MAINEBIZ MAGAZINE: JULY 1997

The Web Business Reaches The Street:

Making a business out of building entries to the World Wide Web has proven to be a more complicated and uncertain affair than many people expected. One Web designer, Ian Harvie, has decided ot take her abilities right to the street and has opened up a shop. In her store, the Portland WebSmith, she offers to build a presence on the Web for pretty much anyone who comes throught the door.

Harvie's strategy is a little different from most others who offer to put an individual or business on the Web. Internet service providers, for instance, usually create Internet connectivity that includes access to the Net, E-mail and other features. The Portland WebSmith concentrates solely on creating and hosting Web pages. Harvie has reduced the complicated problem of learning how to use the Internet to its one most popular segment, the Web. She does not offer connection to the Internet, nor any E-mail address. She figures the simplicity of her offering and her ability to communicate with people face to face will help them make the leap into the unkown that is such a daunting prospect to those who don't know the Internet.

"My forte is making people feel comfortable," says Harvie, seated in the overstuffed easy chair that, with a small but very deep sofa, forms the consultation area of her enterprise. She started out, like so many others, as a graphics designer and expanded her skills into Web development. "I can execute virtually anything in Photoshop," she says, "and make a great looking page." So can a lot of others. Her problem, as her business developed, was to find a way to cut herself apart from the crowd of other Web developers who are offering to help businesses get on-line. "It was a natural progression. I tried to decide if I wanted to rent an office and hire help, and then I decided to pay a little more and get a storefront. It's crazy how smoothly it all flowed."

"I like calling it a 'shop' instead of an office. It's a walk-in place, uncomplicated, like a Web grocer," she said. Her grocery is on High Street in Portland, just off Congress Street diagonally across Congress Square from the Portland Museum of Art. It's the off-beat, lively end of Congress, well away from the conservative marketplace atmosphere of the Old Port.

Harvie has stocked the shelves with a few products, but the basic unit is a start-up package. It is one page, and allows for 300 words of text. She and her associate, Paul Van Klaveren, will design the page, code the text in HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language, the computer code in which Web pages are written), scan two-color images and register the page with search engines for $325. The page is stored with a Web address at the Portland WebSmith domain for three months, from which it can be accessed from any Web browser anywhere in the world. After 3 months have elapsed, the customer can choose to renew the storage for $30 for another three months. She sees it as a place for people to post personal resumes, price lists, artist portfolios, modeling portfolios, event promotion and all the other things that a simple Web page might do. Most sites are more than one page, so larger and more complex efforts are done on a time for services basis, much as with any other Web site service.

How this differs:

There are two basic distinctions between Portland WebSmith and other services. The first and biggest is the storefront. A retail Web store is almost certainly unique in Maine, and is very likely to be one of the first anywhere. The other distinction is that Harvie has decided to just create Web sites, without using the other functions of the Internet such as E-mail, and without Internet access. Customers must find their access through one of the many providers serving the area. There have been on-line hosting services that offered page creation services like this for quite a while, but she is definitely ahead of the curve with a walk-in storefront.

She plans to help her customers get over that fear of the unknown that grips many people who haven't had much Internet experience when they consider using the Web. A new, potential customer is given an intake form to fill out to find out where they are on the learning curve to Internet literacy. "Then we sit down with them and try to mirror what they know," she says. "We will offer an opinion about whether it would work for them." If they don't think the Internet is right, they might refer the customer to print media as a more appropriate way to get their word out. "We usually advise them to start small," she said. "We also make sure they understand that really essential dated material needs to be updated. We work out who is going to maintain it, and what the ongoing costs will be." They offer classes for those who want to try to update their own pages.

Harvie wants to figure out the best way to bring new people to the Internet. "Eventually," she said, "the Web will be everywhere and there will be Web appliances everywhere. The speeds will be faster. We want to come up with a method to get people on to the Web easily." When she has evolved a method that works consistently, she wants to export her vision of retail Web sales to other cities. Her eventual aim is a chain of Web stores in small cities like Portland, cities with an entrepreneurial spirit and lots of little businesses. "My goal is to open up other stores," she says. "I would like to open up a Burlington (Vermont) WebSmith." After that there would be lots of other WebSmiths, all using that same basic method, like making Subway sandwiches.

- Ken Greenleaf