of free time, though (so if time is money, am I rich?). If you would like to see this site continue to grow, please consider helping us out. There are several things you can do:
And so it goes... In summary, running this site isn't really expensive. Expanding it will be. Help us grow. We have a lot of ideas we'd like to make reality. Thank you to everyone who has been so supportive. We have some major plans in store so perhaps we can get our act together financially and make them happy by 2002. -- John-Paul
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