December 1998 Column

So you want your own website?

 Follow these simple instructions and your company can have its own website on the internet within a couple of weeks or so without breaking the bank.

 It is presumed you have an email account with an Internet Service Provider and have the time and energy to manage a simple project.

Hardest Part First

Several years ago when I decided to create my own website for M.E. Berger & Associates, I had no idea what I wanted or how to go about getting it. Before you can go one step further you need to decide what you want the website to do for you, what you are willing to do for the website and what type of ‘content’ do you want.

For me, the first question was a no-brainer. I wanted the website to be a recruiting and marketing tool and an enduring and inexpensive public relations tool.

The second question somewhat harder. I decided that I wanted a site that wouldn’t cost me thousands of dollars up front, would be inexpensive to maintain and would be easy to maintain and not need continuous updating.

 The third question is the hardest. I ‘surfed’ the internet for weeks seeking out other sites run by recruiting agencies and other employment related sites. Back then there were not very many agencies that had web sites. I settled for a simple site with a several pages including a main ‘home’ page, a page where candidates could go and find out about our placement services, a page where employers could go and learn more about our recruiting services, a page for employment related ‘tips’ and a page where anyone could go and post a message to me. My idea was to develop a site that would serve a simple purpose…to introduce prospective candidates or clients to my company and its services. As my objective was to entice a person to my site, have them send a resume or job order and probably not return. I decided to have a ‘static’ site, rather that a ‘dynamic site. The former is less expensive to develop and much easier to maintain, the latter more complex and expensive to maintain but keeps people coming back again and again. Good for retailers but of questionable value to recruiters. Once a potential candidate or client makes initial contact via my website, he/she goes into the database and I no longer rely on web contact for that person.

 Next Steps are Easy…Maybe

 You have now decided on your objective and content. What are you going to call it? My first suggestion is always to try and use an acronym for your company. Mine was easy. I felt http://www.m-e-berger-&-associates.com was a little lengthy so I chose www.meba.com. You will be hard-pressed to find any three or four letter domain names available these days. You might have to be creative in your use of hyphens or other special characters to create variations of the acronym for your company. Other possible names are names that have to do with your specialty, for example, http://www.metalworking-recruiters.com. In general, try and pick a name that is as short and easy to remember as possible. Once you select a name you need some information from your ISP.

 As mentioned at the beginning of the article, you need to have an ISP, the Internet Service Provider who provides your internet dial-up service. Usually the same company also provides your email and news services. If you don’t already have an ISP, go back through some of the older Fordyce Letter internet columns to learn what an ISP is and how to set up an account as it is beyond the scope of this article to go into those topics.

 The information you need from your ISP are things like contact and billing names and server addresses. The ISP should even have all of this information on their website, as mine does, so you may not even have to call them. Once you gather the above information, visit this site:

 http://rs.internic.net/cgi-bin/domain

This is the domain registration page for the Internic, a.k.a. Network Solutions, the company that is the clearinghouse for all domain name registrations. You are asked to read the registration agreement and instructions but basically you type in your email address and the domain name you are trying to register, for example: meba.com, without the www in front. If someone has previously registered the site name, you will get a message that the name you are requesting is not available. Try again until you are successful. Once successful, you are asked to fill out a form with all the contact names and server addresses as mentioned previously. As easy as pie. Internic will bill you $70.00 for the first two years of registration and then $35.00 per year thereafter. Down from the $50.00 it used to cost.

Please Note: Most ISP’s will provide this service for you. I advise you to do it yourself for two reasons: You save yourself the $25.00 fee you have to pay your ISP for taking one minute to fill out the form but more importantly it gives you, rather that your ISP, total control over changes to your account. I had a bad experience once before when I changed ISP’s. Since my original ISP had set up the account only they could change the account. Sticky situation when you are wishing to change service providers. Ended up having to fax in copies of my driver’s license. Fun and more fun. Do it yourself.

Getting your site hosted is also easy and inexpensive. Call your ISP and see what his charges are. All the ISP’s that I know of provide hosting services in addition to the standard dial-up service. My provider, www.brick.net, charges me $200.00 per year to host each of my sites. I think that is a competitive and fairly standard rate. This rate provides you with about 5 megabytes of server storage space, more that enough for a small, simple site.

 Round Three - Content

You now have your domain name registered and hosting services in order. Next step. Get it ready and put it on the internet. I said I would keep this simple. Fire up Microsoft Word (or WordPerfect, etc. although I know nothing about it) and type up your content. Start with the home page and describe your services or your company history. Use the proper formatting, i.e., underlining, bold, font size, etc. that you normally would if your were going to print the document. Next save the document as ‘html’. Put on this page the same material you might put in a printed brochure. Create a second MS/Word document describing your recruiting service and third with your marketing service, then a fourth, etc., etc., etc. Save all the documents as ‘HTML’ as you did the first. These Word documents will actually form the basis for your website. Keep it simple in the beginning and experiment.

Only you can put into words what you want your site to say. Once that is done, go out and find a couple of subcontractors. You will need two. First, find a graphics artist with web experience. You can probably call any of the vocational or tech schools with an internet program and offer to pay a student $10-$15 per hour to develop a background and buttons for your website. You can use the same background and buttons for each page. Also, there are many sites on the internet that offer free downloads (www.download.com) for web graphics. Again, keep it simple. The second subcontractor is an HTML programmer. Again, you can locate a candidate in the same dollar range by calling the schools. There are going to be candidate that can perform both services. Ask them to properly place your background and other graphics on your page with standard HTML statements and provide click-able links from your home page to your other pages. Since this is such a simple site, a student or recent graduate could easily handle these tasks.

 Upload 

Once you have completed all of the above, you use either an ‘FTP Client’ software package of a ‘Website Management’ software package. Take instruction here from your ISP or subcontractor. Again, a very simple procedure that includes dialing your ISP and using the software to move the pages from your machine to the ISP machine. There are pro’s and con’s to FTP access (Cute FTP) and Website Management access (MS/FrontPage) but cannot begin to go into that here.

 Linking Your New Site

After everything else is done and your website is finished. At least for starters. You want people to visit you I am sure. I started putting my domain name on all of my letterhead, business cards, print advertising, resumes sent to clients and anywhere else I can think of. Listing your site with all the search engines is helpful but time consuming. There are services available such as Submit-It at http://www.submitit.com that in one swoop will list your sites with many search engines at once. There are many services like Submit-It. Some are free and other can cost up to $50.00 or so. Spending a little money here could be well worth your while. I cannot tell you the far-flung ways that people reach my site. Also, I pay a small monthly fee to have my site listed in an internet ‘Yellow Pages’ that definitely produces some traffic. I also sent a small press release to the local newspaper who was happy to give me a few lines in their paper. For free.

In Closing

We just outlined a very simplistic methodology to get you up on the internet. The site you will produce from these instructions should be used as a starting point for future development. Visit more sites. Get ideas. Change your website to reflect new services. Do what you want to do on your site. My budget for printed brochures has gone to zero. Anytime anyone asks me to mail him or her a company brochure. I give them the website address and that is that. We spent $70 for the domain name registration, $200 for web hosting, about $300 or less total for technical services, anywhere from zero to $125 or so for uploading software and another $50 dollars for linking services. A total of about $700-$800 dollars up front with less than $300 per year in recurring costs, probably less, and you are up with your own site.  

At the other end of the spectrum you can create a dynamic website with search engines to allow clients to search your candidate database, search engines to allow candidates to search your job order database, animated graphics, DHTML, etc., etc., etc. These sites are much more interesting and keep people coming back but are much more expensive to develop, sometimes thousands of dollars, and much harder to maintain. Keep that in mind.  

P.S.

 Last month we mentioned an article we were going to do for this month about introductory cover letters to internet candidates. We asked readers for examples they have used successfully. We received a limited response and decided to postpone the cover letter article. We ask once again that readers send in examples of cover letters they use when making initial contact with internet candidates. 

P.S.S.

 We have written a lot about internet resumes services and have received questions from readers regarding this topic. One of the enduring questions is how to select the right resume / job order-posting service. I received an interesting call recently from Mark Gottwald of IIRC (www.iirc.com). Mark was offering a service where I would give him a listing of the types of people I normally recruit and then he would provide me with a list of internet resume services that were a close match for my specific needs. This might prove useful for those that are lost in the sea of resume services to assist in zeroing in on those services most likely to produce results. You can reach Mark at markg@iirc.com for more information.