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here's an article I found through a business blog. It is very interesting and I think everyone should read it.


"A company's website can be a great tool for promoting business online and for generating sales. However, as Web commerce increases, so does the risk that others may copy the look and feel of your website, some of its features or the content on your website. The risk also increases that you may be accused of unauthorized use of other people's intellectual assets. This article deals with some of the basic issues that you should be aware of before launching a website."

Covered are questions such as:

What elements of your website can be protected?
How to protect your website
Who owns the IP rights in your website?
If you pay a person to develop your website, who owns the copyright?
What topics should be included in a web development agreement?
Can you use material owned by others on your website?
What to keep in mind when creating, launching, maintaining or developing a website.

"I am using firefox 0.9 version for a couple of months and one thing I can tell you that this browser is very good and more customizable than Internet Explorer. The features include download manager, popup killer, tabbed browsing and easy transition from IE (all your favorite book marks and other settings remain intact). Just downloaded the latest 1.0 version from Mozilla, which have added features like RSS integration. Are you ready for a joyous ride on Firefox?"

Watchcat is a little program I've had for a long time that's extremely useful. It allows you to hide programs in the background without having them clog up the taskbar.

I have a few programs that I always have running: iTunes, Mozilla Thunderbird (email), Feedreader...and it is annoying having them always in the taskbar taking up space. This little tool allows you to hide programs by clicking on its icon and selecting which to hide. you can also set hotkeys to hide all open programs, unhide all, hide desktop, turn on screensaver, and many other things.

Download it, install it, and try it out. You'll definately find it useful.

The most common question I hear from web developers is "How much should I charge for a website?" It is an understandable question, especially if you think of a website as a product. I've seen sites developed for free and others developed for $1,000,000+. So how can one figure out what is an appropriate price to charge for a website?

I've seen many different techniques. A few include charging by the page, charging by the hour, and quoting the solution relative to its expected results (an ecommerce site for a small mom-and-pop shop would be quoted much less than the exact same site for a Fortune 500 company, simply because it is worth more and will make more money for the latter). All these methods have flaws. When charging by the page, you don't take into account the technical details of each page; an "about us" page with one paragraph and a picture would be much easier to develop than a complex article page that takes articles from a database and sorts them by date and type -- but both would cost the same on the "pay per page" payment scale. When you charge by the hour, the client has no idea what the final price will be, which can lead to budgeting problems. And don't ever tell a client you'll charge them more for the same product because it is worth more to them, you'll lose that client for life.

My method is an obvious, but often overlooked, one. "Charge for the hole, not the drill." A client doesn't really want a website, they want a result. Results include online sales, lead generation, cutting down on support calls and increased brand awareness. Identify what it is your client wants and build your solution around it. Most developers jump straight to the "how many pages do you want?" and "exactly how do you want your website to look and operate?" questions. The client doesn't know these things, that's why he hired you. It is your job to look at the client's goal and lay out a plan that addresses it.

Once you have the result in hand and have a good understanding of the business (through multiple meetings, phone conversations and emails), you sit down with the client and come up with the two most important documents: a sitemap and a user profile. The sitemap defines the pages of the site, their architecture, and a brief summary of what that page contains. This is like the blueprint for developing the site. The user profile describes the typical user: age range, gender, occupation, salary range, online experience (newbie, experienced, very savvy), online frequency, connectivity (56K, DSL...), types of sites visited, online purchases per month, and, most importantly, the reason she is at your client's website. This last one is important because it will shape how the website is developed. If the main desired user action is to purchase from the store, access to it will be made as easy as possible and it will be featured prominently on the homepage.

Once you have these project details in hand (the goal, the sitemap and the user profile) it is time to come up with an appropriate quote. You can't just look at these three documents and pull a number out of the air, it requires much more work. First, lay out the process for the development of the website. We often use the following:

1. Define Scope - Through a series of meetings, we will help you define the scope of the project and come up with an appropriate solution. Deliverables: Creative Brief, Contract, Sitemap, User Profile
   
2. Concept Designs - Using the Creative Brief, our designer develops one or two concept designs of the website. The concept design consists ofa homepage and inner page design. The designs are used to show the website's structure, color themes, visual presentation, and information architecture. Deliverables: Homepage and Innerpage Concept Design
   
3. Comprehensive Designs - Using the Concept Design, our designer now adds the content of the homepage and develops specific inner pages (see sitemap). Deliverables: Homepage and Specific Inner Pages Designed
   
4. Prototype Development - There are two parts of the prototype development: content-only site (whitesite) and the actual website. By this time all the website's content is required. We set up a simple site that contains just the content for you to proof-read and confirm the menu system without being distracted by the design itself. Once the concept is confirmed, we copy and pasted it into the acutal website design and come up with a working prototype of the website. Deliverables: Whitesite and Working Prototype
5. Testing - After the website is developed, we test it in many different browsers and operating systems to ensure there are no problems and that everyone can see it. If there are any problems that require us to modify the website, you will be given a Problem Summary and we'll make the necessary changes. Deliverables: Problem Summary
6. Delivery - We give you a hard copy of the completed website on CD and upload it to your server. Deliverables: Completed Website and Source Files (if applicable)
   

Now you identify specific tasks within each phase of development. For example, concept design might have:

• Design home page and inner page.
• Have it checked internally by Project Manager; make necessary changes.
• Have it checked by Client; make necessary changes.

Once you have all the expected tasks laid out, provide a time estimate for each and multiply by your hourly rate (or, if you have more than one person on your team, assign tasks to each member and have him quote his parts). Then add a certain percentage (I recommend 10-20%) to cover unforseen problems.

Now that you have an appropriate quote, it's important that you document exactly what that quote covers. You don't want to quote for a small 5 page website and end up doing a 500 page website. We detail the specifics in the Creative Brief. Finally, write up a contract and get an initial downpayment (I recommend 50%).


Now I cannot think of any project I've worked on that went exactly according to plan. You need to be prepared for the unexpected. The 20% extra should help cover most problems, but when you see your client wanting to add more and more to the project, you'll need to charge extra. I recommend having him fill out a Work Change Order that specifies exactly what the client wants to change/add to the project, then quote that separately. The additional expense will be added to the final bill. If you make them fill out the work change order and charge extra, they will be more hesitant to demand additions and make your life easier.

Also be prepared for the client who is never satisfied with your work. Add a clause in your contract specifying a limit to 2 (or however many you want) changes per phase as described in the project brief. For example, if the client isn't happy with the concept design, you go back and fix it. When you bring it back, if the client isn't happy with it, you will charge extra to fix it again. Some might say this is unfair, but it is the client's fault for not articulating exactly what he wanted, or changing his mind faster than the designer can make it. Also charge extra if, after signing off on a phase, the client wants you to go back and change something. For example, if you are on the prototype development (you are coding the actual website) and the client wants you to redo the design (concept phase) that will cost extra because it is a lot of extra work you will need to do.



All in all, when quoting for a project make sure you are providing the hole and not just the drill. This means selling a solution rather than just a website. And remember that most of the time a solution includes more than just a design; consider online marketing, maintenance and hosting. No matter how good your design looks, it won't be successful if no one knows about it or the content is never updated.

From Jan Tielens' Blog:

I've decided to start sharing some great free software I've found, so I'll post a new one every Wednesday. This week's is ourTunes.

iTunes is an extremely popular music player and store. If you haven't heard of it, it has the largest market share of legal music downloads (they cost $.99 each), it is the companion software for the most popular mp3 player (the iPod) and is a great music player with great features like the library, search and smart playlists. If you are on a local area network, you can share your music with others on that network - the key word is "share." The only downside to iTunes is that you can only listen to other people's music; you can't download it and add it to your collection.

That is where ourTunes comes in. ourTunes shows all the music of everyone on the network and allows you to listen to or download the music. This is perfect for anyone at college because a large amount of people have iTunes running. You can either browse through all the songs, limit it to certain computers (called "hosts") or do a search for a specific song. If you are on a large network, i suggest the search.

If you don't use iTunes, you should at least check it out. I personally think its the best music player available; much more powerful than winamp, which I used back before I had iTunes. If you have iTunes and are on a network, this is a great piece of software that you should definately get. Before you download your next song, just do a quick search and see if it's already available on your network.

Kevin Rose gave away 4000+ Gmail invites and (we assume) all were taken in a few hours. If you want to try your luck at picking one that hasn't been used, I included the link:

http://kevinrose.typepad.com/allthegmail.html

oh and i'm still updating my old post with new invites as I get them. here's the permanent link:

"Want a Gmail Account? I got a few spare"

What is the best way to distribute content? DVDs which will be limited in capacity to 9.4gbs on a single DVD for another year, and then after that 50gbs on a single disk for years to come after that, or rewritable media that can hold 2gb already in a device half the size of a pen, or in a hard drive that can hold 200GBs plus in a drive the size of your cell phone?

Which device should content distributors like HDNet invest in ? DVD, knowing that the future standards will be locked for 7 to 10 years, or these storage devices that will grow in capacity, and shrink in size and price, not to mention the additional flexibility of being able to erase and rewrite the drives?

This article was extremely interesting. He brought up some great points and I have to say I agree with him. Why invest in dvd's whose capacity is limited (even HD-DVD and BluRay will have limited capacities when compared with hard drives) when you could provide the content on small hard drives that go for about $.50/gb. I really loved his idea about having the airport kiosk where, before your flight, you select a few movies and have them transfered to a keychain drive so you can simply plug them into your laptop and watch them on the plane. I'd definately buy that. And I also liked the netflix-inspired idea of paying a monthly fee to get a small hard drive (half the size of a cigarette box) with a hd movie on it. When you're done watching it, you send the hard drive back and get another one. (The only problem with this is the shipping charges. Netflix is relatively cheap because a dvd weighs almost nothing.)

He also brought up a good point about piracy. The problem right now is that quality is so low that the content can easily be transferred online. Bump up movies to full HD quality (even better than the compressed HD you get on tv because tv has bandwith limits) so that a 2 hour movie is 18gbs and you won't have many people downloading them. It's simply cheaper to buy a hard drive with the movie @ $.25/gb than download where your bandwith costs more than that.

Anyway, its an interesting read and i suggest everyone check it out. It also shows the workings of Mark's entrepreneurial mind. He had an idea (put a dvd on a keychain drive to watch on a plane), it worked well and he developed a whole business idea out of it. What differentiates him from us is that he can actually finance all his crazy ideas :)



Oh and in case you didn't know, Mark Cuban will be having a new reality tv show starting soon called The Benefactor. It will be similar to The Apprentice; you always here Mark and Donald joking about eachother's tv show.


(Click the word link to read the article)

Is your e-commerce website ready for Christmas?

37Signals:

"In these pages you'll find dozens of ideas for improving the holiday customer experience at your site. Each idea is accompanied by examples taken from top retail sites (we've visited hundreds of sites over the past two holiday seasons seeking smart techniques)."

Apple recently released a new version of the iMac. It looks quite nice (no longer a "screen on a stick" design) and the processor has been improved (now it has the G5). You can check the tech specs out at the apple website (link below).

I think it looks great, but I'm waiting to buy the Powerbook G5. I really need a laptop that looks great and is powerful enough to be a desktop replacement (and of course have the Mac OS on it).

Speaking of new Apple additions, they recently showcased the new version of the Mac OS - Tiger (Mac OS X v10.4). Very impressive operating system. I can't wait to use the search and iChat.

So eventhough the new iMac looks good, I'm waiting for the Powerbook G5 with Tiger.