Chile Forum

I use to be a partner in a web design firm in another country years ago. So, even though I really do not like building web sites for anyone else but myself, I do handle a few side jobs from time to time.

Mostly as a sort of probono type thing. For the most part I restrict it to select businesses, organizations, and perhaps friends and family.

Chilean clients will not pay for a good web site because they don't understand what a good web site is and what it should do. There are too many graduates of graphics design schools in Chile trying to play web designer. Most can hardly find the power switch on their computers and start their Macro Media flash software, let alone deal with the issues of server configurations, SEO, security, and so on. There is far more to a good web site than pretty pictures (sometimes they even have trouble with that). 99.9% of all Chilean web designers could not right a bug free line of php code, javascript, or even use style sheets. The few that can really write code, where trained in microsoft .NET/ASP/visual basic gibberish. It is changing a bit, but not sufficiently fast to really get Chile out on the internet where the World can easily find them. Just look at some of the web sites for some of the biggest companies in Chile.

So, I have volunteered for the most part to do some sites for friends, family, and clients. I just could not leave them hanging. For example, every once in a while I come across some small business in Chile that has forked out a bunch of money for a web site, and gotten a bunch of musical flash garbage from some web designer that is half finished and can only be viewed with one browser in his office or worse. I even did a government tourism web site a couple of years ago that the organization had hired 2 "web designers" and waited like 3 years for them to finish.

The biggest mistake they have is that almost no Chilean designer can get their brain around the basic mechanics of how Google or other search engines and basic SEO works. Even worse is trying to get business owners brains around it. If you are not going to do SEO, and do it correctly, there is no point in having a web site no matter how cool it looks or even how well it works. Most clients I just do basic SEO on their site and don't even waist my time trying to explain it to them.

None of them are anything fancy mostly because I don't have the time, but sufficiently technically sound for them to be REALLY on the internet and not just paying for an animated movie viewable on the internet. So, I charge them my cost for doing it. Typically I have charged about 300,000 for a small business. Right now I will not touch a new project for under million pesos, and it would have to involve a lot of begging.

Really, I have been trying hard to give it up. In fact, I have been looking for someone sufficiently good in web design and SEO that I can hand my current clients over to them, without feeling guilty that I threw them to the Wolves. Want to buy a web business?

I just want to do my own sites. I don't have to argue with the client to do the right thing that way. I much prefer spending the time tweaking my sites like allchile.net, and building web sites for other people is just a distraction from that. I could do a web site on any random topic and make more money, and it would be much more satisfying.

Where you at currently?

yea, PM me we can talk shop in more detail. I would not mind outsourcing some work.

The real problem I run in to, especially with Chilean clients, is they like to talk. Doing web sites for the most part is the easy part, once you have your system down and you have some experience with the pitfalls involved and how to avoid them. It is waisting a hundred hours or more talking to a client that is only intending to spend say 50,000 pesos on a project, and a lot of it often has nothing to do with the web site.

In the South of Chile they really really like to talk. It is just how it is. I could easily spend 3 to 5 days on average talking to a client about their project, and less than half of a day doing it. Which is all great fun, and leads to a lot of other sorts of business contacts that have been profitable; but, still not terribly cost effective way of going about it. In fact it is the only reason I have been doing it in the first place, is because it builds trust with the community. Once you get that involved with someones business on that level, the town tourism industry, or some organization they tend to trust you implicitly in other areas. Even the most powerful and experience business people tend to be fairly vulnerable when it comes to technology, and they know it. For example, the VCR has come and gone and I bet you half the CEO's of the fortune 500 companies in the World never got the time set correctly. That was all the internet boom of the late 90's amounted to. Not any different in Chile, other than they like to talk more about it.

So, it was a nice foot in the door, that I am now not sure how to pull my foot out.

A couple of years ago I did this site for an nice old lady who owns a hostel in Futa: http://www.lagringachile.com

She told me from the start, "I don't know anything about the internet and I don't want to know anything about the internet"
She just wanted a web site. Once I heard that, I charged her 150,000 for the site including the domain name (I am even still paying her domain name and hosting the site for free). She was my dream client because I did not have to talk to her and walk her through every little detail of how web sites and the internet work. It is the ones that I have to teach step by step about how the internet works, what they should be doing, what their old web designer did wrong, what their competitor's web designer is doing wrong, and so and so on that I see a fairly profitable 300,000 CPL worth of work is whittled down to a total loss. What I really need to do is outsource the talking.

I am mostly just doing joomla site systems now. I use to write my own CMS systems from scratch back before open source was really a concept, but either life is too short now or I am getting to old is to chase bugs. Open source projects for the most part are far more efficient at it.

Nothing against word press, I just have found joomla to be more of a swiss army knife. I have also been following and participating in the development community since before the split with mambo, so it is also a 'better the devil you know' problem for me. What I know of Word Press however is that is has had a real reputation for security holes in the past, but I have not spent a whole lot of time messing with it either so I really would not be able to say if the reputation is deserved or not.

Really, most any CMS system is the same to me, as long as the community is alive and on top of the development, and there is not a lot of junk legacy code to deal with. The new joomla 1.5 systems has done a good job of purging all the bad stuff from mambo. phpbb seems to have done fairly good job also with the new version of purging the ghost in the machine.

The code inherited from mambo was a mess. The fundamental design was flawed. We will see how the new joomla 1.5 code does on the security and bug front.

Speak of the devil:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/community ... 635606.htm

Don't mean to start a 'which CMS is best' war, just ran in to this on the wire and thought I would share it. Sounds like a fairly good size hole, as security holes go. Still, I as yet to run in to any web application (that could really do anything), that one of these issues did not pop up sooner or later. More important is that they pop up sooner and get patched rather than later in open source circles. It is the closed source black boxes that scare the hell out of me.

I worked on closed source custom produced ASP CMS years ago (I did not build it or design it), that it was basically well known in house secret that it was riddled with security holes. The only thing that kept it from being hacked was the uniqueness of the security holes. We all just had to keep it held together with chewing gum, bailing wire, and a wink between us because it cost well over $250,000 to produce in the first place (it was a lot of years ago), and management was not about to replace it. It was finally retired with the whole IT project, but makes me wonder how many other IT departments are out there with security skeletons in their development server. An insecure open source application, is by definition a much more secure application because of the transparency involved (as long as someone is fixing them when found).

the 500,000 microsoft servers hacked:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/28/2014206

Yea, joomla does separate out its user space from administrator space fairly well.

I know some of the members on the forum are a bit frustrated with why I don't add more cool features to the forum. It is is in part because I have to think long and hard about if it is really worth it every time I add a user land feature to the forum that requires a user to input data. I know that is kind of blanket policy, but it is true. Anytime you allow a user to input data on the web, you better have all your security ducks in a row. It is just the nature of the game.

I have also learned to be more and more conservative with adding any modifications or extensions to a system. Even if everything is working correctly, it might make me hesitate or put off a needed security upgrade or patch if I also need to upgrade the modification. Thus potentially leaving a security hole open longer than it should be on the web. For example on the forum I have really gone out of my way to keep it as stock as possible.

This site is the only one I allow public logon and registrations.