JimWorld Gazette Issue #8 06/13/1997

Gazette - Issue #8 - June 13, 1997

CONTENTS

-- What's Going On Jim?
-- Dangerous Subject Ahead
-- New Tutorial
-- Put Her There Pardner
-- My Favorite Bumper Stickers
-- Posting By Hand - Part 2
-- New Way To Say Thank You
-- Change Of Address
-- El Cheapo Autoresponders
-- Tips From Our Weekly Winner
-- Help Please


Link to this issue of the Gazette as http://gazetteworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g8


The good news this week is: I get my cable modem back on the 24th of this month. There is a God, and he must like me. Cox Cable is doing the final testing in my new neighborhood and then I get it. Sleep is just around the corner.

Speaking of sleep, I was having a running e-conversation with John at SmartClicks http://www.smartclicks.com/ and he asked when I found time to sleep. I replied "Sleep? Is that an HTML extension?" and he fired back one of the best responses I've had in a long time.

"Sleep is not an HTML extension, it is an upcoming enhancement to the 'UrlIfe' browser.. It was supposed to be in the last version, but there wasn't time. I have heard rumors that it will be in the next version, but until then we are stuck with persistent bug of nice performance, then degradation until a crash, reboot, repeat."

Great message, John. You have as twisted a sense of humor as I do (I'm not at all sure that is a compliment, but it is meant to be). BTW - John said it was OK to share this with you. While John might be a bit twisted, I can assure you that the services offered by SmartClicks is not. It is absolutely worth looking into for all of you if you want to see where web advertising is going next.

WHAT'S GOING ON, JIM?

You may have noticed that the Gazette went out a day late this week, and it is a bit shorter than usual. No, I haven't finally run out of things to babble about. No such luck. I have material for at least another 50 issues, assuming all of you keep listening.

This week the Dad part of me took over. My 11 year-old's Little League team took first place in their regular season which ended this week. 26-2 record. Not bad. Then they had the play-offs this week and won that as well. Sunday they have their first game in the Tournament of Champions which is single elimination play-offs for all of the top teams in the county. I put the needs of 2,000 loyal readers on one hand and the chance to watch my son finish up the season of his life, and guess what? You guys lost! If Nick's team lasts in the Tournament, you are on notice that you will finish second again next week. Then we'll get back to business as usual.

WARNING! REDUCE SPEED. DANGEROUS SUBJECT AHEAD!

Relax. Take a Valium. Put your slippers on. Get the Barney stuffed animal and put it next to your computer so you have something to smash against the wall when I make you angry with this week's Main Event. Just remember, I'm on your side. Barney (and that $%^&*# song) is the enemy.

The subject for this week has been bandied about on every discussion group I've seen. And everybody has tried to be polite and politically correct in the way the talk about it. As you have probably guessed, politically correct and polite are just punch lines to jokes in my world.

I am referring, of course, to the subject of: why you should have your own domain name before you put any effort into promoting a site that might develop into something real. If your site is just for fun and you don't have any ambitions for it, skip the rest of this section. It's not for you. On the other hand, I haven't met a webmaster yet that didn't have dreams of longevity and popularity for his or her site. Otherwise, why would they put this much time and work into it. It's not like it's a walk in the park.

We're going to talk about several compelling reasons for you to spend the money to register a domain with InterNic and to cough up the bucks to have your site hosted by a commercial ISP. These are not esoteric arguments of image and perception, but rather hard, cold business reasons for taking this drastic step. A large percentage of the Gazette's readership have their sites hosted on free services like geocities and they get their email through several of the free email services. It is you that I am talking to this week. Slow down. I can see you getting red around the neck already and I haven't even scratched the surface yet. Put Barney down and keep reading. I'll let you know when it's Barney time.

Let me tell you about Janelle. This is a scary story and contains violence and un-adult themes. Turn on some lights so you don't get scared.

It all started with a message I got from Janelle. I had never talked to her before, but her story got my attention. Here is the first message she sent me:

"Hi! Great site! I was reading this weeks Gazette and the part on spam caught my eye. I recently sent a message to ChipNet Online http://www.tybee.com/chipnet/index.html editors. Now, I was under the impression that they were a review type of ezine so I wanted to send a short press release and ask them to review my site for their zine. What I got back instead was a letter from my email forwarding service IName saying that my service was being canceled for violating their anti spam policies. Here is the letter I sent to the ChipNet Online editors. Does this sound like spam to you? Did I do something wrong or are the ChipNet Editors jerks?" Attached was a short, pretty well written press release for her web service LuvPersonals at http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/4120

She even opened the message with my favorite three words! You can see why I might be interested in her dilemma. (replay of Jim polishing armor suit and brushing white charger. Damsel-in-distress alert!) Having been down the over-reaction road a time or two (just ask my wife), I asked Janelle a few questions.

First, I wanted to know how she had learned of this problem. This is the message she got from GeoCities abuse department apparently on behalf of iName:

> The following is a complaint received regarding your unsolicited email:
>
> Return-Path: ChipNet2@aol.com
> From: ChipNet2@aol.com
> Date: Sat, 31 May 1997 12:11:31 -0400 (EDT)
> To: abuse@geocities.com
> cc: postmaster@unforgettable.com
> Subject: Fwd: Site Review
>
>
> PLEASE Stop people with sites on your server from Junk Emailing about them.
>
> Thanks!

The next question: where did you learn of ChipNet and what led you to believe they would be interested in your story? She responded that she had found them listed in the ezine directory at http://www.meer.net/~johnl/e-zine-list/zines/chipnet.html. If you go to the above page, you will see that they would appear to be open to receiving press releases. How else would they get their news?

I sent a copy of my request for information and facts to the operator of the site where Janelle found the listing for ChipNet. He promptly replied with the following, even though he was not even in the line of fire for this issue.


"It does seem a bit extreme that Jackson's email name was disconnected simply for sending her single advertisement (technically not a press release; do some basic PR research and you'll see the difference), since she did preface the message with a personal request for publishing the text in ChipNET. I wouldn't count this as spam, since it really was a message purely for ChipNET, not broadcast to a huge list of email addresses." "according to ChipNET's current entry in the ezine-list, the magazine `feature[s] editorial reviews of businesses and products' and `accepts freelance submissions for publication.' As someone who has been involved in publishing for over 15 years, I interpret this to mean that submissions of objective articles, reviews, works of fiction, poetry, etc., would be welcome."

So far Janelle's story is holding up. Next I found out that Janelle had sent the message to three editors at ChipNet, since they each seemed to handle different areas of interest and she thought it could fall into any of their areas. Not unreasonable.

Next, I looked at the notice Janelle had received from iName, her free email service provider. Here is what they had to say about all of this:


"This email serves to inform you that your iName service has been suspended. We have received complaints that you have violated iName’s Acceptable Use Policy (see extract below). Confirmation of this complaint will result in the termination of your iName service.

iName is firmly against spamming and unsolicited emails. iName believes this activity is harmful and disruptive to the Internet community. iName has made reducing spamming activities a high priority and acts fast if it determines that spamming has occurred. iName’s policies are stated in the iName Service Agreement and in its Acceptable Use Policy. When appropriate, iName refers spamming activity to the appropriate legal authorities including the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Computer Crime Unit. Interfering with the operation of an Internet Service Provider is a Federal crime.

If you feel that you are not in violation of iName’s Acceptable Use Policy please respond with an explanation and an iName customer service representative will assist you."


This is an interesting document. It reveals to us that the FBI has undertaken to make the world safe from spammers. I am glad to know about this heretofore unexposed War Against Spam to be headed by the Spam Czar at the FBI. Even more interestingly, it holds out hope that iName will investigate before chopping off Janelle's email head. Unfortunately, her email service was terminated before they ever sent her a message. Apparently they did not need her input in order to determine the facts and arrive at a fair sentence. When they say that they 'act fast' they understate the reality. At the above invitation from iName, Janelle responded with an explanation of the events leading up to this 'spam crisis' to which she received no response. Apparently, decisions by the Spam Police are binding on all parties and may not be appealed.

My next step was to send a message to iName at their published email addressed to be used for all spam related correspondence. I was immediately rewarded for my efforts at investigative reporting by way of a return message, beautifully written, sent to me by a computer program on iName's server. Not exactly what I had hoped for, but it did promise that a human would be in touch shortly.

Here is what the iName computer wanted to say to me:


"This is an automatic response from GlobeComm, Inc. GlobeComm is the parent company of iName which sells lifetime email addresses under a variety of domains. Any mail sent to postmaster or abuse at iName or any of the domains it manages comes to here. If you sent multiple emails, multiple responses will be generated.

We have received your email regarding spamming. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. This email was automatically sent to you so you would know we have received your complaint. Every email is read carefully and responded to appropriately.

We look into each occurrence of reported spamming or sending of unsolicited emails. iName is firmly against spamming and sending of unsolicited emails. iName believes this activity is harmful and disruptive to the Internet community. iName has made reducing spamming activities a high priority and acts fast if it determines that spamming has occurred. iName’s policies are stated in the Terms of Agreement and in its Acceptable Use Policy in this email."


Again, reassurance that iName acts fast to protect the world from random acts of spam. Makes me sleep better, I can tell you. Did I mention that the above message, sent the day after the problem arose, included an extensive list of Spammers that had be terminated by iName? Well, it did, and guess who's email address was already on the list. You got it - Janelle's. Now, that is fast action. I tried a couple of more times to reach a human at iName, but only got more copies of the above assurance that someone was investigating my complaint at this very moment.

Is anybody scared yet? If so, you might take time to hug Barney for reassurance and all sing together -The Ballad of Barney. Next step was to try getting some information about this out of GeoCities. Wasn't sure where they fit into this story, but thought maybe all of the hard working iName investigators were actually over there. Now, this one you should be able to see coming. Yep. Got a great Letter Of Reassurance from them letting me know that spamming is a threat to the American Way Of Life and they would have their staff spring into action on my complaint. Apparently, springing doesn't involve actually talking to me. Here's their contribution to my Untouched By Human Hands mail folder:


"Dear GeoCitizens and visitors,

Thank you for sending a message to abuse@geocities.com, the GeoCities editor who deals with abuse of GeoCities member email accounts. GeoCities does not permit any improper use of member email accounts. We take all these reports quite seriously and investigate every claim made. However, because we get hundreds of messages a day, it may take us a few days before we can investigate your complaint. Please be patient and we will follow through with the appropriate action."


Moving on, I did actually hear from a human at ChipNet. I present it here unedited, just as received.


"Hello :)

This situation doesn't merit much of a reply... but here are my brief thoughts:

We at ChipNET, unfortunately, receive hundreds of junk emails every week. We received at least 4 e-mails involving "LuvPersonals." Three contained a slight reference to us, which could actually have been created by a bulk e-mailing software package, but another was clearly a bulked e-mail with no reference. We do not appreciate continued bulk e-mails. We do continue to accept press releases for quality items that our readers might be interested in, but in our opinion the LuvPersonals mail was junk e-mail.

It is my opinion that the "LuvPersonals information provider" is a junk emailer and should've taken the steps to make SURE that she had a secured way of doing business, and NOT using free email accounts, and a free web site. How could that be a true business to start with?

ChipNET will continue to strive to provide our readers with quality resources, and we will continue to attempt to reduce the amount of junk e-mail we receive.

John Peck ChipNET Editor-in-Chief"

When I asked them nicely if they could supply me with the offensive spam received from Janelle, they responded:


"I'm sorry... this is not possible, as with all junk e-mail, we delete it to prevent our mail boxes from being overwhelmed and essential e-mails from being overlooked.

John Peck ChipNET Editor-in-Chief"



At this point, my Barney went on to his final reward as purple fuzz settled over everything in my studio.

While you might think (or pray for it to end) that this is the end of the story, be heartened. I have saved the best for last.

I visited the ChipNet web site http://www.tybee.com/chipnet/index.html and was greeted by an ironic plea for help. It seems they were unjustly thrown off of America OnLine for wandering to far afield from their original purpose which got them their free forum in the first place. They gave AOL email addresses and asked their loyal followers (and casual visitors) to send lots of email to AOL and force them to give ChipNet back their free service so they wouldn't have to pay to have their own web site.


"At this time, we would be extremely appreciative if you could just take a moment to drop a note to some AOL officials (e-mail/snail mail addresses listed below) and express your views on ChipNET Online leaving AOL. It would be wonderful if you could form these views, and thoughts into a short comment and send them to both:

Barry Schuler, President/CEO AOL Networks e-mail: bschuler1@aol.com

Steve Case, President/CEO of America Online, Inc. e-mail: stevecase@aol.com

Click here to open up a mail window that is already addressed to the above two individuals. Please consider carbon copying ChipNET2@aol.com."


Apparently, it is only spam if it is sent to ChipNet. It is perfectly acceptable to ask visitors to the ChipNet site to send tons of unsolicited email (that is what spam is, isn't it?) to multiple people at AOL in an effort to regain their freebie service. Now, I don't want to turn their every word back on them, but regarding ChipNet's use of free AOL space "How could that be a true business to start with?". They wrote that, not me! But, I couldn't have written it any better if I had tried.

OK, let's get to the point of all this. Janelle was really lucky. She only lost her email service and address. She could easily have lost her web site as well. I get messages every week from victims of the spam hysteria that is sweeping the web.

When I say 'all she lost was her email address' I don't want you to miss the implications of that. Janelle has now lost all ways of communicating with her established user community. There is no way for them to find her except to visit the web site and find out what is going on and how to find her now. In addition, Janelle must now track down all of the web sites that have generously put her email address somewhere on their sites. No way will she find all, or even most, of these listings. She must now start building much of her community over from scratch.

It only took a one sentence complaint from one grumpy person to strip away months (or years) of her hard work. If this complaint had reached GeoCities and Janelle had lost her web server account, her entire web effort would have been wiped out. Start over registering with the search engines. Find all the links that provide so much traffic to a site and beg them to change your URL address. Likely as not, many of the webmasters would already have deleted her link by the time she found them. Nobody wants broken links on their site. All of the bookmarks in the browsers of her community members would now be invalid. To get that community back, she must rely on their taking the time to go looking for her.

This mass following of one another as they all jump off a cliff is the greatest threat to your web efforts. In one moment, all of your hard work at promotion and community building can be wiped away by someone who won't even answer your email. What if this site had been Janelle's source of income. Wiped out. At best, set back several months. And if she goes to another non-domain web address, she runs the risk of this repeating itself.

This tirade is not aimed at just the freebie web servers. Any time your web site is under somebody else's domain name, you are at risk. If your site has a ~ or a / in it, you are at risk. If you don't have the power to tell InterNic to move your domain name to a new server, you are at risk. Personally, I would never put any work into promoting a web site that didn't have their own domain name. When I promote for hire, I turn down this type of business.

When you have your own domain name http://www.yourname.com you can pack up and move to a new ISP on a days notice, and all of your hard earned traffic goes with you. And you can receive your email at you@yourname.com This goes with you where ever you go with your domain. It follows you forever. It's your traffic and email.

If you think this story is a fluke, just a weird one-time thing, I'll let you look through my in-box. I have lots more.

(Just a note: If you are going to spam, don't put your regular email account at risk. Find an 'email friendly ISP' as your first step.)

If this didn't convince you, let me tell you a few others, quickly.

• When I receive award submissions, I seldom visit the freebie servers to look at the sites. The servers are usually so slow that I can't afford the time needed to even see the first page. This is a shame, because I have seen some stunning sites on freebie servers. Lots of wasted efforts, because they don't get the traffic they deserve due to lousy server speed.
  
  
• Like it or not, the world judges businesses by their address. Why do you suppose real-world businesses keep striving to afford as nice of an office or store as possible. Because the location says something positive about their business. The same is true on the web. People's first impression of you is formed by your URL. Let's face it, http://www.mysite.com is a better address than http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/4120. Realtors that have any degree of success drive the nicest car they can afford. It is part of the image of prosperity, and people want to deal with prosperous people. It reassures them that the person or business does well. What message does a freebie address send?
  
  
• Many webmasters will not give serious consideration to linking to freebie server sites. What an outrage, you cry! Who ever said the world was fair? And it's their web site, not yours. They set the rules. Would you try to sell luxury cars from a booth at the swap meet?
  
  
• Do you think that serving up pages at a snail's pace is impressive to your guests? Do you enjoy sitting there waiting for minute after minute as a page loads from a server? Show some consideration for your guests, and they will become part of your community.
  
  
• Do you think the big animation at the bottom of your pages proclaiming
  
  "But, I can't afford to pay for web space and traffic and all that!"
  
  really impress people. You know the ones. 'This site provided free by xyz.com.'
  
  Are you sure you can't afford space on a real server? Have you seen the unlimited traffic, 20 MB of storage, email accounts and your own domain name for $19.95 per month? Can't afford 20 bucks a month? Bull. A domain name is only $100 for 2 years of registration. Sell a couple of ads on your site. Mow some lawns. Skip lunch 1 day a week. Make your kids skip lunch and mow some lawns. You can find a way if you're serious about what you are doing on the web.

OK - NOW IT'S BARNEY TIME!

NEW TUTORIAL

There is a great new Guest Tutorial on the VirtualPROMOTE site at http://www.jimworld.com/guest7.html

It's all about what to do when you can't get listed (or listed right) in the search engines and directories. Good stuff written by the president of the oldest web promotion company on the web. AAA Promotions. Go read it. It's good.

PUT 'ER THERE PARDNER

What's New at http://www.whatsnu.com is a new searchable database of new site openings. New features are being added all the time, so I'll be sending you back to this one a few times. Looks great. Works fast. And was created by the folks at Web-Ignite who really know how to promote a site. I assume this site will get lots of promotion, which translates into more traffic for you when you submit your site.


OmniTree is a new search engine that is just ready for prime time. http://www.omnitree.com You can only list sites dealing with computer hardware and software, but that list is due to expand quickly. Go get listed.


Not a place to get listed, just this week's Fun Stop. ContestWorld at http://www.contestworld.com has listings for more contests then you can imagine. Be careful, this site is addicting. If you win anything good, send me my share.


GameWeb: The Gamer's Search Engine at http://thegw.com. It's a search engine dedicated to computer games sites and console game sites. Submit and get listed.


Travel related sites should get listed at 111 Triple One Travel Directory http://www.triple1.com/. They have lots of free ways for you to promote your site by listing with them, and some offer a way to upgrade your visibility for a few bucks. Travel on over and get some traffic.


Four11 has launched Yellow Pages! They have partnered with five of the largest Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) to bring you the a new yellow page service for your region. Their partners include NYNEX, US West, Ameritech, Pacific Bell, and BellSouth. Now Four11 provides a "one-stop shop" for your directory needs! Let your fingers do the walking at http://www.Four11.com. Not everything is free in YP listings.


If you have a little cash laying around and want to get some big time promotion out of it, run over to WebLink Express Corporation http://www.weblinkexpress.com/ They are publishing a nice insert that will be included in the Parade magazine and delivered to 85 million households in America over a 13 week period. Your listing in the directory will set you back about four grand, but that's a lot of households to reach. Visit the WebLink Express site to see the full presentation. The plan is much more complete then this short tip can do proper justice to.

MY FAVORITE BUMPER STICKERS

I love animals. They taste great

Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes

The gene pool could use a little chlorine

Give me ambiguity or give me something else

Make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.

I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it.

We have enough youth. How about a fountain of SMART?

PART 2: POSTING BY HAND

Tips from the Hitman, or part 2 of a continuing adventure into the proper design of you web page so it can be found by the rest of the world.

Last week I covered the title of the page, in particular the title as it appears in the HTML code. This is the title that appears at the very top of the browser window and is the title of the page as seen by the search engines for indexing. Why am I back on titles again? I discovered another very good reason for your title being a mini description of you entire site, for bookmarks. You want people to bookmark your site because it is a great site and is worthy of a bookmark. Good, that’s the right attitude.

Take a look at your list of bookmarks. How many of them tell you exactly what you will find at the bookmark? How many bookmarks tell you absolutely nothing about the site? Well, folks, the browser uses the title of the page as the default description of the bookmark. I have so many bookmarks I almost always use the "find" feature (a mini search engine) to find a page I remember bookmarking. Boy, is it nice when keywords are used in the title.

So as a reminder Title is everything! Do the world a favor and make yours a statement of site content.

OK, on with the show. This week we talk more about keywords. Keywords need to be used to your advantage in the title, meta tags as well as in the body of your page. We will start with how to determine what keywords to use and how to do this so they work for you in attaining better than average positioning at the search engines.

To digress for just a moment, you will find me mentioning the search engines all the time and making little mention of directories and other places you may be placing or having you site posted. The cold facts are 90% of the searches done to find information by US web surfers on the Internet are being done on the big 8. The big 8 sites, not necessarily in the order of importance are Yahoo, (the only non search engine in the Big 8, Yahoo is actually a directory) Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, Web Crawler, Alta Vista, Hot Bot and Open Text Index. What about Magellan you ask? Magellan is now owned by Excite and is essentially the same search engine now. We will concentrate on getting listed so you can be found on the big 8, this will make or break any site.

What are keywords anyway? For our purposes, which are getting results at search engines, keywords are words that are used to locate information when using the search engines. A keyword could be a company name if you are lucky enough to have that level of recognition, but usually they are more basic. We are more interested in keywords or keyword phrases that the average person would think of if they were interested in what you have to offer.

We can go back to the example used in lesson 1. Remember our site title? "Bed and Breakfast Accommodations in San Diego CA - Smith's Inn" If we look at the words selected in the title, we have many keywords that might be used in a search to find this particular site. If I am doing a search, I will often start with a keyword phrase. For the purpose of these lessons, when I say keyword phrase I mean two or more words that would be used to describe the type of site we are looking for or that would be used to describe your site when you apply these lessons to your own site. For the example above, I would perhaps start my search by typing Accommodations San Diego. This might return 200,000 or more possibilities, on Infoseek I go 241,820. Now I would narrow it down by going for the Bed and Breakfasts in these results. I am down to 5,655 sites, better but too many. If I had time I might even look at the first couple pages. If I narrowed the search one more time, and add La Jolla (ocean front community in San Diego) I get 655.

This is now getting down to a usable size for real information. Now if Smith’s Inn is in La Jolla section of San Diego, they should be in these 20 or so pages of results. If they used keywords in the body of the web page as well as they did in the title, then they may very well be on the first three pages of results. This should be your goal, as most people do not look past these first three pages of sites when the do a search.

This illustrates a typical search procedure, and the need for keywords being used strategically in your site construction. If you do not have the keywords that would be used to perform this type of search in you site, it will not be found in the keyword search. I have posted sites for customers and had them come back and ask me why they cannot find their site at the search engines. I ask the keywords they are searching for, and on inspecting their page, often as not the very words they used to try and find their own site do not appear in the page in question! This one of the most fatal mistakes in page design you can make.But wait a minute, what if you do not know what keywords are the best to use in your title or on your page for that matter, in the first place? How would you find the best keywords for your type of business? From the competition of course!

Go to the search engines, try to find similar pages or services by entering whatever keywords you think might best describe your type of business. Do this on several of the search engines. You will very likely see some sites coming up on more than one search engine for the keywords you just used. Study these pages one at a time, look for the use descriptive words in the page, look at the document source and see if it has meta keyword tags. The idea here is to see what the sites getting good listings use for keywords. Do this homework and write your own list of the very best descriptive words or keyword phrases for your page. You should look for keywords you might not have thought of yourself, words that are being used by your competition. You want at least 6 of these but 20 in not too many. In some cases, depending on page content, you may have even more.

I would say for the average page you might want to go with the 10 to 15 best keywords and keyword phrases you can find. Try to pick only keywords that are the most relevant to what you have to offer on your site. Be on the lookout for the use of the power words, some keywords are used to appeal to the emotion, to greed, and to a sense of well being. These power words can be used to your advantage as well.A classic here is the word FREE.

You now have a good list of keywords and keyword phrases that describe the type of business or service you offer on the web. Next time we will start putting these to use by discussing using the keywords in the meta tags, and putting them to use in the page structure itself.

So stay tuned, same Web time, same Web channel.

NEW WAY TO SAY THANK YOU

One of the greatest secrets of business success is to build rapport with consumers. Yet, amazingly, few Internet sites are successful in doing so. Recognizing that one of the most basic elements for building rapport is a sincere "thank you," InternetPerks Inc. http://www.internetperks.com recently unveiled its new system of rewarding visitors to member sites with thank-you gifts. The InternetPerks system creates an immediate rapport between visitors and the Website, and gives them an incentive to keep returning.

InternetPerks strategically places a wrapped gift box on each affiliate's Website. Clicking on the gift box awards the visitor free membership ($19.95 value) in InternetPerks and gives them a "key to the city" for the InternetPerks Virtual Community of benefits. The visitor is also immediately rewarded with a gift from the affiliate's company, such as a discount on featured products or other special offer.

"If you go to someone's office to visit them, you can be sure that most people will go out of their way to thank you for stopping by. InternetPerks is a way of saying thank you to visitors. I haven't found the information about the costs to the member sites, but this looks like it could be of some real use to webmasters. Nicely done site, well thought out idea.

CHANGE OF ADDRESS

Danny at Calafia Consulting, http://calafia.com/ has taken all of the information from his popular "A Webmaster's Guide To Search Engines" area of his site and given it its own home. A new domain name at http://searchenginewatch.com/ and it contains an especially useful report that Danny will be keeping up-to-date called SpiderSpotting at http://searchenginewatch.com/spiders.htm. This report gives you the information necessary to spot which spiders have visited your web site just by looking for them in your daily site log reports. Good luck with this, Danny. And congratulations on the launch of a very nice site.

EL CHEAPO AUTORESPONDERS

If you would like to have the benefits of an autoresponder, but don't want to fork over the dinero to use one, read on. An autoresponder lets the public send a message to have more information about your site, service, products or whatever sent to them automatically. They like the feeling that they can ask a machine to send this to them and not bring any more salesman pressure into their lives.

But autoresponder subscriptions cost money, unless your ISP includes a few with your monthly site charges (check on this first. Free is good.) But there is another way to automate this process of communicating that actually lessens your daily work load at the same time.

Eudora (and I assume some of the other email programs) lets you set up 'filters' to look at your incoming email. Filters can put spam in the trash, sort your mail into different mailboxes, and take action on incoming mail, such as sending a reply automatically. This last is the key, sending a reply automatically. That's all an autoresponder does. Of course, a true autoresponder does have the ability to send follow-up messages at a later date, but I don't approve of this 'nag' feature. Just send people what they ask for. If it is of interest to them, they'll get in touch.

To make this plan work, just have people send a message to your regular email address with a key word or phrase (smaller is better) in the Subject line that Eudora can be programmed to recognize and act upon. Very smooth and easy to set up in Eudora. Just store the documents Eudora will need as Eudora Stationary (again, very easy) and tell it which key words get which message. You can set up a whole series of semi-autoresponders in just a few minutes, start to finish.

Now, a true autoresponder works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (just like a webmaster) and sends its replies immediately. Using your email program as an autoresponder means it only sends replies when you log onto the web and check your mail. But how immediate does gratification have to be, anyway? And in my case having a cable modem that is connected to the net 24 hours a day, my copy of Eudora runs all the time, checking my email every 3 minutes and sending replies just as quickly as any autoresponders. And I don't have to pay for autoresponders. Even if you only check your email 4 or 5 times a day, this could work very well for you. But if you have access to a machine that is connected to the Net full time, this is a great money saver for you.

Big deal, you say? Why have email documents available when all of the information is so nicely presented on your web site? Why not just have people visit your site and get the whole story?

Of course I have an answer to that one. You can't trip me up that easily. The reason is: by some accounts, up to 30% of the people who use the Net don't have access to the Web. Huh? All they have access to is email service. They can't run a browser and look at web sites. Or they don't want to. They like getting their info via email. They subscribe to newsgroups and you can reach them by listing your autoresponders in your signature file at the end of your posts. With an autoresponder you now have access to a 30% larger market.

Great tip, Jim. How do you do it? Thank you, thank you. Just doin' my job.

TIPS FROM OUR WEEKLY WINNER

This week, the reward for the best tips goes out to Dennis Dowhy, Web Designs by MSC, Inc. http://www.mscinc.com/

We live in a world of "sue happy" people. It would be nice to have an agreement for site design that covers just about all things necessary for protection of your client and the site developer. This site: http://www.kslaw.com/menu/agr.htm starts out with this statement:

"This is the contract between King & Spalding and CyberNet Communications Corp. for the development of this World Wide Web site. We dedicate this contract to the public domain. We disclaim all warranties, whether express or implied, with respect to this contract."

It is a starting place for a complete contract. One may want to add an overview page and sum up the contract, because it is quite detailed.

An interesting site on Web Design proposal can be located at: Web Site Proposal - AIB Affiliated Bank Web Site http://www.dogtech.com/proposal.htm I don't think this site was intended to be read by the general public because I could not find a link to it from the home page.

Tru Realities: Web Weaving Site Design & Maintenance Agreement http://trureality.com/webdes3.htm Although this page lacks navigation buttons, maybe because the page was meant to be printed out, it offers another way to make an agreement for services, whether it is in promotion, marketing, or web design. This agreement is much less intimidating than the complex contract as public domain listed contract above.

Dennis, come get your free banner ad space.

HELP PLEASE

Some nice person has put the Gazette subscription banner on their page and forgot to change the second URL in the form. This is the one that lets me know who's site I am getting subscriptions from so I can thank you properly. Please, if you have the banner-form on your site check to see that you changed BOTH places where the netad.com URL is listed.

Thank you.