September 21, 2006

           I was barely awake and into the shop before I got a call to head over to the wig store. You might say I’m making good money because I am charging for every minute, the reason being that I prefer not to do that work. Didn’t we already talk about that? I cleaned up the AOL windows, set up an index for payables, wrote e-mails and showed Ruth how to work the CD player. Remember, she is leaping into the works with both feet rather than taking actual lessons.

           For example, I contacted the DSL place and placed her order, checked out some photographers on-line and registered a domain name for her. “Wig-gles”, the full trio, com, net and org. She snapped at me once or twice and I had to remind her I was not an employee. The fact is, I normally charge $100 for each of those events, and the average person might still have been on the phone trying to get past the phone company just on the DSL part, where I was completely finished in around an hour.

           Mind you, she has come a long way to realizing the computer is not an answer to all business problems. She was shocked until I showed her that it really did take 40 minutes to send a single email if you compose the letter while on-line. Get a coffee, go sit down someplace quiet and write the letter on your own time. Then tackle the computer part.
           So there are no pictures for today. That does not mean I don’t have something for you. The business card index has been evolving very nicely. Fred was most enthused, “This is something we can sell.”

           [Author's note 2022: I've since discovered lots of pictured, but they don't always match the blog by the day. Mind you, the month should match up most of the time. I've published a few in the blog format from 2022. Enjoy, and you know what they say, never feel ashamed of yourself. That's you parent's job.
           I won't live long enough to match up all the photos. The best I can do today is this shot of my top clients nowadays in a photo with President Nixon. She did his hair when he was in Miami. And a manatee speed zone.]


           The reception has been great, and remember, all they have seen is the home page. I’ve really done the background work and I think they are going to be surprised. I’m not worried about copycats because (as I explained to Fred), there is no meaningful HTML code, just two links [for each card] to pictures they’ve already seen. The magic is totally the CSS and the simplicity. Nobody can copy it without having to figure out the process, one step of which I discovered by accident with a strange program that does not work right.

           Also, any attempt to “improve” the system will add complication, and it just cannot be made any simpler. The concensus between all of us, with a combined 108 years of business experience is that this is a good one. People generally don’t need to be sold on business cards, although myself I think cards are somewhat over-rated. Take a look at the first sheet, and you’ll see that all the colorful artwork has already been done by the client. If it goes, the entire process, including billing, can be run by three minimum wage clerks, none of whom have any idea what is going on beyond their immediate task. There is very little need for security anyway because my naturally reticent approach has already built that in.

           This all brings us back to why nobody appears to have done this already. My guess is that the nature of Internet advertising is to make a killing. Projects like this, which require more than glitzy presentation, don’t get picked first or at all. It already has the status of a “why didn’t I think of that” undertaking. What you see is only the index. Oh, don’t worry, I see the layout invites a table design and I hope somebody is dumb enough to try that. Yes, I see where rollovers would look nice – but none of those techniques add anything to the utility of the page. This could also explain, and I’m guessing here, why we are not barraged with come-ons for these type of things already – they just don’t exist.
           I’ve seen coupon sites that do a similar layout. However, those coupons are expensive to design on line. There is zero design here, and I can include a coupon any time. You can’t see what happens when you click on a card, but it is not quite what you expect. I’ll keep that as a mild surprise. It is this zero page that is the real seller, would you not want your business card up there once you see this?

           Okay, I’ll talk money. Not dollars, that is none of your business, but money. Okay, what are your choices if you want a web page? Right, big bucks. My thinking was that if you pay for a web page, it kid of sits there much of the 24 hours a day and most sites tend to barrage the visitor with information. I see some nods of recognition. Some sites blast you with so much info that you wish you had not even gone there, or worse, you get lost trying to find the simple thing you wanted. Like why your AOL bill is different from what they told you. My conclusion is that the business card, being a mature concept, has just about the right amount of information for a casual inquiry. So we’ll stick with that.
           That leaves us with the 24 hours a day part. You pay for it, but really, how many hours of the day total are people visiting your site? I knew you’d say that. Well, what does any red-blooded American do in this situation? Right – you time share. Actually, I arrived at this conclusion through a totally different thought process, but it is harder to understand. I was contemplating the parts of web pages where surplus capacity [an economic term] already existed. Home pages were right there. With my system, you are essentially time sharing a single home page.
           Nobody know much about the naming conventions for the page [that I am planning to use out of context], so again for the zillionth time in my life, I find myself alone in a new arena. To simplify my question, follow my logic here. When you visit a home page, say www.gronk.com, do you notice or pay attention to any suffix? Suppose the page came back as
www.gronk.com/detail/faq? I’ll bet you did not even care about the slash detail slash faq that got tacked on the end. That makes my point. I could probably name your site anything you wanted as long as I got the first part right. So this whole idea that a registered domain name makes you a look like a pro is only partially right, in that only people selling web pages seem to notice such things. It could also be making you look like a chump.

           Providing nothing goes wrong tomorrow, I intend to spend the entire evening looking closer at web page processes that fit this idea. The going rate with the 8 books I have here is maybe a half-chapter of useful data per volume. It is the same old story, the easy parts are too easy and the hard parts are too hard. Anything else on this? Yes, one more thing – the web page still inserts a useless blank block upon certain resizing and nobody has solved this yet. I suspect it may be something in IE called a “whitespace error”. The code is supposed to ignore blank white spaces, but then, it is a MS product so go figure.