We actually really like Zen Cart. It’s fast, clear, and customizable. From a quick look at the Magento demo and feature list, it looks like they’re starting with Ajax in mind, but it doesn’t look like there’s that much different in the administration area. Will have to keep an eye on this one.

I used to use Akismet to filter out comment spam, but spammers now seem to make each post unique enough that that became ineffective–I would still get dozens of comments to moderate every day. So then I switched to the Recaptcha.net system you can see on any of my posts–which has been working great for comments, but it doesn’t attempt to deal with all the automated trackpacks/pingbacks.

So here we are, back to comments only. Please leave one, or drop me an email here if you’d like to discuss anything I’m writing about, and are not just another spammer…

• To act as an online brochure
• To attract new customers from search engines
• To sell things online
• To build a community of people who might someday buy something from you

A web site can do any or all of these, but generally the further down this list you get, the more the site is going to cost in terms of development cost and your time.

Web Site as Online Brochure

All businesses need a web site. It’s as crucial as having a Yellow Pages listing a couple decades ago-it’s the first place more and more people will look to find your address, phone number, and contact details. If you have nothing more than a single page with the basics about your business, it’s important to have at least that.

Your web site should not only tell your potential customers how to get ahold of you, but also why they should. What products or services do you sell? Who are your customers? Why do people buy from you instead of your competition?

A web site that answers those questions and nothing more is a sales tool. You are not likely to get new sales leads from such a basic web site, but it can help you close sales for prospects who already know who you are. When you put together such a site, you’ll need to consider your business brand, and there’s a couple of radically different schools of thought here:

1. Brand matters
2. Brand doesn’t matter, but personal reputation does

The old school of thought is that companies develop a brand that is supposed to represent its values. The danger of this approach is letting the trappings of a brand-the logo, the slogans, the marketing material-matter more than delivering those values. It’s like worshiping idols instead of the gods they represent-sooner or later you’re gonna get smote.

The newer school of thought is eloquently expressed in an essay called "The Cluetrain Manifesto" and espoused by many new thinkers and thought leaders, such as Seth Godin, one of our favorite current marketing writers. The gist is that graphics, logos, all the rest of these trappings are completely irrelevant, that nothing but content-your quality of service, your core products-matters. Their approach is minimalist-use freely available tools to build your web site, don’t spend on graphic design, instead just make sure you take care of your customers.

Of course, we think delivering quality service is important, but having a coherent brand can help. Especially if you’re trying to develop a consistent customer experience. Ignoring graphics, domain names, even business names, is fine for personality-driven businesses, but if you are trying to grow a business to be something more than the sum of its personalities, you need a visual identity that’s consistently expressed in your web site, your printed material, your contracts, in everything.

You can get started with a web site at your ISP, or a blog on a hosted service, for next to nothing more than a few hours of your time. We recommend that as soon as you can work it into your budget, hire a graphic designer to put together a business identity and a basic web site that incorporates it. Expect to spend around $3000 to get something unique that expresses what you want your business to represent, though this price can vary substantially depending on the web designer you choose, how well you can express your ideas to your designer, and how intricate and detailed your design ends up. You can find cheaper solutions, such as cookie-cutter designs, pre-built templates, or off-shore design to get something going for a few hundred dollars-but it will definitely show. Depending on the values you are trying to represent with your brand, this may or may not be a good thing.

Prices for web design can vary by a huge amount. We recommend finding a designer with a portfolio of designs you like, interviewing them to see how well you can work with them to make your ideas a reality, and decide what you’re willing to spend up front. Setting a budget for a web designer is perhaps the best way to go. Intricate designs take time to develop, which costs money-start with a logo and an overall concept, and refine until you’re happy or have reached your budget.

But before going crazy with design, read this post by Seth Godin for guidelines on what to put on your web site (and follow his suggestions for other places to post content).

Beyond an e-Brochure: Getting business from your web site

Just having a web site, however, does nothing to get customers beating down your doors. People need to find your web site somehow, amidst the millions of other web sites out there. For small, local businesses, they don’t find your web site online–they find it from your business card, a sign on your car, word-of-mouth, or all the rest of the traditional ways people market their business.

If you want your web site to actually generate business for you, recognize that it’s going to take a substantial investment in your time, more than anything else. The critical ingredient in getting your site noticed by search engines is content. The more, the better–especially if it’s interesting, relevant, and unique. Having new, original content on your site helps it in two ways:

1. It’s more raw material for Google and the other search engines to index. Sheer quantity helps.
2. If you’re a decent writer, and write something useful, people will return to your site to see what you write next, and some will link to your pages.

Google is basically a popularity contest: it places the highest value on pages with the most links coming from other sites. Create a page that people want to read, and eventually it will boost your rank on Google. Create a bunch of pages, and soon you’ll be at the top of the search engines, and start to get business over the Internet.

You can jump-start online marketing by buying advertising. Pay-per-click ads work, and don’t cost all that much. But nothing beats the organic results you get by growing your site with regular additions of new content.

If you need a system to make it easy to add stories to your site on a regular basis, that’s where Freelock Computing can help. We work extensively with Joomla, MediaWiki, Word Press, and Serendipity, different systems that make it simple for you to manage your own content without needing a technical background. We regularly deploy, customize, host, and provide training for these systems. Let
us know if we can help!

Brick and Order: Selling online

Many people suggest having some sort of "call to action" on every page of your site, whether you actually sell online or not. If your web site is for a business, you almost certainly want people to take some action, some small step that might eventually lead to a sale. Even if your product or service doesn’t lend itself to online sales, your web site can help develop a relationship with potential customers, help them gain trust in your expertise or familiarity with your services.

But if your products can be sold online, you almost certainly should set up some sort of online shopping cart. The more specialized your business, the more unique your products, the more potential customers you can find online.

The Internet can put distant customers on your virtual doorstep. Having a friendly, inviting catalog online can greatly expand your customer base, and there are some great tools out there to make developing such a site affordable.

At Freelock, we recommend and deploy ZenCart for retail operations looking to open an Internet store. For people who have some products to sell but still want to have an information-rich site, we’ve deployed a Joomla shopping cart system called VirtueMart.

Growing a Community

By far the most audacious goal you might have for a web site is to make a place where people hang out and talk to each other. Many, many businesses are learning that this is a great way to cultivate a devoted following, but it takes a lot of work.

Community web sites are like gardens. It takes some fertilizer, regular watering, and someone to pull weeds to make a vibrant community grow. If your business is large enough to devote a major part of somebody’s time to keep a community site in good shape, it can pay off with enthusiastic support of your business.

Opening a web site to direct interaction with your customers can be difficult for a lot of businesses. You need to be open to criticism as well as praise, willing to allow the world to see the warts on your business. But doing so nearly always helps people trust your business, and makes them more willing to do business with you.

What sort of work is involved? Quite a bit:

• writing stories and inviting comment on them
• Responding to criticism and praise, both in a professional, business-like way
• Deleting spam, or moderating posts (I recommend only moderating spam, not negative posts)
• Generally making yourself available to your customers online

If you can’t put the time into managing such a site, I would suggest simplifying your goals, go with a marketing or an e-commerce site. Community sites are hard, and there’s not much worse for your business brand than a forum filled with spam, or negative posts that go unanswered.

But there’s not much better than having a community of vociferous fans of your business-they’ll help you with sales, marketing, and support.

We’re helping several companies put together or manage community-based web sites. Joomla has a number of common add-ons we deploy for this purpose-Community Builder and Fireboard provide a solid base of user profiles and forums. For more specialized web sites, Drupal is a more powerful content management system that makes a fine base for building entire custom applications.

Choosing a web site vendor

Lastly, a few words about hiring a web developer. There are lots of us around, with a wide range of prices. What one company can do for $2,000, another might be able to do for $10,000, and you might be able to get someone in India to do for $500. But the end result won’t be the same for any of these.

Spending more doesn’t always mean you’ll get a better result, either. Open Source software greatly lowers the entry cost to get powerful web sites, though these often result in a steeper learning curve to figure out how to use effectively.

The best way to find a good web developer is to ask people you know and trust for a recommendation. Make sure you talk to people who have worked with the web developer to get a sense for how the process went, and how satisfied they were with the results. There are two different skills used in putting together a web site: the graphical side, and the technical side. You need both, and you don’t tend to find both in the same person. Make sure your graphics person "gets" what you are trying to express, and make sure your technical person can explain things in terms you understand. These factors are far more important to the ultimate success of your web site, than the cost you pay up front.

So, here’s the final checklist of how to put together a great web site for your business:

1. Decide upon your goals for the web site, what type of web site you want to create.
2. Ask friends, colleagues, family members for
   recommendations to find a web designer and developer you can work
   with. You might also be able to find a developer by contacting the
   owner of a site you particularly like.
3. Interview your potential web designer and
   developer. Ask to see samples of their work, and to talk with prior
   customers. For the designer, look for designs you like, and how well
   you connect with the designer-design can be extremely subjective,
   and you want someone who will deliver what you’re looking for. For
   the developer, make sure they’re competent, and that they can
   clearly explain what needs to be done and what your options are.
4. Once you’ve decided upon the people,
   determine if they can do the job within your budget, and if so,
   you’re off and running!

Seth Godin is one of my favorite business authors, and yesterday he wrote a simple recipe for small businesses needing to put together a web site. From the article:

The web has changed the game for a lot of organizations, but for the local business, it’s more of a threat and a quandary than an asset. My doctor went to a seminar yesterday ($100 ) where the ‘expert’ was busy selling her on buying a domain name, hiring a designer, using web development software, understanding site maps and navigation and keywords and metatags and servers…

He suggests making use of a few easy services that are free or very inexpensive to put together a site that tells your customer what they need to know about your business, and furthermore gets this content into places that Google loves to search. Read the full story at: Seth’s Blog: Memo to the very small.

This frightens most business people. In the business world, attorneys have designed all sorts of non-compete clauses they attach to contracts, to prevent employees from starting other businesses with the knowledge they’ve gained from working for you. In the open source world, anybody is explicitly allowed to take that knowledge embodied in your software project and set up their own shop.

How do you build a business around something you can’t control?

SQL Ledger/LedgerSMB
In the past couple weeks, there was a fork in the main open source financial project out there, SQL-Ledger. The users’ mailing list is full of insults and accusations between supporters of the old project and the people who’ve left to set up shop. It’s quite an ugly place to visit right now…

What gives the upstarts the gall to leave the project and start their own, LedgerSMB? How is this good for users? Why would they do such a thing?

Turns out, a whole bunch of reasons.

First of all, SQL-Ledger has always been tightly controlled by a single developer. While he accepts help from translaters, most other code he does alone. So new features take months to come out. I’ve been using the system for three years, and there still isn’t a payroll module. While there have been developers willing to help on the project, at least from an outside view the developer has not been that receptive to contributions from the community.

Secondly, while the code is free, the documentation is not. The maintainer of SQL-Ledger hordes knowledge about how to use it, and disseminates it only to people who buy the manual from him. While he has every right to do so–open source is, after all, a voluntary gift to the community when you own the code–it does seem to go against the open source ethos. It feels like a disengenious use of open source–hook them with free software but then force them to buy the manual to be able to use it effectively. Few other open source projects get away with this model.

Thirdly, the mailing lists, which are the main free support for the project seems to have been heavily moderated, and not in a fair or balanced way. I’ve had several of my posts that point out apparent bugs not make it to the list, along with a few answers to other people that might’ve helped them solve their problem but might have been considered too close to the secret sauce in the manual. Meanwhile, some vitriolic subscribers spew ugly insults to others on the list, with apparently free reign, as long as it’s in support of the lead developer. It’s not a friendly place to be, on the Internet, and probably does a lot to drive people away from what is really a great piece of software.

But it appears that the final straw was the lead developer’s complete disregard for a major security vulnerability. At least one developer found this hole nearly a year ago and informed the developer. While we’ve seen more than half a dozen releases since then, this hole wasn’t fixed during that time, until another developer stumbled on it. This developer also tried to work with the main developer to get the hole fixed, but was met with hostility and an unwillingness to take the problem seriously.
So the other developers felt like they had no choice but to take the code and start a new project that took these security concerns seriously.

As a result, all sorts of new possibilities become available: a whole new list of features people have wanted to see may get implemented; people can contribute directly to the project to see enhancements they need; a true open source feel, where people are actually helpful instead of just telling you to purchase the manual; and a sense of shared ownership of the code, not held hostage to a single developer who could decide to pack up his toys and go home.

Now, I don’t mean do speak ill of the original developer. SQL Ledger is really a great program, and he’s done a lot to make it that way. I’ve paid for the manual twice, most recently just to give him financial support to keep working on the software, not because I really needed it. But I do think SQL Ledger has outgrown what can be managed by a single developer, and he stands in the way of its growth. So I look forward to seeing a community-forked version thrive.

Mambo/Joomla 

SQL Ledger is far from the first business open source project to fork. Joomla recently celebrated its first birthday. Joomla is the result of the core Mambo development team getting into conflict with the company that sponsored it, and owned the Mambo trademark. So they all left the project and started Joomla. It took several months for the dust to settle, but Joomla is the clear winner of this fork, with some 2.5 million downloads already and some major innovations on the horizon. Mambo, while it still exists, has barely been able to keep up with security vulnerabilities, and has already lost some of the replacements brought in after the Joomla revolt, for apparently similar reasons.

SugarCRM/VTiger

Not all forks eclipse the original project. SugarCRM has become one of the most successful companies that uses an open source project as its flagship product. And the product is very well done. And it has also been forked–into a community project called vTiger. The reasons for this split are less clear–it apparently has to do with a group of free-software proponents who didn’t really like the idea of a clearly commercial open source project.

SugarCRM is released under a different license than Mambo or SQL Ledger (Sugar Public License, instead of the GPL), so the viability of vTiger is less clear. vTiger has diverged quite a bit from SugarCRM already, adding more enterprise management features like accounting and inventory management while SugarCRM has focused more on enhancing the customer contact side of things with workflow, email campaigns, projects and cases and the like. At Freelock, we’ve stayed on the SugarCRM side of this split so far.

Asterisk/OpenPBX 

Here’s a fork that seems to have dropped off the map. Asterisk is the incredibly popular upstart free PBX (office phone) system that’s starting to decimate the lucrative telecom market. And OpenPBX is an Asterisk fork that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. It has a stated goal of being more stable and better documented, and while it’s still alive, I don’t hear anybody really taking them seriously.

Mandriva Multi-Network Firewall

I’ve even tried to do my own fork of a project. Mandrake Linux for years had a great firewall distribution, called the MNF. As it got long in the tooth, a replacement MNF2 was developed, but it wasn’t released under the same terms as the original. Mandrake had become Mandriva at this point, and it saw MNF2 as a corporate product, not something they wanted to make freely available.

The source code, however, was still covered by the GPL license, which means anyone can take it and start their own version. So we could take the MNF code, rebrand it, and release it under a new name.

Unfortunately, I’ve got a few too many projects on my plate, and so that project didn’t get off the ground. Meanwhile, the formerly thriving community around the MNF has completely died–the mailing list which used to be very active hasn’t seen a post in months. This is a project that could still make for a very fine fork, but that takes time and effort, and nobody has stepped up to the plate to make it happen.

To fork or not to fork

Creating a successful software project of any kind is a daunting task. In the open source world, forks are a natural part of the development of projects. In a very Darwinian way, some forks succeed and grow to become thriving projects of their own, while others die a silent death. A few fill the niche of the parent project, killing it off completely. Forks can be very unsettling, especially when they happen to projects you rely upon for day to day business. It’s generally better to concentrate developer talent into fewer projects, making them develop faster and better. But in the long run, forks are sometimes unavoidable. Forks are an activity that make open source projects thrive, and ultimately result in better software for us all.