Components needed to establish a web site

Once a newspaper decides to publish on-line, the reasons why will dictate whether it wants to "own the presses" or hire a hosting company, said Chris Feola, recently named director of the American Press Institute's Media Center in Reston, Va., (and key contributor to The Cole Papers).

If you want to protect a franchise, and just "get something in there," having someone host for you is the most painless, Feola said. If you want to build a skill set in your newsroom, advertising and circulation departments, then you will want to build your own web site.

Hosted sites take the burden of technical expertise off the newspaper. That also means loss of control, "akin to having someone else print your newspaper," he said. There are situations with hosted web sites where editors have to telephone corrections to typos that are fixed weeks later by the service. It's important to negotiate who controls getting information to appear on-line, whether the newspaper can "post" its own files via FTP.

More important issues are whether the on-line supplier will allow you to develop CGIs (common gateway interfaces), Java, scripts and Microsoft FrontPage extensions or similar tools, the little programs that give zip and pizzazz to a site. The hosting company may limit these changes to the heart of its web system for the sake of reliability and speed.

"It's like allowing 20 or 30 people to make modifications to delivery trucks or the press," Feola explained.

For complete control and headache ownership, you can buy a packaged Web box for less than $3,000. Feola described a "basic box" as a Pentium Pro-200 with 64 megabytes of RAM, a 6 gigabyte hard drive, small monitor, CD-ROM and a Jaz drive for backup. More serious servers, including mission critical features such as hot swapping, multiple hard drives and power supplies, full backups and the potential to add processors later are priced between $12,000 and $20,000.

As for operating systems, Feola said NT is easy to use and very appropriate for many kinds of sites. For high-end sites, Unix has lots of advantages and requires lots of programming skill, if you want to be in the software construction business.

Getting connected to the telephone network may not cost a lot. ISDN costs about $40 a month in connect fees and lightly uses sites may cost $400-500 a month. T1, with same theoretical throughput as ISDN, can be less expensive. It can even be free, as it was at the Waterbury (Conn.) Republican-American, Feola's previous employer, where tariffs for voice charges between the local and long-distance companies were eliminated by a T1 line that serves both the company's voice and 'Net connectivity needs. The tariff savings covered the new line costs.

When it's time to publish, there are easy to use authoring tools that, just like graphic packages, convert the WYSIWYG design to HTML. Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe PageMill are designers' friends. At the same time, the ease of overpopulating with graphics can lead to web download monsters. One cure is to make designers use the site the same way your users do, including dial-ups over slow modems, so they can see real-life results.

Managing the site contents is easier with Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe SiteMill and more sophisticated packages Cold Fusion and NetObjects. Also consider "repair bots," custom programmed to try out your site automatically.

"You can get two high school students to make these for you for a couple of sandwiches and some Mountain Dew, I promise you," Feola said.

A production of The Cole Group, Copyright (c) 1997, All Rights Reserved.

Last updated: 25 June 1997.

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