Before you Start

What and to Whom?

The first things you have to determine are:

What is my message?
Who is my audience?

The Message

The internet is an incredibly powerful communication medium but you have to clarify what you are going to say off-line before rushing into cyberspace.
You message can be as simple or complex but every web site has a message.
Some examples might include:
Hey look at my cat fluffy!
Star Trek is cool!
Look at our advertisers. (Please, Please look at our advertisers)
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated (www,microsoft.com or www.aol.com)
Have you seen my new piercing? (call me)
How can we do business more efficiently? (to an existing customer)
Hire Me.
Visualize world peace.
Buy a book, or a toy, or some software, or just about anything else you can think of.
Come visit our town.
Home made crafts for sale.
And on and on and on…
Go through some of your favorite web sites and see if you can think of what their message is.

The Audience

As you checked out those sites think about what made you go there or keep coming back. You are their audience.
The internet population is growing by leaps and bounds and is looking more and more like the real world. The old (like three years ago, time is relative on the web) idea of the internet audience being a bunch of pocket protector wearing, x-file watching, white guys in the US and Sweden just doesn’t fly anymore.
If you have an audience off-line, there is an audience on-line there to be found and even if you don’t have an off-line audience you might find one on-line.
Internet Technologies can help you:
  • Find new customers
  • Serve existing customers better
  • Streamline your business processes to server off-line customers
The audiences are as varied as the messages. You just have to figure out where they are out on the internet and get them to your site so you can deliver your message.
It sounds so easy doesn’t it?
If your message is starting to take shape (don’t worry, you can change it) and you want to go after an audience then get ready to invest some time as you…

Retro Warning

This “play” section of my web site is now under historic preservation. This site was created in the Fall of 1995 and originally hosted on my Purdue University omni account. This was back in the days of Netscape 2, stringing HTML together in a text editor, FTPing it up to the old Unix account, realizing you capitalized the file name so the link doesn’t work, re-FTPing the file, realizing you didn’t set the permissions right, telneting into the shell account, running some cryptic chmod commands and then finally getting the instant gratification of seeing your page on that Windows 3.1 computer.
Partially out of nostalgia but mostly out of laziness this section of my website will remain unchanged. I will update text and pictures from time to time but don’t expect much. (If you are using Netscape, yes that is a dreaded BLINK tag up there)