Part 1 : In the Beginning

Mark, you have a somewhat eclectic background; has that been a help or a hindrance when working on the web?
Oh, definitely a help. Having a varied background has given me flexibility. If there's one quality you need when working for an Internet company, it's flexibility (and the capacity to survive without sleep, water, food and, often, salary).

It also means I'm not tied into one particular way of thinking. I can often come at complex business problems from a different perspective, which brings something extra to our team.

And how did you get started on the Internet?
I became a casual surfer in 1994, mainly to check the soccer results back home in England (I live in Austria) and to keep in touch with distant friends via email. But I only started my first website in early 1997. I'd just launched my own translation business, and got a grant from the local chamber of commerce to get some professional business start-up advice.

My mentor, a great chap called Martin Knapp, introduced me to html and basic website management principles. Together we set up a site advertising my translation services. It cost about US$25 a month to host, involved no maintenance time at all, and pulled in thousands of dollars worth of business; there was a joke on the index page (which doesn't translate unfortunately) which got the site featured in the opening paragraph in an article on translation in a national business magazine. I eventually had to close the site down , because I didn't have the time to cope with the business it generated, and didn't feel comfortable sending clients to other freelance translators (I had high standards!).

At the time, the chamber of commerce was a bit upset that I'd spent my start-up grant on what they considered to be an expensive website tutorial. They said that wasn't the way to build a business. Someday I must let them know where it all lead to. Martin was a great advisor and is now a partner in one of Austria's leading management consultancies - I've already lined him up for an interview!

And science.komm? Why the odd name?
I wanted to make more use of the web to generate customers for the translations, so I decided to build a collection of links which would attract German-speaking scientists publishing in English-language journals (my target market). The theory was that they would use this link collection (to online dictionaries, journal websites etc.) and then remember me when they needed a translation.

I decided to give the directory its own identity. The site was all in German remember, and komm is a play on words, both .com and "Kommunikation" - the German word for communication. I then set up www.sciencekomm.at (remember I was just after a local market, and .at is the Austrian domain extension) and put up an English version just for fun.

I had no real understanding of the importance of a .com extension, and went around happily requesting links to my website from around the world and collecting science journal links like others collect stamps or coins. Toward the end of 1998 I discovered I had probably the biggest collection on the Internet, 750 visitors a day and 100+ incoming links. That's when I thought I should maybe start to learn a little about website business and marketing.

It's a mistake many make - often unavoidably - first building the website and then developing the business and marketing plan. Then you discover all the things you should have thought of before you started. sciencekomm.at - what an awful domain name!! At the time it was perfect though. Now science.komm has a high level of awareness in the biomedical community (c.3000 visitors a day, with half bookmarking the site), so I'm loathe to "rebrand". And with all those incoming links boosting search engine rankings, and my lack of time, I'm also loathe to transfer to the .com address (sciencekomm.com also leaves a lot to be desired!).

Does being a British guy living in Austria have an impact on your Internet activities, whether positive or negative? After all, your main audience is not exactly down the road...
On a day-to-day basis very little. I "live and work" on the Internet, so my physical location is relatively unimportant, at least for the kind of work I'm involved with (mostly planning and content development). The main problem is that most of my colleagues and contacts are in totally different time zones. Which means late nights and early mornings sometimes.

An American would probably be astonished at the relative lack of dot.com mania here in Austria. Internet facilities and services that many readers will take for granted just aren't available, or only at a cost.

Most Internet users are still paying telephone charges for every minute they are online. Only recently has a decent cable service become available.

science.komm is hosted by a local company for about US$25 a month, and for that I get less capacity and add-on services than many free hosting services offer elsewhere.

The difference though is service. I've rung the hosting service at 9pm on a Sunday and had technical support fix a problem in minutes. Not only that, but after they dealt with the problem, they put me though to the sales department to update my account. Imagine that - there was a guy from sales and marketing in the office, at 9pm on a Sunday, and happy to talk to a customer!

Continued...