Free Business Website

It used to be that a business without a fax number was considered a very small business. Today it's the lack of a website that shouts "small."

No Excuse.  And yet there's no excuse for not having one. At least no monetary excuse. For years, professional organizations, such as the American Society of Appraisers, have offered their members free webpages. But today you don't have to belong to an organization to get a free business website. All that's needed is Internet access -- and you can get that at your local library.

Yahoo! Steps Up Again.  Now in beta, but sure to go gold soon, is Yahoo!'s free website for local business owners. I checked it out last night, creating a website for the Webshop in about 30 minutes, using the supplied templates and filling in the blanks -- no experience in webbery required.

Really, really, really.  Yahoo!, who has lots of experience supplying and managing the free GeoCities websites for personal use, figures you'll like your free business website so much, you'll probably spring for an upgrade. The free site has limitations: it's supported by Yahoo! ads, can't easily be expanded or heavily customized, and resides at a hard-to-remember domain, like ours -- http://ny.local.yahoo.biz/webshop/. But heck, it really is free, it looks really nice, and you can pack in more than enough info to make it really useful.

We Do Free, Too.  Of course, if you want a professionally created, professionally managed website for your business, my Webshop has a free website offer, too. This one will cost you something. You pay for domain registration, hosting, and server setup, and we'll build a basic website for free. Like this one for Griffith Appraisals, run by Tim Griffith, a New Jersey real estate appraiser, or this one for Tonkinson Apppraisals, run by Jim Tonkinson, a machinery & equipment appraiser, or this one for Sugarhill Services Corp., the Harlem real estate property developers and managers. Totally free is better than looking "small." But, with apologies to the Donald, a website that works trumps that, too. At the Webshop, our committment is to websites that work -- that not only look good, but are productive. Check it out.

AOL: Privacy or Piracy?

As a PC consultant introducing his clients to email and the web, I personally recommended and installed America Online (AOL) at least fifty times, probably more. To keep current with AOL, I had an account myself until two years ago.

Unused Account Gets SPAM.  I closed my AOL account, although my wife enjoyed using it, when I found buckets of SPAM pouring into a screenname I'd set up and never used. Since the screenname was unique and unlikely to be generated by a dictionary attack, I assumed internal piracy. This was later confirmed when an ex-employee was prosecuted for stealing screennames. So much for privacy.

Checking Out AIM Webmail.  Recently I read that AOL was offering webmail to users of their AOL Instant Messaging (AIM) service and to folks, like me, who'd closed their regular AOL accounts. To see what they were offering and how it worked, I set up an AIM account with my old AOL screenname, then followed the links offering free webmail.

Almost As Advertised.  Two or three clicks and a few web-seconds later, I had webmail with my old screenname at aim.com. Easy to use. Nice features. Plenty of storage. What's not to like? Well, there was just one thing. When I clicked on the addressbook, I found it populated with the names and email addresses of people I hadn't contacted in years -- literally.

Privacy or Piracy?  You might think that really convenient. Me too, except it makes me wonder what other information they still have, who they've been sharing it with, and whether it's any safer than that unused screenname that was inundated with SPAM. Privacy or privacy? You tell me.

SMOKING:  If you're a heavy smoker and want to quit, please read my article on How to Quit Smoking. It worked for me and hundreds like me.

Hacker Alert for Webmasters

If the name Jim Rhodes and the company name deadlock Design ring a bell, you may be one of maybe thousands of webmasters who installed Jim's free Refer Me script. Written in Perl, it's a basic cgi script which visitors invoke to recommend your website to their friends.

The Disclaimer. Like most freeware it came with a disclaimer: "deadlock Design accepts no responsibility for consequences arising from use of this script." This time, the disclaimer was necessary. Yesterday, a copy of the script was hacked by a SPAMmer who used it to relay thousands of advertising emails to AOL accounts.

The Damage.  The least of the damage was the hundreds of delivery failure notifications resulting from SPAM to closed, blocked or nonexistent accounts. The worst was AOL's pre-emptive and unilateral blocking of all email originating from my service. Hopefully, it's a one day block that will expire and not require explanations and negotiations.

An Alternative.  I don't blame Jim or his circa 1997 script, written in simpler times. I blame myself for forgetting to replace that old script. A word to the wise. A more secure, freeware alternative from a source that continues to write and upgrade scripts is William Bontrager's Master Recommend V3. Naturally, I accept no responsibility for consequences arising from use of his script.