Web Site Design and Development

My HP d4100e arrived while I was at a “Zoo Overnighter” with my daughter, so naturally I was excited to see the big cardboard box in the living room when I returned, a sign of impending hardware.

The good:

• The unit I purchased was a dual core AMD Athlon 4200, with 2 Gb of RAM, so finally I have a substantial development box to work with here, no cheesy underpowered laptop. So far I’ve thrown the JBoss Application Server and Eclipse’s Java IDE at it and it took that and 120 meg of Firefox windows in stride. Performance has been fine, though it’s interesting to note that there are some things about Windows that are just slow anyway.
• Other than start-up, which sounds like a brief and minor train wreck, operation is very quiet.
• There’s a nice set of included utilities, including PC Doctor and a bunch of junk I haven’t tried out yet.

The bad:

• The first day it was set up, with the included wireless mouse and keyboard, I had two fairly nasty hangs of the “hard boot — pull the plug” variety. I’m not sure if the mouse and keyboard are really the culprits, but I thought I’d replace them with my wired PS2 ergonomic keyboard and my old mouse to see what I could see. So far since then I’ve gone through a day with no hangs at all — knock wood that’s solved.
• Well, compared to the issue above — which if unsolved would be a a heart-breaking call support or heaven forbid wrap it up and send it back — nothing else is really to complain about, but the box is a bit of hefty and large. In my younger days I’d consider that a benefit, now I no longer need to play inside so I call it a defect.
• The system came with a pre-installed 60 day trial of a version of Outlook, Outlook 2003. No, thanks, I’ll skip the upsell. My old version serves just fine.

I’ve been digging a little more into Ruby, and I definitely get what the excitement is about. As a few authors have said, Ruby strikes one as Perl done right. I loved PERL, even when it was done wrong, so needless to say I’m really having a blast in Ruby.

If you havent done so yet, I’d encourage you to go up to the Ruby Web Site, download Ruby, and check out the Prgagmatic Programmer’s Ruby Book for a great free introduction.

I’m currently working on automating my real estate business using Ruby Mail, and wanted to thank Xinizul for his excellent fix for Rubymail on Windows, which saved me several hours in the debugger.

Q. How many computer programmers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A. None, that’s hardware.

Well, I finally broke down and decided that it was time to get off this minimalist sales guy laptop I’m using and get some real development hardware in here. After all, I have to go play API alphabet soup on job interviews, so I want to make sure I can tell an SOA from a POJO. So I ordered a nice development machine from HP, and it should be here in a couple of weeks — hopefully less.

Talking to a friend from my VSP / Synergex days today, looks like I can still hold my own fairly well on the technobabble. But there are a number of things I never tried out, back in the day, and a few things that have either developed or appeared since. Time to start hacking again — hooray!

And by the way, apropos the acronyms, the fact that now we have an acronym for the Plain Old Java Objects we should have been coding in all along is fairly amusing. Unfortunately I’m still seeing statements of work for the Dark Side of the Force — EJBs, of course — so it’s a little to early to make a stand on the virtue of simplicity.

Of course, now that I’m brushing off my software hat — a four-prop beanie, presumably — I’m opening Dr. Dobb’s Journal when it comes in the mail. The lastest edition talks about the buzz surrounding Ruby on Rails.

To be sure, there’s a fair amount of hype in Dr. Dobbs about this language / enviornment. Moreover, quick search on Dice shows that it’s a bit too early to declare it “Java’s Successor” just yet.

To praphrase the Monkees, however: “But then I saw the videos. Now I’m a Believer”. Check out the Ruby on Rails Screencasts for yourself. Building a web log in 15 minutes was fun, but I especially liked “Evolving your database schema without a sweat”.

This is seriously cool stuff, even if Java’s still beating it by a clean 14370 keyword hits to 26. What is this, some kind of popularity contest?

Well, for cash flow purposes at least: Yep.

Well, it’s time to order a nice speedy computer so we can load it up with the sort of slow software that people will pay you to work on. Interestingly enough, functional open source works great for the self-employed, but to work in the software you have to have at least a grudging aquaintance with some bloated commercial apps.

It’s been awhile.

At one time, that’s all we did at ParticleWave — go find software contractor positions and work on them.

So we’ll be getting back to that, and having more to say about Java in the weeks ahead, especially focusing on struts, EJBs, and other good stuff with a level of complexity sufficient to satsify the complexity-junky programmers who are advising the managers who are making the hiring decisions. As a wise man told me when I was very, very new to the software business — “learn something that looks hard, because people will pay you more to do it.”

I believe that the next few years will see an explosive growth in the use of Pay Per Click advertising by Realtors® As the market changes and more agents compete for fewer buyers, the perennial challenge of how to generate new business will become even more important. Unlike Search Engine Optimization — the systematic development of so called “on page” and “off page” elements of a web site to help target “free” search engine results — pay per click campaigns are easier to begin and have a lower cost of entry.

To be sure, there are many ways to go wrong with pay-per-click. Targeting the wrong keywords or not budgeting your bids correctly is a common mistake. Even worse, you may direct the click that you paid for to a page where it won’t do much good. A common mistake is to send pay-per-click traffic to the home page of a web site, but what you want is to send your prospects to a page that is most directly related to your ad. Are you advertising “Springfield Condos”? How about a list of Springfield Condos — or better yet, a call to action to sign up for a list of Springfield Condos. Your headline, your short pay per click ad text, and your landing page should all conspire as much as possible to create a useful lead for you. What’s worse, even the best laid pay-per-click ad is likely to only attract about 1/3 of the traffic as a well placed “organic” (non-pay-per-click) search position. The reason? Well, buyers assume that the free positions are really more relevant to what they’re searching for than the paid positions.

For all the problems and limitations of pay per click — in real estate or otherwise — the reason I like pay-per-click so much hinges to a large extent on a comparison between pay-per-click and direct mail. Having been in real estate for some time now, I’ve tried many approaches to getting new business, some free but time intensive, and some easy but money intensive. Of all the great sink-holes into which my dollars have been ill spent, direct mail is one of the greatest.

When you think about it for awhile, it’s easy to see that direct mail cannot hold a candle to a technology like pay-per-click. Direct mail marketers have been saying for years that there are three main components to a successful direct mail campaign. To quote a list that appears widely on the Internet (for example, at the Entrepreneur’s Help Page), a successful direct mail campaign involves three things:

1. The mailing list or target audience
2. The offer or incentive for the customer to buy the product
3. The creative package or communication message conveyed in the overall package

Well, OK, so far so good. Why should direct mail be any worse than a pay-per-click ad, then? The offer to buy is likely to be the same — a free CMA or a discount on a closing cost or a promise of better service or the like. No harm there. And the Internet does offer the ability to convey a communication message with color and allows the user to respond perhaps more easily than a return mail card, but that still isn’t it.

Look at your first component, the mailing list. We’re told direct mail marketers say this accounts for 40% of the success of a campaign. Now ask yourself, which of the following is better. (Let’s assume for the sake of an interesting place name that you sell real estate in Schenectady).

List #1: Everyone who might buy or sell a home in Schenectady, someday, or not, regardless of their interest level or willingness to do something soon.

List #2: Everyone who just this minute searched for Schenectady real estate on a search engine and clicked on an ad about it.

Now let’s say you could send one message to List #2, for about the same amount of money as you could spend to send two messages to List #1.

Well, in the case of Schenectady, that’s just about exactly what the numbers are. Here are the amounts on Overture for the top five bids for the keyword Schenectady Real Estate, as of today:

$1.02
$1.01
$1.00
$0.82
$0.80

In other words, $1.03 gets you into first place. Sure, one or two of your competitors may bid higher, but you’ll still appear prominently on the page. Those of you who have sent postcards know that that’s probably less than the cost for two postcards, designed and in the mail. The question is — how many postcards do you really have to send before you reach that one person who’s at least as minimally interested in Schenectady Real Estate that she’s searching for it online? Ten? One hundred?

And while we’re on the subject, that postcard probably doesn’t have a response piece (except perhaps your phone number). Your offer on your Schenectady Real Estate landing page can have a place for them to sign up for email updates or anything your mind can conceive, or as much information as you want to convey about your services or your specials. Your phone number, an offer form where the lead goes to you — whatever you want.

As more and more agents realize that what they’ve purchased with their web site is a rather expensive postcard with no postage on it, I believe pay per click will continue to grow in popularity. I believe that reaching one person who’s searching for something beats reaching about ten who aren’t, so pay per click is a great bargain compared to direct mail. I’ll take one person looking for “Mytown Luxury Homes” at five bucks per click over ten recipie cards in the trash for five dollars any day of the week.

In traditional real estate, “those who list, last”. Internet marketers, competing with colleagues pouring money into the vast direct mail sinkhole, have revised the motto to read, “those with the best list, last”.