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Frederik Burch

Steps to your own website:

First think of the content you want to publish and the purpose of the website. This will strongly influence the design of the website. A governmental website will have a different design than a website of a fashion designer. Remember: What you will upload and publish in the internet, could STAY there and could eventually be used against you..

It is probably fair to say, that it makes sense to outsource the task of designing and coding the website, since you want to use your resources where they are needed most.. But basic knowledge will not hurt either..

Decide on the technology you want to use for the website. If you outsource the design and coding of the website, but still want to be able to do changes of content ,easily by yourself, the coding will be more complex than a simple website. Do you need a e-shop? Do you need a database? Or do you simply want to publish some text?

Budget and traffic. How much time and money are you willing to spend on the website? and how much traffic are you expecting on your website? This will determine the quality of the website and also what type of server you will use. You can get free webspace with minimal control, or you get a shared or a virtual server, which will provide you with a slight improvement in controllability (especially with the virtual-solution, where you rent a virtual machine, with the possibility to restart the machine whenever you like, which is not possible on a regular shared server, also you have the possibilities that come along with the root access of the virtual machine, that allows you to implement new scripts and so on) Obviously, a independent server, just for you, will offer the highest possible flexibility and control. Also you will have the option to upgrade the hardware as you wish. A few years ago, me and some friends, tried around with some old self-built computers and we turned them into servers. Our knowledge was mostly based on the hardware, rather than software, which turned out to be a major problem. After putting the servers online, it took about 3 hours until cablecom blocked our internet connection completely. To our surprise, our servers were immediatly used as proxy hosts to share malware and to send spam-mails - all because we neglected the importance of decent security protection.

The decision on what technology and coding will be used for the website is also of major importance. According to Steve Jobs, Flash is a dying technology which uses up too much CPU computing power. Althought Flash offers a lot of advantages for designing the website, it is important to know that many portable devices such as Iphones and Ipads do not support the contents of Flash-websites.

The design of the website is very important. Luckily the time of flashing contents with neon colors and the annoying Geocities-pop ups are in the past (and left room for annoying flash pop ups...) but still it is important that the information provided on your website should be easy to find. There is nothing worse than a website, badly structured, so you will not be able to find even the most basic informations, such as a contact number...

Even with virtual storage is decreasing in price rapidly for the past 20 years, it is still important to keep your website's content small in size. People today are not willing to wait longer than a nanosecond for a website to load - 20mb large pictures will not help...

Some of the problems of earlier days, when I was still interested in building my own websites in wordpad, are not a big issue today anymore. Today most people have more or less the same resolutions on their laptops and desktops.. Even on my 27inch, full HD screen, it is fine to view a website that was made for a 1200-resolution. Earlier, when most people had 15 inch screens or maybe a maximum of a 19 inch screen, it was important to consider the resolution on which the website was especially made for. My first website had even different options before entering the main page, to choose between 800*600 or the higher option.

After the website is fully designed and coded, it needs to be tested on different machines and platforms, and then uploaded to the server (FTP) and the URL needs to be linked to the actual server and start page.

I cannot state sources for the above information since i did not quote anybody's work.. it is merely knowledge I gained during the past 15 years as I used to be very interested in these topics and still today are a geek with technology.

Metatags:

I visited the website of my favorite restaurant in Switzerland, which is the Pastabar in Rapperswil. The website is horrible (http://www.pasta-bar.ch/) and completely out of date. It was easy to find the website on google, because there are not too many Pastabars in the world. But the website does not use metatags at all. Checking the links of the pastabar, by googling: link "http://www.pasta-bar.ch/" it becomes obvious that the admin of the website is not doing a good job at all, since there are only 3 links. If I search for links of http://www.vapianointernational.com/, which has roughly 3000 links, it becomes obvious that Vapiano is putting more effort in their website. Obviously it is always hard to compare a small family run restaurant to a international chain (although Vapiano's food sucks..) but on the other hand it would be easy and cheaply possible to improve the pastabar website.

when you search for pastabar you will see the following:

[|pasta bar]
 - [ [|Translate this page] ] // **Pasta** //-// **Bar** // & Restaurant, Fischmarktstr.4, 8640 Rapperswil. www.**pasta**-**bar**.ch/ - [|Cached] If I were to do an google ad for the pasta bar, I would change the text in the middle column. Instead of the address I would try to describe the customer experience to attract new customers (as the existing customers already know where to find the restaurant) Since the restaurant offers a very unique experience it wouldn't be too hard to find a attractive description to attract new customers.. Something like: "Try one of the 600 Pasta recipes as they are prepared right in front of your eyes"    Homework:   **__What did social media do for the ongoing unrest in the Arabic world? (try to compare Egypt and Libya)__ ** Altought, opinions about this topic seem to be divided, I think Social media accounted, at least to some extent, to the successful revolution in Egypt, and Tunesia, while Libya is still an ongoing process. If the country has the necessary infrastructure to make the use of internet widely possible, then it's (young) people will most likely make use of social media. If such a country is censuring local TV and other controlled media, tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, as widely used during the "Arabic Revolution", which is currently happening, are used to spread the word. While International News, such as CNN, can be hindered (or arrested) to show actual footage, the people in place could still upload their own videos to platforms, such as youtube. Youtube Videos of violence against protestors have shocked the world over and over again during the past few weeks and months. The careful evaluation of said footage and information is necessary as always in social media (or all media for that matter). But Social media also proofed to be an effective tool to mobilize people. Used for the Chinese Jasmine Movement and in the Arabic World during the ongoing unrests. Personally, I noticed that Facebook is to some extent replacing other news media. If I blend out all the useless information my "friends" share with me, there are still a lot of useful hints of what is going on in the world. Recent example: While News agencies all around the world are bombarding us with (maybe over-) dramatic scenarios and stories about the nuclear disaster in Japan, while there is no doubt that it is a horrible catastrophe, it is still helpful to know that my friends in Tokyo seem that life is moving on, and they are not fearing a horrible death due to overexposure to radioactivity. Sources: http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/2011/03/social-media-influence-on-revolution.html http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/02/demands-of-the-chinese-jasmine-movement/ www.cnn.com as well as CNN Tv Channel www.facebook.com **What did social media do to tourism industry?, showcase samples ** Photos on facebook or Videos on youtube are a great source for images of a destination. Unlike brochures professionally edited pictures, which often show a false image of a destinations reality. A Destination could make use of that and use "false" images and wrap it up as amateur videos to fool people, so as always: be careful in evaluation information! Once we relied on Guidebooks and such, for gathering information. But many people (rightfully) are skeptical with the information gained from such sources. While Hotels are paying to appear in the Lonely Planet Guidebook (and most other guidebooks), I trust a friends opinion, who stayed at a certain hotel much more than some guidebook. Social Media is bringing word of mouth to a whole new dimension. In Social Networks we are communicating mostly with friends and family- people we know and trust to some extent. Word of mouth from these people are regarded with more weight than even platforms such as tripadvisor. Therefor it is even more important as a company to make its customers happy, because any bad experience will be shared within minutes in Social Media. Many friends of mine, working in the Event management industry, found a great use in Facebook to share informations of upcoming events and gathering a fan-base. Once the Fan-base is established (and keep growing) Advertisement of upcoming events can be sent to each fan, or member of the group, with only a click of a mouse. Many of these friends actually stopped printing flyers all together, and therefore safe a lot of money, while reaching even more people (=Target market!) Another interesting issue is the possibility to mark yourself if you are attending a certain event or not, and lets other people see who is attending. Which is helpful to analyze the female-male ratio of a upcoming party... One of the Sources stated "Visit Japan"'s Facebook site as an excellent example. They created a Facebook site which provides all the useful information a traveller to Japan could need. Rather than googling yourself through dozens of websites, the facebook site is a good place to start. Making use of Social Media is important for any company, and will grow to be more important in the future. As Social Media is a young construct, so is the marketing use of Social Media. More smart uses of social media as a marketing tool will show up eventually. sources: http://www.penn-olson.com/2010/04/05/how-to-promote-tourism-through-social-media/ http://technorati.com/lifestyle/travel/article/social-media-changing-the-tourism-landscape/ http://www.axses.com/encyc/archive/arcres/Social-Media-Travel-Marketing.cfm www.facebook.com   **How active are yourself in Web2.0, what role does it play in your life?** I have to admit that I am very active, probably too active at some times. As a late joiner to the world of facebook, i still learned to catch up quickly. And while at first I spent way too much time in Facebook, I now cut back my active time to a realistic minimum. Facebook is running pretty much 24/7 on my phone, which will push messages to me in an instant, but I refuse to spend hours only to read up on my "friends" status messages, as I am not interested much in information about my cousin's neighbor's barber sitting on the toilet right now... I found Facebook very useful to keep in touch with my very international base of friends, as well as for networking reasons. Since cloud space is still mostly coming with some costs, it is nice to store some pictures for free on facebook. Another nice thing: Since most of my close friends own smartphones and are connected to wifi or 3G networks at all time, I can safe on SMS costs, by just sending them messages throught facebook or skype. I do not participate in the hype of twitter, but instead I just recently started using linkedin and Xing. For my current personal situation, with my girlfriend and son being several thousand miles away, social network helps us to be closer together! As social Media is a very young phenomena, I am wondering to what dimensions it will grow and the benefits and danger involved with it. With my tender 25 years of age, I remember when my neighbor first showed up with a mac that had a mouse! I instantly felt out of date with my 3/86 running on DOS (my dads old work-computer at that time), then the step to Windows 3.1 seemed already like science fiction. Not so long ago, people didn't know the meaning of the sign "@" and today I can book my flight on the push of a button my my phone while driving to the airport. The rate of change is totally mind blowing, and even I, as a young, tech-interested guy, have a hard time keeping up - which makes me wonder how the older generations must feel..? Time will show what the technical future will bring...and it this pace, it will show it rather soon!