Dan Siedman: Don't send a 15 page publication out and expect it to get read. Short and sweet is best. I believe my popularity is in part due to the shortness of stories.

Christopher Herman: I think finding your niche is the key. Obviously I couldn't go into business to try and become a bigger and more popular search engine that Yahoo. First of all, I don't know anything about that business, and secondly I couldn't compete with them.

Dr. Rosabeth Moss Kanter: One of the reasons that many older companies have trouble changing is because they evaluate people on whether they stuck to their plan. But if you want innovation and change, you have to be flexible. You can't stick to your plan.

Michael J. Katz: For a traditional businessperson trying to learn how to use the Web as a tool, it's very reminiscent of living in a foreign country. It's not inherently more difficult, just different, and to a large extent, the only way to pick up the culture is to live there for a while.

Jon Nordmark: When we were just starting out no one believed in what we were doing. And when I quit my job at Samsonite, this friend of mine took me out to dinner and he just kept telling me I was crazy.

Peter Kaufman: When the Web started, most sites featured a smiling CEO with a Mission Statement. My personal feelings about mission statements can't be printed in a family magazine. What a waste of space!

Vincent Flanders: Darwebinism is the Darwinian extinction of sites that, for whatever reasons, fail to catch on because no one can navigate the sites or find what they want.

Fred Langa: The prevailing thinking is that "people won't pay for content." But some people will pay for some content: Manage that equation carefully, and you've got a viable business.

Jakob Nielsen: The way the Web works is that you go there, a website just doesn't happen to you. You choose it. People on the Web are very goal driven.

Bob Thompson: Internet pundits and the dot-coms proclaimed that channels (middlemen) would be killed off by the Internet. It's ironic that now the dot-gones are looking for work at the companies they tried to put out of business!

Peter Cohan: All the collapsing business models share at least one thing in common; they all depended on the willingness of investors to swap their cash for stock in businesses with scant profit prospects. 

Brian Alt: There's a money and time trade-off; if you don't have either, don't bother getting into email publishing. A surplus of one or the other is a prerequisite.

Britt Thompson: We are constantly bombarded with requests to link to other sites. But it has just never made economic sense for us to do it, and if you open that gate just once, there's just no turning back.

Dr. Randolph Bias: If usability is just common sense, then why are there so many products out there that aren't usable? Why are there so many VCRs with "12:00" blinking on and off? Why are there so many complaints about being unable to navigate web sites? The fact is, design is hard.

David Yancey: [Almost] all the ideas I hear of share one fundamental aspect, which is that they can be developed for very little capital by very few people. So, even if your team is small and resources limited, this is not the time to give up on the new economy.

Matt Mickiewicz: I can't believe how frugal I was in the early days but it ended up paying off in the end, as I was forced to do so much with so little.

Dennis Gaskill: My name is ___, and I like to have sex with animals.

Dominic Taylor: I believe the death of the banner is much exaggerated.

Matt Ragas: ...the amount of utter B.S. and fluff that some Net CEOs are still spouting is astonishing. When I interview a CEO with a stock price in the single digits who thinks his company is actually going to "roll-up" an industry, that's when I know a certain percentage of companies are still in dot com fantasy land.

Alex Swoboda: I can't think of any examples of a band that has gone from nobodies to world stars just because they had a good homepage.

Andrew Hartsock: So ideally, your IT staff are diplomats.

Derrick Austin: I regularly receive daily reports from my little spiders telling me who's been a "naughty boy" and other relevant information via email and SMS.

Matt Ragas: Right now, the Web has gone from being the cute, little baby that everyone thought was perfect into this wild-eyed toddler that doesn't always do what we tell it.

Andrew So: I don't see forcing someone to get offline as an Internet solution.

Jim Ackerman: Listen to your clients; they will teach you a lot about what they want.

Debbie Campbell: In another 18 months, it's kind of scary to think what could be happening with the business.

Ralph Slate: Believe me, not everyone is getting rich off the internet!

Jeff Eisenberg: When your message is as clear and timely, your mission as compelling, and your results as powerful as ours are, attracting quality people is not a problem.

Barbara Petura: Traffic, Traffic, Traffic!

Leslie Eiser: We call it Blanco Diablo

Mark Brownlow: An American would probably be astonished at the relative lack of dot.com mania here in Austria.

Matt Ragas: Bottom line, if an entrepreneur really has a clear execution plan, team and market opportunity, he will still get funded regardless!

Richard Counsell: I would have bought a pornographic magazine and registered every word I came across adding dot.com several times!!

Daryl Rayner: In the end we had to do some guessing and keep our fingers crossed.

Allan Gardyne: Buy the product, work like mad - and take time to smell the roses.

Aaron Zelins: I must be able to auction off my extensive collection of belly button lint on Ebay.

Shawn Collins: To tell you the truth, the 80:20 rule is a myth.

Mike Banks Valentine: You don't just post a site and forget about it, that's a recipe for disaster!

Edwin Hayward: (on Amazon.com's Book Recommendation service) ... it's obsessed with telling me that I should buy Star Trek products...

Edwin Hayward: It would be nice to be able to claim that I had a "grand design"

Jeff Eisenberg: There will still be plenty of horror stories to write about in January.

Dennis Gaskill: Every decision you've made in the past brought you to where you are today. Every decision you make today affects the choices you'll have later. For a better future, make the right choices today.

William Bontrager: Mostly it comes down to being considerate of site visitors. Putting them off is putting them out. Without visitors, a site is no more than a personal hobby.  

Fraser Hay: Plan. Test. Plan. Test. You can solve most problems if you put it on paper.

Jeffrey Veen: After all this time on the Web, we all still get enamored with sexy technology and forget why we're actually building websites for people.

Bill Hopkins: Technology is going to drive the global economy for the next hundred years and guess what, it's driven it for the last 175 years.

Troy Williams: There was this myth in 1998 that it was easy to start a company. I think it really was a myth. It never really was that easy.

Sean Carton: In the end, ecommerce is about value: how much value is the etailer providing to the consumer. If they're not adding enough value to make the online transaction worth their while, the customer isn't ever going to buy again. No customers? Poof! No company.

Donna Baase: The most challenging aspect was realizing that a web designer is usually very technically or artistically talented, and not both.

Jeffrey Zeldman: Suffice to say, the Web is broken, and all of us helped to break it.

Don Middleberg: And that's what public relations is still about, you can have all this high tech in the world, but it's really still about high touch.

Rob Kelly: Funniest pitch ever was a smart woman who was pitching selling two stuffed animals that were otters, meant to be used as a communication device for two partners in a relationship.

Mark Brownlow: My wife is a paragon of patience, but in the last few weeks I've come to realize that you have to set priorities, and the number one priority is the family.

Rich Zygler: Today's website client demands much more of their website than they did only two years ago.

Andrew Hartsock: I am going to learn more by having problems, than not having them.

Jeff Eisenberg: Have you ever heard of a customer who said, "This site is terrible, but I'm going to buy from the company anyway because (insert a big name developer here) put it together?

Matt Ragas: Don't trust anyone online, until they give you a reason to trust them.

Brad Lang: About is one of the dotcoms that is going to survive, despite all the negativity surrounding the field right now

Richard Kies: "forget the buzzwords, lose the hype, the marketing babble and the "two-dollar" words, and write just as you would talk"

Ralph Slate: The advertisers are clearly taking advantage of the publishers right now

William Dupuy: I live by several ground rules [of disclosure], particularly in times of a corporate crisis: Get it out. Get it over with. Get on with business.

Stuart Pool: In four years, we have established a successful business from scratch. So I cannot say that I regret any of our decisions.

Debbie Campbell: Customer service is a major way of weeding out sites that last from sites that don't.

Lynda Weinman: Make sure you listen to your client and leave your ego at the door. If they hate a color or a font, don't push it down their throat.

Ashlie Lefko: I don't believe in blowing a lot of money and hoping that something works.

Dennis Gaskill: There isn't that much distance between good and excellent, but they are worlds apart, if you follow that twisted logic.

Barbara Petura: I was not maintaining backups because I was sure [the ISP staff] were doing a professional maintenance job. Oops!

Andrew So: I thought one of the biggest problems on the Internet was customer support.

Alex Swoboda: Everyone knows that you can't make money here (Austria) selling over the web, but everyone also knows that one day you will be able to make money selling over the web - that's why they're pumping so much money into it.

Wayne Porter: You treat affiliates fairly and offer a competitive offer, and they will go to bat for you. Burn them and they will not only walk away, but their colleagues will too.

Matt Ragas: People may disagree with me, but I did my job if I get people thinking.

Leslie Eiser: I guess I'm blessed by not having a lot of money to spend

Aaron Zelins: ...we know that what we are planning today will probably be a bit different from where we wind up tomorrow

Allan Gardyne: The worst day working for myself - when yet another thief copies part of my site or when I have horrendous technical problems with the database - is still better than working for somebody else.

Richard Counsell: I would rather employ a ten year old than I would the vast majority of so called web experts

Nelson Carbonell: We call it "playing Jeopardy." Our clients tell us the answer and we try to figure out what the heck the question was.

Molly Holzschlag: The biggest problem still in web design at present is that designers are rarely thinking about audience, product, and intent. They overlook the preliminary process and jump right in.

Neil West: Calling someone up and telling them that their song got the best reviews from music lovers and that this has earned them a US$250,000 recording contract... well, that's a great telephone call to make.

Martin Knapp: Many clients have the (false) expectation that the Internet means they just have to put up a website. Project done. Go back to the real business.

Garth Franklin: I look at sites from a marketing side if necessary but the "look and feel" of a site is always more important to me than its marketing angle. I could for example easily double or triple the amount of advertising on my site, but I choose not to because the "look" is first and foremost to me.

Leslie Eiser: We're very careful to make sure people don't double dip. It's one free sample per family, period.

Denise O'Berry: Never forget you are dealing with people. Relationships must be built online just like they are when you network in person.

Jeff Koke: The best advice I can give to a small company trying to compete against larger, established companies is to use your marketing to make yourself appear "larger than life."

Dr. Mani: You can't be online what you aren't in real life - unless you have a split personality