Part 1 : Fascination, education and Website 101

Hi Mike, and welcome to ibizInterviews. Tell us something about yourself - where did the motivation come from to work with and help small businesses with their initial web efforts?
I started out online with a simple fascination for the medium of the web. The idea that an Everyday Joe Normal could publish a site visible to the entire wired world just blew my mind! This was four years ago and I was on AOL, with a 14,400 modem and an old, used Macintosh computer. But the real drive for me came when I decided to move my own small business online and hired a web designer to create a site for me. Getting set up with a local Internet service provider (ISP) was a baffling prospect and it drove me nuts that there was no simple step-by-step set of instructions to follow. The ISP patiently waded through my questions and confusion and I got my web space, but I hadn't a clue about what came next.

So how did you then set about getting up to speed on the relevant issues when you first started online?
My web designer put together a great site template for me and we chose a targeted industry-specific portal site to host it. I'm the kind of guy that needs to know a lot before getting involved in things, and I was nearing completion of an online interactive course in web design. I still highly recommend this course to any small business owner that will be creating their own website. It teaches HTML basics in a multiple lesson format that has you creating a simple site using their images and text; it just gives you a clear and basic understanding of writing HTML.

Once I'd completed that course I was seriously hooked on web publishing! I took the template that my web designer had created and adjusted his navigation scheme slightly, had some scans done of my company logo and products, and published that site immediately! I was in heaven! I'd paid the designer about US$500 for the site template and the host US$350, and the scans cost another US$300. My ISP dialup account was another US$250 for the year, so I was in for just under US$1500 dollars, had a gorgeous website, and I was officially online!

I immediately enrolled in an advanced web design class and started to create a website for pure pleasure. It's the most fun I ever had online and is still the coolest domain name I ever reserved; I registered madeofmoney.com and started collecting web graphics on the theme of money and finance. I then added money- and finance-related jokes, quotes and trivia to it. I still play there, adding links, graphics, jokes and quotes on a regular basis.

Man, you really got me going! In any case, it was just a love for the medium and frustration at the lack of information about how to put it all together that led me to create WebSite101. The site is not so much about writing HTML or about web design; rather it's about marketing issues and content development for the small business entrepreneur. It's meant to help the little guy understand what makes an effective web presence and how to go about getting noticed, including search engine positioning basics.

Continued...