It's been far too long since our last newsletter. There's a lot more stories to tell, but today I'm going to talk about some of the reasons I haven't written in so long: our customers.

Open Source Consulting: Helping people get the most out of Free Software

Web sites are the most visible thing we do, so I'd like to highlight a few of the ones our customers have launched in the past few months. Our newest core offering is an e-commerce system called ZenCart, and we've had two of them launch in the last month.

The first thing to ask is, why? Web sites have lots of reasons for existence, but for business purposes, we tend to see some combination of four motivations:

• 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. 

Quick quiz:

1. Your computer has been infected with a virus, and it deleted everything on the server. What would you do?

   1. Send the server hard drive to a data forensic/analysis firm to see if they can recover your project data.

   2. Recreate all your marketing material from scratch, scanning your logo and everything else.

   3. File a law suit against Microsoft, Symantec, and Dell for letting this happen.

   4. Call your friendly computer technician who disinfects your computers and then restores your previously backed up data from the Internet.

A web site is an essential marketing tool of a business. These days, especially in the Seattle area, people will check out your web site before doing business with you. The work you do with a graphic designer like Peter Mckinnon can have a big impact when someone decides whether you're the right fit for what they're looking to buy.

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.