The most gratifying thing we do is to
go out and meet with people
to tell them about the internet. Sometimes,
we feel like Marco Polo or Vasco De Gama upon
their return from a distant, unknown land.
It's often this way when we're invited to join
a Chamber of Commerce for dinner, as we were
the other evening.
Business people are smart, and independent. They
have to be. They're on the other end of the payroll,
they don't collect it, they make it. We're always
prepared for them to know more than we do about
nearly anything, and they often do.
Imagine our suprise, the other evening, when
we had the following conversation, over and
over again:
"Yes, we already have a website."
"Do you ? What's the address ?"
"I don't know, I've never seen it."
The first time, we thought it was odd. The second time,
a bit more odd. By the time the seventh person had said
the same thing, we knew something was up, and we made it
our business to find out what it was. What it was, friends,
was an embarrassment to all of us doing webwork.
Early on in the Journal, Richard Mitchell said simply
to us... "Write what is true, honest and needed." These
circumstances remind us of that responsibility, and we
ask all who do webwork for hire to examine their business
practices for something we think could, in the long run,
damage all of us. Since we know of no name for it, we
will call it "dead-ending."
"Dead-ending" is when someone treats a website like a billboard,
and does not advise a client that the web is a communications
medium. Webwork is consulting, and a good consultant explains
what is going on. One does not pretend it is something else,
and keep the client in the dark.
To do a website for someone, and not suggest that they find
some way to get email is like running a phone-line into a house,
but not providing the telephone. In fact, if you don't suggest
to the client that they MAINTAIN the site, you're not doing
justice to the web, which is, we all agree, a way for people
to communicate. Which people ? All of them, not just the
one's who know how to ftp a silly file.
This is important because these dead-end sites will do the
client little or no good, and will likely turn them against
the web as a means of doing business. Then what have you
done ? If these folks spend their money on websites and
the websites don't produce anything, what are they to think
but that the web doesn't work. It does work, but only if
you use it yourself. No one can do it for you.
To tell people otherwise is to mislead them.
To mislead someone who has hired you to advise them in
a technical matter is fraudulent, and hurts all of us
who are trying to promote the web. There's an old
expression "When one dog bites one kid, puppy sales
go down all over town."
So... for what it's worth, we ask you to ask yourself,
are you biting the hand that feeds you ?
March 17, 1996 Charles Paparella The Shore Journal
Yeah, you're a paragon of honesty, too, right ?