In computer news this week:

Lead: Do's and don'ts for websites

Several years ago, in the insanity of internet investing, people truly believed that stock in an internet company, or getting a web site, was their road to riches.

It turned out to be a gold mine for very few, just like the real gold rushes of the 1800's, and billions of dollars have been lost in the stock market on now useless internet ventures. Everything was based on hype; and for the most part it all fell down and went boom.

Just ask AOL-Time Warner; A traditional media company desperately seeking an internet venture - who got burnt so bad on their acquisition of American Online that now they want to take the AOL out of their corporate name.

Hopefully people now understand that the internet and websites are new communication technologies, a new way of reaching customers, just like the phone and fax machine were years ago.

A website name - yourcompany.com - can be purchased quite cheaply, under $ 100, and you can get the exclusive rights to that name for a few years with your purchase.

You then need a place to host it - or an internet storefront, and that can cost a monthly charge of anywhere from $ 10 to hundreds of dollars, depending on how much space you need, and what services you need. The cost goes up when you want to process credit cards, or have an online inventory people can put in their electronic shopping cart and then check themselves out.

You then need content for your website, pages, pictures, menus, products, ways for customer to contact you. This is generally the most expensive part - the website design and ongoing maintenance. This can be thousands of dollars initially and ongoing.

Then you need to register your website with search engines, and you need to put in your main webpage keywords about the products and services you sell, so that people can find you, and so that the search engines can index your page.

This actually is the step many people miss. Then they wonder why they don't have any website traffic.

Most web hosting services provide you with a statistics package of who is coming to your page, from where, what they are looking at, what key words they are typing into search engines to find you.

In looking at the statistics for my website, which is hosted on Earthlink servers for under $ 20 monthly:

Last week I averaged about 160 visitors a day

The majority of people go straight to my KPBX Raw Bytes page

The majority of people - 55% - came directly to my website without a referral - somehow they just knew about it.

For the rest of the visitors - 15% came through google.com, 5% came yahoo.com, and about 2% from MSN.

As to domains that people came from:

25% came from inktomisearch.com - a yahoo acquisition

10% from googlebot.com and interseer.com

and after that it breaks into single digits.

The majority of visitors used Internet Explorer.

I also know what my most popular pages are, how long people read them, and where they exit from.

All these are important to know about your website, and all these things I've talked about are important to do.

Otherwise you'll be facing a common internet fate - all dressed up with a webpage and nobody comes to your party.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 624-7230

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