Poor Richard 21
#021/04-Dec-98
POOR RICHARD'S WEB SITE NEWS
Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low-Cost Web Site
Editor: Peter Kent
Top Floor Publishing
http://PoorRichard.com/
13,000 subscribers in over 100 countries!
IN THIS ISSUE
- Beginner's Column: Who Owns Your Web Site?
- ZDNet Free Offer
- Paying for Search-Engine Placement
- Button and Texture Generator
- Foreign Companies Doing Business in the U.S.
- Why You Need This Book
- Email Newsletters: The Duplicate Email Problem
- Advanced Mailing List Server Features -- Lyris
- No, I'm Not a Spammer! -- A Plea for Civility
- A Quick Comment on Microsoft's Legal Woes
- Reading Back Issues
- In Future Issues
**** IF YOU FIND THIS NEWSLETTER USEFUL ... FORWARD IT TO FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES ****
Beginner's Column: Who Owns Your Web Site?
I received an email question recently that at first glance seemed easy to answer. A Web designer emailed and asked me who I thought was in the right in a dispute he was having with someone for whom he'd created a Web site. The designer had placed a little "designed by" note at the bottom of every page, along with his company logo. The site owner didn't want his name on every page, and he felt that "since he's paying me for the web page it's all his."
My first reaction was that there should only be one answer; of course the Web site owner should be able to say whether or information like this is placed on his Web site. But then I realized the situation is a little more complicated. Thanks to a common misconception regarding copyright, many people in many different situations -- not just Web sites -- are in the situation of not really owning materials they paid for.
(What I have to say relates to the U.S. copyright law, but even if you're not in the U.S. you may find that the law is similar.)
If you hire someone to create a copyrightable work for you -- a technical manual, a book cover, a CD cover, a Web site, or whatever -- you might be forgiven for thinking that you own that work. You asked this person to create the work, you paid the person, so it's yours, right? Not necessarily. It depends on the agreement you had with this person.
In many cases it's quite clear what is going to happen. When someone writes a book for a publisher, for instance, there's generally a contract that explains all sorts the rights and obligations; the contract explains what rights will be transferred to the publisher. In other cases -- more to the point, in the case of Web design -- the question of rights transfer is unclear or perhaps completely unstated.
Now, a copyright belongs to either the person who created the work, or, if it's clear that the person was at the time employed by someone else and the work was done as part of that employment, by the person's employer. If the person creating the work is a freelancer, not an employee, the copyright still belongs to the creator, _unless_ there is a contractual agreement stating either that the work is a "work for hire" or that the copyright will be transferred to the person paying. (A verbal contract is legally valid -- but as Sam Goldwyn once stated, a verbal contract "isn't worth the paper it's written on," because it's hard to prove a verbal contract. Thus a signed paper contract is a better idea.)
What, then, does the person paying for the work own? He owns the right to use the work in the manner for which it was clearly intended.
For instance, let's say you hire a Web designer to create Web pages for you. Let's also suppose that you have a verbal contract you can't prove, or you have a paper contract that neither specifies that the work is a work for hire, nor specifies that copyright will be transferred to you (perhaps the contract specifies only the number and type of pages you want and the fee you will pay).
Who owns your Web site? The designer.
The designer owns the copyright, and you own the right to use the Web site in the manner for which it was obviously intended. If you provided text and images for which you owned copyright, you'd still own the copyright to that text, but the designer would own copyright to the overall design. What's that mean? What sort of dangers does this open you to? Here are a few examples:
- The designer may demand that you include a "designed by" note at the bottom of every page, along with a company logo.
- The designer may demand that you hire him to make future changes -- he may stop you from hiring another designer or modifying the site yourself.
- The designer may not allow you to copy the site and use it for other purposes, unless you hire him.
- The designer may use the overall design again for another client.
I should note that these things are not likely to happen -- but perhaps only because most designers know as little about copyright law as their clients. But nonetheless, the threat is real ... and it's very easy to avoid. All you need to do is make sure you have a signed contract that states that the work is a "work for hire." You may even want to take an extra step, and specify that you will own the copyright to the final work.
I fully expect to receive email telling me that I'm wrong. It seems so _obvious_ that the client must own the work, after all. Please, don't email me, I don't have time for an argument! The law is quite clear on this -- the creator of a copyrightable work who is not your employee owns that work, unless the rights are transferred to someone else by use of a contract. (Book publishers know this, which is why most have contracts that clearly specify rights ownership when working with cover and book designers.) If you don't believe me, do a little research of your own. I strongly suggest that the rest of you begin using these clauses in a signed contract (even a simple letter of agreement) right away!
ZDNet Free Offer
A reader, Bob Laurence, sent me information about an interesting offer from ZDNet. This offer is for "a select group of professionals" -- I'm sure that covers all my subscribers, so check it out. For $1 (yes, one dollar) you get 30 days membership, during which you can sign up for the following:
- A one-year subscription to any ZD magazine, such as PC Magazine or Computer Shopper (does that mean your subscription ends after the thirty days is over if you don't renew? I don't know ... )
- A free semester at ZD University -- enroll in as many courses as you like; choose from Web Management, Programming, Design/Web Layout, Photoshop, Internet Advertising, and over 150 other courses
- Access to the Computer Magazine Archive with over 200,000 articles, columns, and features from 200 computer magazines
- Access to a full-length computer book online (a new one every week).
- Special prices on selected software
- Selected software downloads
After the first thirty days it's $49.95 a year.
Check it out here: http://chkpt.zdnet.com/chkpt/zdna981118/www.zdrewards.com
You should probably do so quickly; the page is there right now, but I've no idea how long it will last.
Paying for Search-Engine Placement
I saw an interesting report recently about GoTo.com, a search engine for which you have to _pay_ to get listed. You actually place a bid for placements on search pages. For instance, if you are selling CDs, you might offer to pay, say, 13 cents for every time your site is displayed in a response to a search for various keywords: music, rock, van halen, and so on.
Ray Owens, owner of Joke of the Day ( http://jokeaday.lyris.com/ ), reported that he spent $250 on placements at Goto.com; he bid 13 cents per placement, and because that was higher than anyone else bidding for those keywords he came up first on the lists, and received almost 2,000 new visitors to his site. That's not bad, considering that with banner ads you can easily spend many times that sum.
Say, for instance, you pay a cpm (cost per thousand) of $40 (that is, for every 1,000 times that your banner is displayed, you pay $40 -- you can easily pay more). And let's say you get a clickthrough rate of 3% (which is pretty good). For every 1,000 impressions you'll get 30 visitors; so to get 2,000 visitors, you'd need 67,000 impressions, right? And that'll cost you $2,680!
Check out Goto.com at, you guessed it, http://www.goto.com/ You can try out the system for as little as $25.
Button and Texture Generator
Another tip from Bob Laurence. Here's a neat program that creates buttons and textures for your Web pages.
This MS Windows package is called Buttonz! & Tilez!. It comprises Buttonz!, which creates buttons of various shapes, colors, and bevels, and Tilez!, which has 20 basic textures that you can use as backgrounds. You can customize these by creating multi-layer textures and importing images to be included in the textures.
Buttonz! even has a batch mode so you can provide a list of words, and the program will automatically create matching buttons for those words. This really is a neat little feature. You create a button by selecting the width, height, color, bevel, texture, and so on, then type a list of words into a text box, and Buttonz! creates a button for each word.
You can find Buttonz & Tilez! (it's free) at ... http://www.b-ischo.horizont-is.net/bt_index.htm
Foreign Companies Doing Business in the U.S.
The Internet is providing access to the U.S., the world's largest market, for many foreign companies. But many of these small companies have two major problems to overcome.
- They feel, probably correctly, that if they are perceived as operating outside the U.S., many U.S. customers will not want to do business with them. In any case, U.S. customers won't want to be billed in anything but U.S. dollars ...
- In many cases it's very hard to get a credit-card merchant account.
In the U.S. we've come to regard credit cards as an essential of modern life, like toothpaste or television. And although I've heard horror stories from small businesses about the problems they had getting a credit-card merchant account (that is, an account used for taking payments by credit card), it's actually quite easy today -- if you have a good credit record, in fact, it's _very_ easy now.
But in many other countries, even in Europe, credit-cards are not used anywhere near as much as as in the U.S. In Austria, for instance, many restaurants and gas stations simply don't accept credit cards, a situation that's hard to imagine in North America. And in some of these countries mail-order by credit card is very primitive; some companies in Italy, for instance, take credit-card orders by phone, then fax the orders to the bank every few days. When they receive notification from the bank that the orders have cleared, they ship the products. (Those of us living in the U.S. don't realize the extent to which we've become an instant-gratification society!)
I've heard from two companies recently who are dealing with these problems. The first is an Australian company selling electronic services on the Internet. They wanted to do business with the majority of Web sites that are owned by US companies and individuals, so they didn't want to be perceived as "foreign," and didn't want to bill clients in Australian dollars. The second company is Italian; it's had terrible problems getting a credit-card merchant account. This company is seriously thinking about setting up a merchant account with a U.S. bank.
The Australian company did just that. First, they found an American lawyer willing to set up a shell company for them in the U.S. Once they had a company operating in the U.S., they were able to get a credit-card merchant account in the U.S.; so now, when people do business with them, they can bill in U.S. dollars.
I don't know all the problems involved in doing this -- I don't know how the Australian company dealt with the credit check that would have been done when applying for a merchant account -- but it may be an option worth investigating for many small companies that want to operate in the U.S. market or have no other way to get a merchant account.
Why You Need This Book
Poor Richard's Web Site (the book, that is), is still turning up in the press. With luck, it may be mentioned in Playboy soon; I'm keeping my fingers crossed, because I think this may be the only computer book to have ever been mentioned in those pages (it wouldn't be surprising, now, would it?).
It's mentioned in the current Home Office Computing, in an article about small commerce Web sites, and may be in a review in that magazine in the next issue. It's the Book of the Month at MediaTechBooks ( http://www.g-factory.com/mediatechbooks/ ), and was recently Editor's Pick at CIZone.com, and Book of the Week at SmartBooks.com.
In fact I believe this may be the most reviewed computer book in history. (Okay, so "history" in this case means about a quarter if a century, but you know what I mean.) Why is it getting so many reviews? Two reasons. First, I'll freely admit I've pushed this book hard. But there's a limit to how far pushing will get you. It wouldn't be widely reviewed if it wasn't a really good book.
I've had reviewers say this book saved them time and money (come to that I received email from a reader today saying that he wishes he'd had the book two years ago -- it would have saved him $5,000). Reviewers have recommended the book over and over; they say that it really is geek-free commonsense advice ...
So, what am I saying here? I'm saying BUY THE BOOK!
For many more reviews and testimonials, sample chapters, and a table of contents, visit ...
Poor Richard's Web Site is in many bookstores, and can be ordered by others; it can also be ordered on-line, through the mail, by fax, or by phone.
See ...
Order direct from the publisher, and you'll get a 100%, 1-Year Guarantee. If the book doesn't help you set up a low-cost yet effective Web site, send it back for a refund!
Email Newsletters: The Duplicate Email Problem
Sorry about the last issue -- I sent out _two_ issues accidentally. The funny thing is, I'd just finished talking about how free email services don't have the sophisticated features that you may need ... and the mistake I made was partly due to one of those advanced features. (Such features are a double-edged sword; they can be useful, but you have to be careful how you use them.)
Here's what I did. Lyris isn't supposed to send a message to the subscribers until I authorize it. I send the message; Lyris sends a notification back to me asking me to confirm that it should send it out; I confirm; and the message goes out. There's one exception; I had the system set to automatically send the message out at midnight if I didn't respond to the request for confirmation.
On the night I was working on the last issue I sent the message at one minute to one in the morning my time -- but as the Lyris server is in California, which is one hour behind my time zone (I'm in Denver), it was one minute to midnight on the server. Lyris sent a message asking me to confirm, but on the stroke of midnight it sent out the message anyway, without waiting for my response. In the meantime, I had found a couple of small errors in the message, so I sent a reject command to Lyris; of course it was already too late, the message had been sent out, though I didn't realize it. I then sent the corrected message ... thus two almost identical messages went out!
Well, as we're on the subject now, I might as well discuss what a really sophisticated mailing-list program can do for you.
Advanced Mailing List Server Features -- Lyris
As I've said many times before, most Web sites could use a newsletter, bulletin, mailing-list discussion group, or other email-based communication system. Don't think of your Web site as the only part of your Internet campaign; it should be the center, the headquarters, but not the entire campaign. In the last couple of issues I've discussed setting up a mailing list or newsletter using a free service. See ...
http://www.poorrichard.com/newsltr/019.htm#newsltr
http://www.poorrichard.com/newsltr/020.htm#freee1
Now it's time to see what you'll get if you _pay_. As an example of what an advanced mailing-list server can do for you, I'll describe Lyris. I'll do so for two reasons. First, it's the one I use (so I have access to it!). And it's also one of the best -- if not _the_ best -- products available. Here then, in no particular order, are some of the neat things Lyris can do.
- Schedule messages to be sent at particular times.
- Customize headers and footers that are automatically added to the message; place ads, announcements, subscription information, etc.
- Customize welcome and good-bye messages -- include information about your newsletter and your Web site, for instance.
- Archive all the messages at the Lyris Web site, so visitors can search and view old messages or newsletters.
- Detailed delivery reports, showing how many messages were sent out and when, and how many bounced back.
- Sophisticated "bounce" management. Tell the program how long it should accept bounce messages before putting a bad email address into a "held" list; what message to send to held addresses and how often; when to purge held addresses if the address remains bad, and so on.
- Mail merge. You can incorporate the recipient's name into the message body. I could, if I wished (but I don't) start each of these newsletters with Dear John (or whatever your name happens to be).
- Sophisticated management tools. You can send messages to the server to carry out various commands, or use a Web form.
- View different types of subscriber lists -- a list of all the "held" email addresses, lists sorted by country code, lists sorted by name, and so on.
The people at Lyris have some other important features in the works:
- Split runs: For instance, send half the subscribers one newsletter, and half another (so you can sell ads to people who can't afford a full run), or perhaps send one newsletter to all AOL addresses and one to all the rest (so you can send a newsletter formatted for AOL's email program).
- Circulation verification: I wish I could prove to advertisers how many subscribers I have. Pretty soon I will be able to, with verification reports coming directly from the Lyris server.
If you'd like to see exactly what Lyris can do, you can see the Lyris User's Guide at http://www.lyris.com/help/
It looks a bit daunting, but remember that most features are optional so you don't have to learn it all!
You can find information about using the Lyris service at http://www.lyris.net/
If you might consider buying the software and running it on your own server, see http://www.lyris.com/ (you'll need somewhere between $500 and $8,000).
No, I'm Not a Spammer! -- A Plea for Civility
Why are so many people so rude on the Internet? An hour or two before I began writing this issue, I received a short email message addressed to prwebnews@topfloor.com ...
"Please remove our name from your garbage E-mails. We do not want to keep deleting them. Thank you"
A few days ago I received a similar message. "Some (sic) is sending unsolicited commercial email rip-off schemes either from your site or is sending this junk mail through your site" the message said. The writer went on to threaten me: "I do not want your sleazy advertisements. Junk mailers will be nestea'd, WinNuked, or whatever else we have to do to convince you to stop sending this unsolicited mail."
This didn't make a lot of sense to me; what "rip-off scheme"? What "sleazy advertisements." I know the writer was responding to my newsletter, because the newsletter was quoted at the bottom of the message.
But I never send this newsletter unsolicited. I checked my database and found that indeed this person was in my subscriber list. I found that he'd recently subscribed, a few days before the issue went out. I even know how he subscribed -- he filled in a form at one of my newsletter partners' Web sites.
Now, it's possible, though hardly likely, that someone else subscribed for him. But he'd received a notification saying that he'd been subscribed to the newsletter, and didn't respond -- he didn't complain that someone had fraudulently subscribed him. I suspect he simply forgot he'd done so.
I think there are two major causes of this sort of rudeness. First, people can hide behind the Internet; you never see them, you're not likely to be able to track them down, so people often say things they'd never dare say in the real world. And the other factor is anti-spam hysteria. Spam certainly is a problem, but we've reached the stage at which people have irrational, knee-jerk reactions to email messages from addresses that they don't recognize -- in some cases they may even set up filters to automatically send out rude responses depending on keywords in the message or subject line.
Unfortunately it's not just a matter of rude messages from recipients. This anti-spam hysteria is going so far that an accusation is the same as a crime. I know one person whose newsletter was blocked from a domain after being accused of spamming, and now we're seeing a number of vague and poorly written laws being proposed that are a threat to many of us. Spam's definitely a nuisance, but let's not react in such a way that the innocent have to suffer, too!
A Quick Comment on Microsoft's Legal Woes
I've criticized Microsoft many times, both publicly and privately. I believe some of their business practices are pretty obnoxious, and that their software malfunctions far too often (though I'm not sure that it's any worse than the industry norm). But I do believe that all this fuss about bundling Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system is absurd. Consider that ...
- Microsoft is not the only operating-system publisher to believe that people buying an operating system should get a free browser; IBM provides one with OS2, and the current version of the Apple operating system includes _two_ browsers!
- Microsoft was not the first company to bundle a Web browser with an operating system -- IBM included a browser in OS2 in mid to late 1994, long before Microsoft even released the beta of Internet Explorer.
- Web browsers were "traditionally" free; in 1994 there were dozens of Web browsers available, and most were available at no cost.
- Netscape claims that Microsoft hurt it by giving away a browser in the operating system, but if Netscape's executives really believed they could build a multi-billion dollar business based on a simple utility like a Web browser, a utility that had a history of being free, they must have been smoking something pretty strong.
Reading Back Issues
If you need to refer to back issues of this newsletter -- and search the archives -- you can find them at the following location: http://PoorRichard.com/newsltr/
In Future Issues ...
All sorts of things too numerous to mention ... just keep reading, and forward the newsletter to friends and colleagues!
-------------------------------------------------------------
(c) Copyright 1998, Top Floor Publishing
All Rights Reserved
-------------------------------------------------------------If you like this newsletter, PLEASE FORWARD IT to friends and colleagues!
Please retain this copyright and subscription information; you may want to remove your e-mail address from below.
It may be posted, in it's entirety or partially, to newsgroups or mailing lists, as long as the copyright and subscription information remains.
