Dreamsite Overview

This site is for dreamers, people dreaming about their own ebay or amazon.com. I will show you the right road to go down to make it happen and that road centers on custom programming (it so happens that is what I have done since the birth of the web in 1995). You can be sure ebay.com does not mess with assembling off-the-shelf cookie-cutter components to create their site. Everything is written from scratch to be exactly what is needed. It is constantly evolving. When you realize the power of custom programming to adapt to your changing visions your dreams will go wild.

Dream Big, Start Small and In-Control

Today there is an unprecedented mismatch between price and suitability when it comes to website solutions, a solution costing one hundred times less can actually be better. Web experts sell you things that make them money, not things that work the best. It is more profitable to send you down a high-maintenance depend-on-others road. Early bad decisions now will mean the ultimate failure of yourdreamsite.com. Dream big, but start small. It is better to understand, control and grow something simple than get ulcers on something big, complex, expensive and out-of-control! A dreamsite is not something you can hire someone else to take care of. It is your dream so you need to learn what is necessary to make it happen (hire people to do other things). I can help you stay away from the dead ends and blind alleys.

What is a Dreamsite?

A dreamsite is a term that refers to creative use of the world wide web not only for a website but for its administration, for controlling it and your entire life and for web applications. So your web vision needs to be three-fold, a public site for everyone, a private administration site for your staff and a control site specifically for you. 'Dreamsite' is thus an encompassing term that describes the use of a web server in a wide range of ways that are under your complete control. It constantly changes with your changing visions, it is never finished because you never stop dreaming. It happens in small steps. It acts as an engine, it keeps opening new doors that were not a part of your original vision, it is a catalyst, a focus and an idea-factory for your success. You obviously have to manage it on an ongoing basis and make good choices early on to make such a comprehensive concept a success. On this site I will show you where to begin learning to create or manage the creation of your dreamsite.

Web Site

Your web site is what the public sees and of course it needs to be under your control. Today many companies will create a site for you using templates and rapid publishing systems that minimize their work and maximize their profits. But likely your dreams and ideas are not ‘templated’. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that you need a custom solution.

The part of the website that people see is called the ‘front end’ and admittedly there are many companies that can create a fancy one. But the I must assume that you want a site with brains and abilities, one that can interact with people and capture, save, analyze and recall information. These are done on the back end of the site. Again, there are many companies that can create site back ends, however they charge a premium price and they create them using expensive and often-outdating Micro$oft technologies that lock you in and are less reliable. On this site I will show you how to utilize a LAMP server to host your site, it costs less and puts many more technologies within easy reach.

Administration Site

Sites like Amazon and Ebay have matching administration sites that their employees can log into from anywhere. These sites are normally more complex and require more effort than the public site. Employees use them to process orders, manage the people databases, communicate, analyze, co-ordinate, etc. It is vital that you give this aspect of your web presence the same attention as the public site. Your company’s ability to provide a good customer experience is determined by this part of your site. You will find that this aspect of your web presence will also need to change often as you evolve and streamline the way you handle things, off-the-shelf solutions are just not going to be good fits.

Control Site (Dashboard page)

If you are or plan to be a person of any influence then having your own personal control site programmer is as important as your own accountant or mechanic. A control site is a secure online control panel or dashboard for your life, a place with everything you need to see and do in a day (communicate, sell, do customer resource management, instruct your people, research, network and leverage your assets and resources, watch news feeds). It is global, it enables you to manage your life and visions from anywhere at anytime using any computer (including handhelds). Like your public site, it evolves as your ideas and life evolve and its home page will be the one your computer goes to when you turn it on.

Control Site Particulars:

Internal messaging system, not email.

Email is so clogged with SPAM today that it is no longer an effective communication method. Important messages just get lost. Internal messaging systems employ databases and web pages to create a private channel apart from the email system. They guarantee that messages are delivered and can impose many forms of restriction and security. For example, you can have a personal contact page on your website that people visit. It can use cookies so that it knows who has opened the page and it stores messages and presents them right on you PAWS home page. You administer these messages in a manner similar to an email program. However the messaging system can also be tied into your people and invoicing databases, for example.

Project Management

Your PAWS home page is laid out according to the priority of the tasks you need to perform. Color coding, charts, links to external web based tools, links to internal data stores, etc are a part of this.

FAX and Phone Call Management

Your PAWS home page can flag waiting FAXes and phone messages and it can enable you to send FAXes and phone messages from your workstation.

CRM

Customer Resource Management is a key tool in business today. You PAWS should be built around keeping track of all the people you need to know. It should provide database tools to deal with large numbers of people. You need programming expertise to create special handlers to carry out the customer communication tasks your business evolves, no one can predict these.

External Management Tool Links

You will accumulate many user names and passwords for external management of things like bank accounts, ISP control panels, payment gateways, credit cards, routers, servers, etc. You need a way to manage this complexity, your PAWS home page coupled with your database system and security is the answer.

Web Site Management

Your portfolio of web sites will grow over time and you need to be constantly improving and updating them. Pages either need to be directly edited, edited and uploaded or scripts on pages need to be written and fine tuned. Your PAWS home page is the place to keep the priorities of these jobs right in your mind and get the work done.

SEO

Your PAWS home page is the right place for a link to an SEO tools to help fine tune your pages to place on search engines.

B2B

You need to build communication infrastructures with your customers and suppliers to automate many types of exchanges in information, money and goods. Pages on your website custom written for these tasks are the answer. Your PAWS home page is the right place for management level indicators that monitor these pages and provide appropriate action alerts.

RSS Newsfeeds

Thousands of news feeds are available on everything you can imagine. It is likely there are news feeds on critical news you need to keep abreast of, these should be in a box on your dashboard page.

Application Server

Most of us are conditioned to see computers as productivity tools on which we run software such as Microsoft Office. Microsoft and others, of course, like this vision because it means they can sell every user a copy of their software. However when it comes to things like database, scheduling and accounting software, for example, the web provides an opportunity for a much better solution than the traditional PC based approach. This is because web servers can act as application servers. That means that a program on the web server can present itself through a standard web browser. The accounting software world is moving in this direction. In future most businesses will simply pay a monthly fee and do all of their accounting online. The advantages of this are obvious (access from anywhere, automatic backup, never a need for updating software, a familiar web user interface, etc. Management of customer and people databases are also much easier using a web server since its presence on the internet enables the people themselves to keep their own information up-to-date. In recent years telephone gateways on the internet enable web applications to perform many amazing communication tasks (e.g. send and receive faxes, perform voice recognition, interact with libraries).

Another recent development in web applications is the widespread ability to generate PDF pages on demand. This means that web applications can print reports and send the browser to open them via Adobe Reader (making it possible to generate complex forms with color, shading, graphics and any font).

The realization of this opens up many opportunities redeploy applications currently running on Pcs to a web server, no only to impart all the benefits thereof, but to integrate them into the administration site.

Only custom-written web components can go down any road you choose!

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