PUBLICATIONS 
BASICS TUTORIAL ON PCS AND USE OF THE INTERNET
COSTS
Yes, you guessed right; it's not all free - the costs associated with websites have to be paid for by us the 'consumers'. The purpose of this page is to list where those costs are incurred and to show you how the royal 'we' pay for those costs. The price to us as consumers for the privilege of just surfing and communicating on the internet is based on well-known factors (bandwith and contention ratio, etc (affecting download and upload speeds), permanently on, peak, off-peak, pay as you go, etc; you choose based on the speed you want and the time you expect to be online), but there is the grey expenses area beyond that, especially if you are using the internet for marketing products or services. For most commercial enterprises, these expenses are quite nominal actually, compared with those associated with other, more conventional marketing media, but, as has always been the case, they can be a lot more significant for a modestly-sized freelance operator or sole trader (large companies having the economies of scale):
- The PC. This can be either a desktop PC with all peripherals you need or a mobile laptop, depending on how you want to use it. You should choose its specification on what you really need and allow for, say, 5 years of technology developments, ie the storage capacity of the Hard Disc Drive (HDD), which will be based on how many movies and photos you want to store, in scores of Gb and the size of the working memory, which needs to cope with the latest operating system and the number of windows you want open at any one time, in hundreds of Mb (soon in GB!). But there is no point in buying a top-end spec PC if you only want to surf the web, for example, in which case you really only need to consider your memory size. The processor (Intel or AMD, etc) is important of course, but this will be fast enough in new PCs.
- Internet Service Provider. There is a lot of competition between Internet Service Providers (ISPs), who actually connect you to the Internet, and you can find the one that fits what you need for a reasonable monthly fee. They usually offer packages that include phone and sometimes TV services. ASDL internet connections are made on the phone company's phone line (BT, or companies who lease the line from BT such as Freeserve and Carphone Warehouse, in the UK). If you have a (fibre-optic) cable connection to your premises (Virgin Media in the UK), which includes phone and TV services, that is another option to consider. Again, if a dish can be installed on your premises with a line-of-sight to a satellite, you have another option (Sky in the UK). Your choice of provider/combination of providers/service options will then be based on needs, cost and performance factors (it's worth spending some time researching and evaluating these, to find the optimum package that isn't more than you really need). Besides the possible integration of phone and TV services, you need to consider the download bandwidth you need - this will need to be 'unlimited' if you watch a streaming movie every day for example, because each movie is over 0.5Gb. If you plan to download only a few movies and music items in a month, maybe a bandwidth limit of 10GB is adequate - where there is a limit specified you will pay extra for any more you use. If you only surf and the reliability of the service is not critical, you can choose the cheapest of course.
- Website Design Services. If you don't design and upload your own website, the services of copywriters and website designers are needed; the costs for these services are analagous to those for the services of an advertising company, ie for experienced creativity and trade knowledge, using the necessary facilities that you therefore don't need to buy or learn how to use.
- Software applications. If you intend to design and upload a website yourself, it goes without saying that software applications are needed in your PC to create elements in your website and then to upload the files for the configured website to web space on a server. The leading software applications required many man-years of programmer effort to produce of course and this has to be paid for by the users of these applications.
- Web space. Web space is normally made available in high-capacity, very high bandwidth, powerful, dual or even triple-redundant (one or two levels of failure mode fallback for every component), typically Unix mainframe computer installations, which need to be kept running and maintained round the clock (these things cost the big dot-com companies real money, not to mention the costs for lawyers to protect them if they caused downtime in safety-critical systems - we do need to remember that 'there are more things in heaven and earth than that imagined by your philosophy', etc). ISPs normally allow their online-time paying customers free space on their servers for websites and various other owners of servers also offer free space. However, you'll have to put up with a long URL made up from your username and the server's name and other conditions, such as an intrusive banner on your pages, lack of commercial support and clout when the system doesn't work. This free space is therefore fine for personal or charity sites, but could become problematic for commercial sites. To avoid such problems, you can pay a server owner a monthly or annual fee to obtain a level of support (size of space; server side Application support; number of e-mail addresses; etc), depending on how much you pay (that's the reality). You can also pay for a domain name (see below) and have that re-directed to your free webspace, but there are several 'catch 22s' associated with doing that, including the very serious one of being ignored by search engines (see later). This particular website (as are all websites under the Eclipse TBS umbrella) is hosted by One.com using the distinctive domain name 'eclipsetbs.co.uk'.
- Domain names are made available by various ICANN-accredited registrars, who will charge you as much as they can get away with for doing next to nothing (remember that they're only acting like a post box and don't accept any responsibility for copyright infringements, but they do have control, so the answer is to shop around for the best domain name deal, which may be part of a package that includes other services). A purchased domain name normally lasts for one or two years. It gives you the advantage of having a memorable URL compared with the nondescript one provided with free webspace and you can normally have it re-directed to disguise the nondescript one (but see above).
- Search Directories such as Yahoo!, LookSmart and Open Directory manually create and administer their categorised directories and that costs them real money of course. Yahoo! and LookSmart accommodate applications for non-commercial websites without charge, but don't guarantee inclusion in a directory and even if it is included it is unlikely to be anywhere near the 30 at the top of the directory (normally the only ones ever looked at). For a commercial site, Yahoo! will charge you £199 (in 2003) to look at it and then tell you if they'll include it, again without any guarantees (but I guess that only serious problems with the site could result in a costly rejection). Open Directory is controlled by editors who are users and appears to offer the best deal, but this may not get the best 'hit' rate for your site. Sadly, the bottom line seems to be that your placing will normally depend on how much of the green stuff you're prepared to commit (and risk)! This particular (non-commercial) website is currently hosted in the following search directories: UK Index, Yahoo!UK and LookSmart Zeal, and Open Directory. The Eclipse TBS (commercial) website is also currently hosted free in these directories and no paid-for services are currently used (reflected by a low number of visitors, compared with this tutorial).
- Search Engines trawl the internet for new websites to add to the indexes that they make available to us all when we're surfing. They also accept applications for sites to be positively scanned and even have paid-for schemes such as 'pay-per-click' (just another price to pay, unless you're one of the lucky ones with your site already established in the lists). This particular (non-commercial) website is currently indexed free by the following search engines: Ask Jeeves/Teoma, Google,Lycos and AllTheWeb.. The Eclipse TBS (commercial) website is also currently indexed by these search engines and no paid-for services are currently used.
- Keywords are words or short phrases used on website pages to increase their 'hit rate' when the Internet is surfed. Searches are made using words or phrases that relate to what the surfer is interested in, eg to find a washing machine supplier in Brighton the surfer might enter the keywords 'washing machines brighton'. Search engines look for these keywords in websites and display links to these websites to the surfer. This is basically how it works, but the system is far more complex than it sounds, because as you can imagine there can be thousands of such websites for you to inspect and some rich websites pay to get onto the first page of links. For a website to get a high ranking without paying a premium for it, it is therefore very important that as many unique keywords as possible are included in the body section text of the web pages. Then such keywords need to be added to the 'meta name' tags in the head sections of the pages. I have recently used such a technique in my Eclipse TBS company websites in an attempt to increase the hit rate there. My business is publications and website design and restricting keywords to such as 'web design' and 'copywriters', ie the obvious ones, has been next to useless. To illustrate this (and even increase the hit rate for this tutorial!) the added keywords are as follows: troubleshooting manual, article grammar, written documents, writing documentation, document company, web authors, publications company, magazines company, publishing company UK, British publishing company, journal publications, writing co, copy company, proofreading, copy editing, writing a magazine article, user instructions, user manual, sample editing, writing outline, stories writing, design writing, document specification, word writing, document architecture, java writing, maintenance instructions, operation and maintenance manuals, maintenance documentation, instructions manuals, maintenance handbook, maintenance books, service handbook, owners handbooks, business format, business introduction, writing articles for, introduction writing, article ideas. Do you get the idea? Examples of great keywords are of course: cellphone, life insurance, bank loans, credit, weight loss, diets, mortgages. However, the aim should be to use unique keywords (and short phrases).
Details updated: June 15 2010
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