While I can't address the issue directly, in the past few weeks I've taken lots of calls from people who frankly shouldn't be in the industry they want to get into. People treat computers either as mysterious boxes to be avoided or easy time savers which should be easy to work with. With the economy the way it is, and with the shady nature of people supposedly helping people get online, there has been a rush of people who want to save money and try to do their internet presense or business on their own.

To all those folks who think that way, use this example; if you had a car and your mechanic was somehow indisposed, you wouldn't jump up and say you would fix the car yourself just because you saw them work on it a few times. You especially wouldn't attempt to fix your car two days before you had to come to work.

More people are trying to DIY computer work without a clue as to how everythng fits together. Just because your an IT person doesn't mean you can design a website.

While I can do a lot of things with computers, I would never label myself an expert nor would I pass myself off as one. Recently I did a modest website for someone, charged them a fair price and when I was done I handed all the information to them. Now, I haven't heard from them since, but for me to demand control of his site would be wrong. I'm just a contractor and I shouldn't ransom his product.

Now, I have to say he wanted me to have a lot more control of the site than I wanted to have. I didn't want to be on call all the time to handle little stuff. I didn't want to change his font, make something 'prittier' or any of that stuff.

At my job, weekends are the best times, because they're a little slower, but they're the worse times because all the weekend computer experts call in panicked because they have to get a project finished by the weekend. Everything going wrong is everyone's fault but their own. I understand wanting to do this stuff, but it took me years to know what I do and I didn't learn it by putting myself in a crunch situation to get something done, or promising more than what I could deliver.

If I could give one bit of advice to all the people who want to start a website, I would say you have to treat a website as you would a real store. What you would do with a real store you do with an internet store. How do you get business? You tell people about it. When you start a real store, you don't submit your information to the paper and the yellow pages and sit back and wait for people to show up. You're going to hit friends, family, trade shows, anything and anyone that can get publicity to the store. After a time, you will get word of mouth and finally traffic to the store.

The web works the same way. You have to have your stuff out there but you have to tell live people about your site. Once they get there they'll tell more people and so on. The  more people realize a web presense is just like a live presense, people will understand more how to work the web and how it isn't different than you do in real life.