The Workermonkey

Friday, March 03, 2006

Website Progress I: Coalition-Building 

# posted by DJ Booze Piñata @ 3/03/2006 12:29:00 PM

I'll make this into a main post so it's plain to see.

Whereas: I intend to be involved in moving Multipurpose Workermonkey onto its own hosted domain site, complete with features such as
- forums (much better than Blog format since topics can be revisited and ongoing),
- media (we'll figure this out)
- the ability to expand into what we'll make of it (some form of revenue, eventually? Perhaps stuff we'll create. Why don't you build her a cake?)

Whereas: I intend to have a sister-page to the Workermonkey intended for my music production. This includes not only my own little Frankensteins, but also the recorded versions of my WESU radio show, playlists and all. It's coming in baby steps, but I'm improving at it and I intend to have them available for audio streaming. There's soon to be a little more talking or issue-tackling on the show, since many listeners tune in to a particular program for the personalities, not just the music. If, say, Ron were to start flexing some skills at Flash animation then I could help add the audio.

Whereas: There are a number of issues we need to look at regarding the creation of this site.
- Host Servers -
A "dedicated server" is one that is strictly for your business and will not be shared. This is too expensive, probably. Can one of us run it off of a barebones computer? Maybe, but it's likely to run into bandwidth issues, as well as pretty slow load-times. That's only a prediction, though. A "reseller" buys a multi-domain package and cheaply sells the remaining domains to others. Cheap, but possibly lacking in needed features like customer support. There's a number of very good companies out there which sell great packages which are worth paying the $10/month or less: Midphase, Lunar Pages, IPower, StartLogic, etc. I did some research this week, and I'd be happy to run our subscription; however I'm not beginning a pay cycle until I know that we have a soon-to-be functional website that has already been designed and drafted. Which brings us to....

- Website Design -
As I see it, there are 3 options:
Professional website design assistance: $300 at LEAST. Not a ton, but significant enough to warrent a collection pool. This is also most likely to yield the best-looking results.
Purchase a decent Template: under $100, and we do the rest ourselves.
Do-It-Yourself: free, but by far the most time-consuming. I don't think any of us has enough functional in-depth knowledge of HTML scripting etc. yet to make anything good-looking. YET. We should be looking for a dynamic interface, for starters. You know....on the minimum end, just links which get affected or light up as a mouse cursor moves over it. Someone with experience in graphics-editing like Photoshop would help. Looking your way, Branciforte.

- Bandwidth & Memory -
Considering I'll want music and media to be available, we'll need to have at least a few gigabytes of memory and a decent amount of bandwidth space in case the site ends up being well-traveled. If we put up some content that alot of folks would find cool, or even a hard-to-find video clip of a granny-punch or something weird, we could end up with many visitors at the same time. A good test of a Web Host is to check on some sites that use them as a host. Is the load-time fast or slow? If the physical location of the server drives is in China or Djibuti then it'll be a greater lag-time. So it's good to know that the company has a homegrown office area.

After work today I'm going to get some how-to books on Web-Design Scripting and maybe Flash Animation or something similar. I may or may not need some tertiary knowledge on SQL Databases for one reason or another. Prolly not.

Therefore: I welcome comments and suggestions. Pretty big buildup just for that, eh?

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