Secrets of Running a Website

Are you considering setting up your own website, or just curious to know more about the inside operations of running an online presence? Here’s a secret look at the ins and outs of advertising, web site traffic, and the tools available to publish your content.

First off, here's an overview of my background in developing and running websites for large organizations, corporate startups, and just for entertainment.

Pearls before Swine at UCSF

My experience in building web sites started at UCSF, where I did some limited sys admin support work for a very large website, and handled the ongoing updates for a really badly designed project site I had inherited. That ugly site had to go, but it felt a bit presumptuous to redesign it from scratch.

After spelunking through UC's vast bureaucracy, I discovered that the university's marketing group had created a standardized design for all websites related to UCSF projects scattered around its various campuses. Armed with a design to implement, I learned how to wrestle with HTML to create pages that looked the same on both Internet Explorer and Netscape; that required significant experimentation in the days of third and fourth generation browsers.

I built my version of UCSF's master design in part using GoLive CyberStudio, an innovative new tool for building graphic web pages, and in 1997, "the best way to design a Web site." I built my placeholder graphics to UCSF's specifications using Macromedia's Fireworks.

The UCSF design group was only providing non-editable, and therefore completely worthless, GIF placeholders. Thinking that other groups might appreciate being able to edit my PNG files to easily create a consistent set of graphics and buttons that matched the official design on their own websites, I submitted my graphic templates back to the university to share.

To my surprise, they rejected even making my graphics available, because they didn't think anyone would be able to edit PNGs. My web adventures were not only challenging my inner artist and presentation code designer, but also provoking my inner rage against the machine, made up of mindless bureaucratic drones.

I began describing the bureaucratic university queens, who loved to command attention as petty despots over whatever territory they could manage to assemble, in an analogy involving the barnacles and other crap that grow underneath ocean piers.

All that crusty junk appears several feet above the water line at low tide. How do those immobile chunks of sea trash get into position so high above the tide, and what keeps them alive up there? At UCSF, it was: "what tidal wave washed through here and stuck these incompetent boobs so high up on the institutional ladder!?"

2001: A Dot Com Odyssey

After getting several job offers from enterprising startups all desperate to hire people with a wide range of experience, I left the university and started work for a well funded dot com aiming to deliver technology to simplify procurement for education.

I was a bit skeptical of the whole startup situation; San Francisco was getting $40 million dollars of new investment every day, and I couldn't see how any of the operations I looked at could ever hope to deliver a positive return on all the speculative investment.

In the end, I imagined that the company that hired me would be around for six months, and that it would be a fun ride while it lasted. I was right! I also found out why they were so interested in my broad experience: they wanted me to be able to do the work of several people.

Every week felt like a month, but I was young and dumb and perpetual crisis seemed like fun and excitement. I spent several nights sleeping on the floor while baby sitting the regular, overnight disaster recoveries of an Exchange Server, I designed and spent a million dollar budget on new equipment, I was able to work with architects and contractors to turn condos and old brick warehouses into new class A office space, and all the champagne and limos and catered lunches were enabling me to finally gain some weight.

Best of all, I got to work with new technologies, including all the web stuff I could stand. I built an Intranet news and documentation filing system using WebObjects, but was then bummed to find that nobody in the company was really using it. To drive some attention, I started writing dryly comical faux news stories to post on the system.

By that point, my six month job expectation had grown into two years, and the reality of economics was eating into San Francisco like a modern day bubonic plague. My company had started laying off chunks of people at regular intervals, so everyone was pretty morose about their uncertain employment prospects. I knew I'd be the last person to go, because while HR can fire IT, IT has to be around to unplug HR’s computer.

My web articles started getting more absurd and comical, not just to attract attention to my now pointless portal, but to distract attention away from the reality facing people who had just woken up to the fact that they had been tremendously overpaid to have too fun, and everything else was going to be downhill from here.

As my Intranet audience continued to shrink, I decided to start posting the same type of stuff on the open Internet, except instead of writing Onionesque articles about the office, I’d write about unwelcome guests, eating pets, and living on San Francisco’s most toxic island.

The Treasure Island Experiment

I had been living on San Francisco's Treasure Island as long as I'd been in the dot com game. I'd qualified for housing there as a university employee, but moved into my waterfront townhouse with a $20 trillion view the very same day I quit working for UCSF.

I brought with me the simple HTML layout I'd put together to publish stories on the web, this time under the name "tiexp.com," proving my skills in marketing are not likely ever going to pay my bills.

I designed my new site using only shades of grey and bright yellow, greyscale thumbnail graphics, and kept everything in lowercase just to make readers angry and frustrated. They put up with my odd style to read my articles, which ranged from the absurd to the odd.

Tiexp made Yahoo! site of the week, was featured in a San Francisco and a San Jose network TV news report (although one displayed my URL wrong), a local radio program, and garnered interviews from a French cable channel, CNET, Wired Magazine, and SF Weekly.

My fifteen minutes of fame encouraged me to experiment with various site designs, including a brief attempt to use slashcode to automate my site. I couldn't bear to give up my hand wrought control of the design however.

I also got to play with Flash, QuickTime VR, and using cookies to track unique visitors to see what they found useful and interesting. I added reports of my travels, threw in bits of island politics, and planned an expansion into criticism of San Francisco's big disasters and big projects, but then put things on hold while I looked for another job.

RoughlyDrafted Magazine

Several years later, after moving from a Windows IT environment into the world of supporting businesses and individuals that were primarily using Macs, I started a new website. After firing off stories exposing the magic and drama surrounding QuickTime, belaboring Macromedia's new foray into DRM, and predicting a new design for the iMac, I was hit by a truck and ended up with lots of time to write about it.

After recovering from my broken arm, I returned to imagineering a Safari Finder hybrid, and attacking analysts’ dire predictions of iPod woe. I was then hit again by a inattentive driver. I was growing tired of trauma, and was too depressed to even write about it.

Even worse, it was becoming a tradition to break a bone and a PowerBook every January, and miss out on San Francisco's summer weather, which occurs in the spring. By the time I'd fully recover, it would be summer, which is San Francisco's cold, foggy winter.

This year, I managed to break tradition instead of another body part, and celebrated by going on a significant vacation, the first I'd taken in several years. When I came back, I had thousands of photos I wanted to publish. However, the tools I'd been using for my site weren't going to work for that.

Adventures in iWeb

Half expecting to fail, I started building a new layout using iWeb. It turned out to be a great way to layout pages, but it has several significant limitations. It currently provides no way to add many of the third party features that advanced users want to include, such as site advertising, commenting, trackbacks, and sophisticated web stats.

I wrote up an initial set of observations in What’s Broken in iWeb, and I plan to fill that out even better in a follow up article. If you use iWeb and have comments on it, I'd like to hear them.

I started using iWeb Extender to add some features to my pages, but much of what the utility is designed to do is convert iWeb’s generated pages to a flatter layout. I didn't want to break all my existing external links, because i hate it when spastic webmasters mess around with their file layout on a regular basis and destroy their URLs. All I wanted was a way to perform several automated search and replace edits to my sites' pages.

The iWeb Extender tool does this, but it also interlinks all of the site’s pages, purportedly so Google can index related pages. The real point of all this interlinking is so the tool can include a link to its website, which bumps up its PageRank everytime Google's web-bots run into the mess of link glue on every extenderized web page. Unfortunately, the side effect of all this interlinking was that the indexing quickly sucks up all RAM and then craps out after about twenty pages. I was writing it to death.

I poked around to find out how to build my own multiple search and replace workflow using Automator, but then came across MassReplaceIt, a free and very handy tool designed to change a bunch of file names or update text across a series of files. It is the perfect companion to iWeb. Not only does it just work, but has an excellent user interface that makes performing multiple replacements very easy to mange.

For example, on my site I search for the meta name="Generator" tag and replace it with my own meta name tags that enable Google to search for content better. Other header tags enable javascripts that activate Haloscan commenting, as well as the Ajax functionality for the article lists below my stories, and the new user definable content on the right hand column.

Similarly, I search for the body end tag and replace it with a new tag that includes javascripts for Technorati tracking, an Amazon link enhancer, and web statistics.

I also search for placeholder items I create in iWeb, which are designed to be replaced with affiliate links, a javascript that aspires to obscure my email address from spam harvesters, the live action Digg box that grows brighter with every click, my Haloscan comment and trackback links, and PayPal links for readers who like my writing enough to make a donation - thanks!

Advertising Revenue

You might be wondering what kind of massive ad revenue I get on my site. It’s no MySpace, but I do drive some significant traffic. Just this weekend, a popular story on market share drove 20,461 unique visitors and 35,269 page views. That means the majority of readers who came to the site were interested enough to continue looking around. What kind of bonanza of advertising revenue did I earn from all this traffic?

Find out in Secrets of Running a Website, part two, where I look at various web advertising programs, how they work, and what they pay.

I really like to hear from readers. What do you think? Leave a comment or email me with your ideas.