Part 2 : Missed Opportunities & Technology

Looking back, how would you have gone about things differently? Did you take any decisions you now regret?
I wish I had put more effort into keeping some of my earlier sites updated - I tend to get very enthusiastic about my current project, whatever it is, and lose focus on earlier stuff. I'm finding that it's difficult to resurrect a site that has been dormant for a long time.

And any opportunities that you missed?
Oh dear, so many missed opportunities! My biggest "fish that got away" story relates to domain names - at the time I set up igoldrush.com I could have picked up dozens of "generic" domain names for next to nothing - for instance, I remember drawing up a list of available names in early 1996 that included "Competitions.com". Money was very tight then, so I guess I passed up the chance to make a relative fortune now for want of a few hundred dollars a few years ago.

Has living in Japan had an influence on your Internet activities?
I'm not sure - I started building sites after I moved to Japan, so I've not really had a chance to immerse myself in any other "Net" culture. Having said that, it's certainly harder to get companies in the US to take you seriously if they can't just pick up the telephone and call you, which makes it tough selling ad space at times.

Does managing several sites simultaneously bring special problems? Have you ever considered outsourcing or hiring staff? What design software are you using?
As I mentioned earlier, the main problem I have in looking after several sites is that I tend to always favour the youngest. My older sites have not been updated for quite some time, and it's not clear when I'm going to get around to them (although they still occupy firm positions in my mental "to-do list"!)

I'm only just coming around to the idea of possibly outsourcing some work on my sites; until recently it would not have been cost-effective to do so. I am looking into setting up more automation to make updates easier and more manageable.

For my sins, I am now firmly in bed with Microsoft and FrontPage 2000, although I don't like to use its proprietary features such as the WebBots and custom programs. I tend to lay out pages in FrontPage and then go into the HTML and hand-tweak tables and things until they look just like I want them to. I could write the pages in NotePad if I had to, but I find it much faster to sketch out my ideas straight into FrontPage.

What hosting solution do you use, and why?
My hosting setup is still a bit of a mess. Emailaddresses.com is hosted on a dedicated machine with Alabanza, which gives me masses of bandwidth and a very fast site - Emailaddresses.com itself uses up about 45-50GB of bandwidth a month. I could host all my other sites on the machine as well, and I plan to get around to this sometime soon, but it's always a case of there being something more urgent or more interesting to do, rather than read up on how to transfer and set up sites on my dedicated server. So I still have some sites hosted on very cheap hosting packages on IperWeb and on Hiway.

The design of your sites features heavy use of colored tables, rather than graphics. What's your thinking behind this approach?
No choice - I can't draw to save my life, so I rely on others to produce even half-decent graphics! I also don't subscribe to the theory that "eye-candy" is necessary on information sites; my mainly text-only layout loads much faster than a page loaded down with graphics.