CoffeeBear.net

WebKeyDesign Interviewed

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life

It’s another long, bor­ing day at work and so CoffeeBear.net is happy to bring you this inter­view with the man behind our web­host, WKD.

CB.net: Who is WebKey­De­sign?
WKD: Essen­tially, it’s just one per­son. Fran­cisco Olaguez.

CB.net: What inspired you to start your own com­pany?
WKD: At first it was bore­dom, because I felt that there was not enough chal­leng­ing things in my life, but now that I reflect on it more. Even though the busi­ness has made my life more stress­ful, it has improved my health. I have less time and what time I do have is more focused. I am def­i­nitely the type of per­son that pro­duces more in chaos, than order, so if lots of things are hap­pen­ing, I end up doing more, not less.

CB.net: What is WebKey­De­sign?
WKD: Well, the WebKeyDesign.com web­site serves two pur­poses. The main one of course is for peo­ple to pur­chase sim­ple web host­ing and sup­port for their websites.

My cus­tomers are mostly aver­age peo­ple who have mod­est host­ing needs like blog­gers and of course non-technical clients who need a web site, but who have very lim­ited bud­gets. The orig­i­nal mar­ket for WebKey­De­sign was sup­pose to be for day­care orga­ni­za­tions that wanted to cre­ate a web pres­ence. Once the school sea­son starts again, I will actu­ally start to work on a cou­ple of day­care sites.

CB.net: Day­cares with a web pres­ence? Where did you ever come up with that idea?
WKD: My son’s day­care is a non-profit busi­ness and I found that their pri­mary way of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with par­ents is through paper fly­ers. Most school chil­dren bring home a lot of paper already from the school, and young chil­dren are very good at los­ing things like papers. I sug­gested to them that they use a web site instead to pub­lish their infor­ma­tion, this way even if the child lost it, the par­ents could access every­thing online.

The day­care was inter­ested in this, but the local school sys­tem does not allow for things like MySQL and CGI on their web­server, so the day­care would have to pur­chase host­ing sep­a­rately to make a nice dynamic site.

Even­tu­ally, it was they who pushed me into tak­ing care of every­thing, from host­ing, to site design, to support.

CB.net: I’ve noticed lately you’ve been read­ing a lot about SEO (e.g. in mag­a­zines and on web­sites). How does this fit into your company’s mis­sion of pro­vid­ing sim­ple web host­ing & sup­port for the non-technical crowd? Also, what is SEO any­ways?
WKD: SEO is short for Search Engine Opti­miza­tion. Com­ing from a tech­ni­cal back­ground, I knew that quite a bit of hack­ing takes place on the Inter­net, but in the SEO world, you will find a lot of it as well.

What good, harm­less SEO means, is that you make your site pop­u­lar by doing such things as ana­lyz­ing your web traf­fic, find­ing the right search phrases that peo­ple use, and mon­i­tor­ing your com­pe­ti­tion to see what makes them popular.

Some SEO is expen­sive, like using a Google AdWords cam­paign to mar­ket your site to the Inter­net at large.

Then there is the spam­mer SEO, some of this came to light with the WordPress.org web­site. Spam­mer SEO is all about cheat­ing the search engines like Google and Yahoo.

WordPress.org has a very high Google PageR­ank which is what Google uses to rank a site impor­tant. By WordPress.org link­ing to your site or col­lec­tion of sites, you instantly attain a higher PageR­ank, which makes your site higher on Google’s search results. Search Engines believe that sites should be impor­tant because of their con­tent, not their links, and so stuff­ing a bunch of invis­i­ble links into a pop­u­lar site to make other sites pop­u­lar is not some­thing they condone.

How­ever, spam­mer SEO does hap­pen every day and the search engines are get­ting bet­ter at ignor­ing it, but from a busi­ness point of view, if you can drive 10,000 more vis­i­tors to your site, the temp­ta­tion is hard to resist.

In some cases though site own­ers do not under­stand that what they are doing is bor­der­line uneth­i­cal, and if you break Google’s poli­cies enough, they will ban your site and pos­si­bly your business.

CB.net: Just to clar­ify, when you men­tioned “hack­ing”, in your pre­vi­ous answer, were you mean­ing it in the same bla­tantly wrong man­ner as the main­stream media (e.g. as a ref­er­ence to ille­gally access­ing other people’s com­put­ers and/or net­works) or are you actu­ally using it in the cor­rectly (as a ref­er­ence to pro­gram­ming a com­puter in a clever, vir­tu­osic, and wiz­ardly man­ner¹)?
WKD: I mean it more in a gen­eral way, that hack­ing is some­thing you do that you know is wrong, but you do it any­way because you can. In other words, not hack­ing for the sake of curiosity.

CB.net: That doesn’t make much sense…
WKD: It’s like steal­ing a pack of gum. You know it’s wrong and don’t really need the gum, but you’re doing it any­way. Basi­cally, I’m using it as a neg­a­tive term.²

CB.net: Sorry about digress­ing there, but the way the main­stream media mis­uses the term is one of my pet peeves. Get­ting back to talk­ing about SEO, you gave a good overview of it but you have not yet told us how it plays into your company’s strat­egy.
WKD: I myself don’t have the time to do much SEO. I rather make WebKeyDesign.com pop­u­lar by adding con­tent than by research­ing a new key phrase every day. Plus, the big strat­egy was there from the begin­ning, when I switched to Word­Press to drive the site’s main con­tent. WP has some great plu­g­ins like SiteMap­per and Jerome’s Key­words that make SEO easy for every­one³. Blogs in gen­eral have some great built-in fea­tures that helps search engines index them.

RSS being the most impor­tant and obvi­ous one that I can think of.

CB.net: What do you find most enjoy­able about hav­ing started the com­pany?
WKD: There is a sense of empow­er­ment in being able to say that you run your own lit­tle enter­prise, and then there is the occa­sional moment when a cus­tomer is really happy with your busi­ness and lets you know it.

CB.net: And what’s the worst part?
WKD: For me it has always been sales and mar­ket­ing. Even when I was younger and sold audio equip­ment, I was never that great of a sales­man. I hate to bother peo­ple in gen­eral, but when you are a small busi­ness, mar­ket­ing is every­thing. You have to open your mouth and intro­duce your­self, give strangers your busi­ness card, and so on, because you never know when you will hit upon your next customer.

Some clients end up buy­ing your prod­uct after they thought about it, and other clients make up their mind imme­di­ately. So far, when I have kept in touch with poten­tial clients, it has not worked for me; I have had bet­ter suc­cess with being less of a salesman.

CB.net: Doesn’t that make the choice of start­ing a web host­ing com­pany rather awk­ward? After all, there are thou­sands of com­pa­nies out there already doing this sort of thing.
WKD: Yes, the mar­ket is quite flooded with overnight host­ing com­pa­nies, but what I found out through research is that the major­ity of com­pa­nies doing web­host­ing are not inter­ested in talk­ing to small clients. The major host­ing com­pa­nies only want clients who can pay around $35 or more a month for services.

Their busi­ness is also very auto­mated. Any time they actu­ally have to com­mu­ni­cate with peo­ple, even through email cost them money, and cuts into their prof­its, so the major­ity of com­pa­nies would rather not deal at all with small websites.

It is actu­ally the same thing with domain names and other inter­net ser­vices. Com­pa­nies see sup­port as a neg­a­tive, so they rather not have these clients at all.

This is where WebKey­De­sign comes in. We only ser­vice small clients and we give them the same prod­uct that they could not afford oth­er­wise. The biggest ben­e­fit is that they talk to a real per­son and they get actual sup­port even though they are pay­ing less.

CB.net: It cer­tainly sounds like a noble goal and we wish you luck with it. I’m afraid that I’ve run out of ques­tions for you. Do you have any clos­ing remarks that you’d like to make?
WKD: I would like to thank you, Man­z­abar for your time, and say that start­ing your own busi­ness really requires three things: Money, Patience, and Deter­mi­na­tion. You have to be care­ful that you use what lit­tle money you have wisely and that your grow the busi­ness grad­u­ally as best you can. Thank you.

Well faith­ful read­ers, that’s it for this inter­view. If you liked this sort of thing, please let me know in the com­ments and per­haps we can see about doing again some­time in the future.

¹ Def­i­n­i­tion taken from the Urban Dic­tio­nary.
² The major­ity of this inter­view was done via IM; how­ever this question/answer was just chat­ter back&forth through the cube walls of our office. As such, the word­ing used here may not be 100% accu­rate.
³ I checked with WKD after the inter­view to get the links to the plu­g­ins he men­tioned and found when he said SiteMap­per; he was actu­ally refer­ring to the Google Sitemap Gen­er­a­tor plugin.

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