from the November 2003 Newsletter
by Rob Zorn

This series of articles is mainly the brainchild of one of our customers, Roger from Lavender Pathways. Not being in any way a computer or web guru, Roger had been through all the pain of organising a web site from scratch. He therefore suggested to me that other customers might benefit from being able to read about some of the basic questions that occur to someone who knows little or nothing about the web, but who wants to organise a personal or business web page.

In September's issue we dealt with seven introductory questions that attempted to provide an overview of what's involved with getting a website online from scratch. In October's issue we began to deal with some of the specifics.

In this issue we'll finish up with seven more general questions. Legal matters covered here are done on a best-endeavours basis. I have no expertise in that area, and if you have real concerns about web site related legal matters, you should conduct your own research or seek expert advice.

Question 15: Is there a limit to the amount of web sites one can have, and the content that is used in them?

The short answer to this is no. You can have as many web sites as you have time for and can pay for. Of course, most web hosting fees are charged by the megabyte, so a bigger site may mean you have to rent more space from your ISP for the hosting of your images and pages. The Internet is wonderfully unregulated, so there is no central group or body anywhere monitoring who has how many web sites and nobody (other than your ISP, perhaps) has set any limits in terms of how many you can have or how big they can be.

Question 16: Can I copyright my web site?

Sure you can, at least as far as its content goes. My understanding of intellectual property rights is pretty rudimentary, but I think that anything you write and publish in New Zealand is automatically copyrighted. This means that any original content you put on your web site belongs to you, and it is illegal (at least in New Zealand) for anyone else to take that content and use it themselves without your permission. It would be a good idea (if you're concerned about it enough) to put a copyright warning on your page reminding people that they shouldn't steal your stuff, but you don't need to have such a warning in order to have copyright over what you write and design.

The problem is going to be with enforcing your copyright. It is likely that not all countries have the same copyright laws as we do, and if someone in Hungary copied your information onto their web site, I don't like your chances of getting much help from their local police.

There's not much you can do in real terms to stop people copying and pasting from your site or printing your pages out. That's the risk you take when you publish web pages. You can add special code to make it so that people can't right-click and save your images, but anyone with a little web-savvy will be able to get past that, and they can always use a freely downloadable screenshot catcher program anyway, so I wouldn't bother.

Question 17: What legal issues surround setting up a web site?

I think it's probably safe to say that the development of legal laws specifically for the Internet is a process that is still in its infancy. That is not to say, however, that laws don't apply. As a general rule, they do. Copyright laws are a case in point. It is illegal to offer copyrighted material e.g. images, copyrighted music files etc, at your web site without permission from the copyright holder. You also cannot display images that are considered illegal in any other media, such as child pornography or other content banned for reasons of indecency. As yet, however, there is no legal requirement to offer warnings about your pages if they contain material within the bounds of adult content deemed acceptable to non-minors. Trademark infringement would be another case in point. You can't use logos or colour schemes from other businesses as if they were your own.

Recognised brands in domain names is not on. You wouldn't get away with registering mcdonalds.co.nz for example and using it to sell your own hamburgers, even if you changed your surname to McDonald.  Cybersquatting is another interesting case in point. Some people tried to register domain names that would be sought after by big companies or music stars, in the hopes that they would be able to sell them to the company or star for lots of money at a later stage. In New Zealand you can't get away with this sort of thing, and you'd be forced to hand the name over unless you could prove that you had an established right to the name yourself at the time that you registered it.

The Consumer Guarantees Act also applies to your online content. You can't advertise falsely online and get away with it just because you're on the Internet. Product right-of-return laws all still apply just as they would for any other business advertising and selling goods in other ways. There are also laws about credit card transactions and your legal requirements to establish that the person using the card is legitimate. These apply just as much online as they do to supermarkets and other non-online vendors.

These are all issues that you would want to investigate and be careful about before you started conducting business online, and you'd be well-advised to conduct your own research beyond the general coverage given here.

Question 18: Is there a place for the small business or personal web site without being blitzed by the big boys?

Yes, of course there is, but the reality of the situation is that it is going to be harder for you to get recognised if you're in an industry that's dominated by big players. Companies with money are going to be able to pay search engines for "sponsored links" that will display more prominently in web searches, or they're going to hire crackerjack web designers to provide them with amazing sites that you could never compete with on a small budget. The reality is that things usually come down to money in the end.

There are some things you can do, though. My first suggestion would be to register your site with lots of search engines. Actrix has a service, for example, where you can be registered with around 1400 search engines for the fee of $29.95. But if you have the time, visit as many search engines as you can and look for their submit feature. You should especially register your site at New Zealand search engines such as NZSearch and SearchNZ. If you operate a plumbing business or pizza delivery business, it is less likely that people are going to search for your type of service on an international search engine such as Google. You have a better chance of being returned near the top of a search at a local search engine site.

Many local communities or suburbs have their own web sites. Some examples would include www.wainuiomata.co.nz, www.stokesvalley.co.nz, and www.wairarapa.co.nz. If you're running a business I would seriously recommend contacting such sites (webmaster@whateverthesiteis.co.nz will usually work if there isn't a contact page) to ask about the possibility of advertising. You're better off getting your name out in front of people who would probably be predisposed to using the services of someone local. My impression is that people are still woefully ignorant of the types of services they can find and use over the Internet, but this will change with time and is changing (it won't happen overnight, but it will happen). The more businesses that advertise their services online to their local communities, the faster that change will be!

One more thing that should be mentioned here is the use of good meta tags. Meta tags are just simple pieces of code that you can add to the headers of your web pages that contain a list of keywords that you think are relevant to your site. They would include your business name, your locality and the sorts of things you do or products and services you supply. Search engines will use your meta tags when they serve your site up at someone's web search. Even if you don't register your pages, search engines will usually find you by means of the robots they send out to trawl the web following links and reporting back on the pages they find. You can also use meta tags to provide a short description of your site which the search engine will also dish up for the searcher when they search on a keyword associated with your site. Again, the Internet abounds with information about how to use and write good meta tags.

Question 19: What are some more design issues I should be thinking about?

We mentioned a couple of these already in answering Question 11. Make sure your information is easy to follow and that there are plenty of links on each of your pages to all your other sections. Ideally, these links should be in roughly the same place on each page. If visitors quickly become bored or lost at your web site, they will move on without much of a second thought.

Many pages on the web are confusing or unclear in terms of how to find stuff. Common mistakes to avoid are overwhelming the visitor with too much information all at once. Make your opening page reasonably simple with just a paragraph or two about what your site is all about. Then provide links to other pages. Visitors should understand pretty much what those links are about after reading your introductory paragraphs.

Think to yourself about what exactly you want visitors to do, and then make it very easy for them to do just that. Lead them to your products page like a horse to water if you can. Don't cram any page with so much information that the visual senses just can't take it all in. If there's too much information there and it isn't clear what's important and what's not, then most visitors will move on to a page they can more speedily make sense of.

One good idea might be to explore by surfing around the web for a while. Look at pages you like and understand, and think about what made those pages work well for you. Try to duplicate those processes in the pages you are designing. You might also find all sorts of interesting design ideas while you're there.

Keep it simple. It's tempting, when you're starting out, to try to impress visitors with extra bells and whistles. Think about a colour-scheme before hand that includes no more than three or four well matched colours. Too many colours will sometimes come across as an assault upon the senses, and may well make your page look quite amateurish. (An excellent colour page can be found here.) Similar principles apply to fonts. My advice is not to use too many different ones. Usually, the simpler things are, the easier they are on the eye.

It could come down to personal preference but one other thing I advise you to avoid is the providing of music. You can add scripts to your site that will cause music to play while someone is logged into it. While this may seem like an impressive idea at first, it usually involves large sound files that would have to download onto the visitor's computer, and I have yet to come across anyone who ever found music at a web site anything but an annoyance. As a friend of mine recently stated: "I'm surfing the web. I don't want to feel like I'm in an elevator!"

Question 20: Is there any way for me to get an idea of how many and what sorts of people have visited my site?

Yes, there is. Most ISPs, and certainly Actrix, will give you a place that you can log into to find out statistics about your site organised by month or day. The sort of information available to you comes in graphs and charts that reveal how many unique visitors you've had, the most popular page links they clicked on, where in the world they were when they were accessing your site, and so forth. This can be very useful for gaining an idea of how successful certain aspects of your site are. No specific personal knowledge about visitors can be gained, however.

Question 21: What can Actrix do to help me set up a web site?

Well, we'll certainly give you lots of encouragement, and I am happy to answer brief or general questions. You may also find a couple of the help desk staff willing to give you suggestions and a bit of quick trouble-shooting. However, sorting out html problems, why images won't load, etc, can be a very time consuming process, and it is really beyond the job description of the help desk. I guess our approach is that we'll assist you to find answers to your html problems, but we can't really solve them for you. That's part of your learning process.

When it comes to explaining how your domain and e-mail will work, you'll find our sales representatives all ears and helpfulness.

Of course, we do provide you with some free web space on our servers at which you can put up your own personal content. Each and every Actrix customer is entitled to that. We provide you with an upload web page that you can log into so that you can put your pages up without having to worry about FTP (see Question 4), but this is for personal web space only, and won't work with a domain named web site. You can find out more about user home pages at http://www.actrix.co.nz/domestic/userhomepages.php. Because this is an Actrix service that everyone is entitled to use, our help desk will gladly assist you with how to make the system work if you are confused by the instruction page.

Lastly, Actrix does provide a web design service where we can design pages for you. We have various packages and options available starting at $599.00. You can find out more about Actrix Web Services at http://webservices.actrix.co.nz/.

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