Kat Rice, who I met briefly at Wordcamp Dallas, posted How to Tell if Your Webmaster is Cheating on You today and it's a topic that is really about disclosure. If you hire outside help for your website, are you getting the whole truth? Go read through her list of red-flag statements that may be signs you're not getting all the facts. I'll get to those in a second.

First I want to hit on the topic of small business and what it means to work in that area as a web vendor. The small business market is brutal. If your only business experience is with Fortune 500 companies and you decide to market your skills to small businesses in your area, get ready for the rack. With no other income, getting $1000 from some small companies is a miracle to behold.

I went out on my own and had my butt handed to me on a paper plate over and over for many reasons. One was a personal illness that I plan on writing about when I find the right way to approach it. But the other reasons are also important. These reasons come back to me when I read articles like Kat's because those half-truths and evasive statements are how small business operates.

Small Business Runs on Fumes and Feelings

I've yet to meet a small business executing a five-year business plan. If they are, they're probably a start-up and I put start-ups in a completely different category of business, even though there is similar behavior. With your experienced corporate eyes, you may know companies will spend seventeen million dollars for a company blog. Why? Nobody really knows but they really do. So when you spend 20 hours writing a proposal for a potential client who wants a sophisticated e-commerce you walk away bewildered when they throw your $11,000 proposal in your face followed by vulgarities. And you thought you'd save them money by using open source frameworks and doing the customization yourself. No they didn't appreciate that either.

Modern small business culture is a product of decades of collective wisdom rooted in the 1950s. Most everything related to marketing is compared to yellow page advertising, much the same way large companies compare everything to television advertising. If you think your customer is progressive and understands the Web, double check. You may find your customer's idea of value is incompatible with reality. Because most of these businesses run such tight margins, $1000 is a lot of money as you're finding out yourself since you've been writing $11,000 proposals. Even if the value is right for your proposal, business owners may feel that's too much and will say things to that will kill one synapse at a time. You may hear, "I spoke with Charlie at church–he works for a bank and even with computers–he thinks $11,000 is way too much. He said just set up a Yahoo store." You may also hear, "My cousin's neighbor has a kid in high school who will do it for nothing." [Editor's note: the kid will also use the site to launch denial of service attacks against his Internet frenimy, Warlock.]

Everybody Is Trying to Find Their Way

Your perception of value will be competing with the perception of value of somebody who is selling hardware or owns a restaurant or is mostly a mechanic. Just as you can't fathom why a brake job is $500, small business owners cannot wrap their brains around what it takes to build a custom website. You can try to explain it, but they will not get it. In Kat's article, she is listing some of the common website sales pitches that have been dumbed down for small business. Rarely do you find an educated small business owner who truly understands that website creation and management has no rules. Every vendor is different and small businesses are really looking for a consultative partner rather than a gee-whiz stenographer.

This is why disclosure is so important. If you cannot sit across from somebody and tell them the whole truth about who you are, then you have no business dealing with small business. Just as you have to get to know your client, they need to get to know you and begin to trust you.

The List

So I'm going to take Kat's list and change it to how these items should be pitched by ethical web vendors.

1. This individual design is just for you. How about this: "I can create a unique design for you, but it will cost more because it takes more time. If you don't mind a site based on existing templates, we can start there, but some cost."
2. The most important thing is design. How about this: "After we figure out how you want to approach the design, the next step is to make sure the message and design work together. This involves making sure colors and graphics don't clash with your message."
3. Everyone charges a monthly fee for upkeep. This one is tricky because some web vendors need to count on monthly fees as a business model and that should be fully disclosed. So try this: "We have our own dedicated server [if true] and it's easier to maintain your site if you host it on our server. In addition, my company charges a monthly retainer of $x because we provide services above and beyond initial site creation. For example, if there is a vulnerability in your site's code, we will fix it. The retainer is a flat rate and we will charge outside of that retainer. Here look at this complete list of services we provide for the monthly retainer. If you don't want that, then when these are necessary, we will bill hourly with advanced notification."
4. SEO costs extra. It's never part of the coding process. The whole SEO thing bugs me.  There are genuine, good people selling SEO services and there are people like, say Superpages, who tell small businesses they need to pay $17,000 a month (true story) to compete in Keller, Texas. Here is how I always answer the SEO questions: "SEO  is something I know about, but I'm not an expert. I can do what I can to optimize your site so SEO is easier as you manage content in the future. However, I can also recommend trusted SEO experts for the future. Also, do not expect that you will be number one on Google for the single word 'hardware'. Please keep that in mind."
5. Your website or social media or email or whatever is the only marketing your company needs. How about this: "Your online presence is part of an overall strategy. I'm not a business management consultant. My expertise lies with website and social media. I do not do public relations or traditional marketing. However, I have several companies I've vetted who I can recommend for that type of work."

Hopefully this is helpful to you if you are going after small business. If so, you will needs a dumpster full of patience and a savings account large enough to help you get established.

Data about Obama's helicopter breached via P2P? | Security – CNET News:

"What appears to be a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md., had a file-sharing program on one of their systems that also contained highly sensitive blueprints for Marine One," Boback told WPXI.

The idea behind Six Sigma is that every process of a business should be executed with as few errors as possible – the target Six Sigma aims for is 3.4 errors in every 1 million attempts. Now, lots of companies follow silly management philosophies. But Six Sigma takes on religious overtones at G.E. because of its followers fervent belief that it is a universal belief, enforced in every facet of the corporate empire. Even, at one point, according to a (maybe apocryphal) well-told anecdote to comedy writing. Former GE chief executive Jack Welch is said to have once ordered the counting of the number of laughs each episode of NBC's sitcoms.

Funny because it's true.

Have you ever noticed that on these custom projects, the single most common cause of overruns, failures, and general miserableness always boils down to, basically, "the (insert expletive here) customer didn't know what they wanted?"

I visited the customer last month to demo the conceptual mock-up demo. Before I could get through the demo, the customer said this wasn't what she wanted, even though I had numerous conversations with her on the specifics that I put in. It's primarily my fault for several reasons. This system was developed from the back-end rather than getting the customer to agree on all of the interface components. My customer is a very visual person and she really needed to see a complete mockup of the final product. I'm a conceptual person and I see conceptual material and easily extrapolate the full picture from the pieces. I have to remember that not everyone can do that, nor should I expect that.

Note to self: Always do the interface first and leave the rest for later.

So after this last trip, things are much better because I had the interface nearly done and she could visualize the workflow. It goes to show that it's easy to forget the basics when you are trying to make a project work and you're rushed. I think more time and money is used to make up for mistakes than actually doing things right to begin with.

Last month, Pentagon auditors urged the U.S. Army to start withholding millions of dollars in payments to Halliburton until the company justified its bills.

Various government agencies are investigating several aspects of Halliburton's work in Iraq, including allegations of kickbacks by Kuwaiti subcontractors and improper charges totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.

Halliburton never deserved the negative attacks it received. It's just a company like many others. It also sucks to have to prove yourself in a storm of negativity. However, the last thing you want to do is prove your critics right. This is an example of poor leadership. The press has been all over Halliburton since it won the Iraq contract. Instead of running things better and cleaner than the average company, sloppy business practices, poor management, and lazy accounting are going to energize the critics.

Whittman-Hart had a collection of excessively skilled consultants who knew training, documentation, usability, and Web technology like no others. They were actually reputed to get work done, unlike other companies at that time that would spend years on an IT project just to have it shut down when the client ran out of money. In 2000, Whittman-Hart merged with USWeb and the Mitchell Madison Group to form marchFIRST. At this point, marchFIRST had promised to be the ultimate consulting company. As they say down here, they were too big for their britches. In January 2001, marchFIRST was laying off people and closing offices and by March, Divine, Inc. had announced its intentions to buy what was left of marchFIRST.

Last year, Whittman-Hart was reborn as WHITTMANHART (see this article). The end result is that they seem to be growing and doing well. I don't know anybody in the reborn firm, but I wonder if it's the same as it was. I hope so. Everyone I knew at the original Whittman-Hart loved it and they produced excellent work. But I have to laugh at the new WHITTMANHART Web site. The site is sparse and the company history doesn't even mention marchFIRST by name.

I worked for another company called CARA that was smaller, but had the same quality reputation as Whittman-Hart. During the time I was there, CARA was purchased by ACS and then that division of ACS was purchased by TMP Worldwide, who owned The Monster Board. In the middle of all of this were politics and customer quality issues. I saw a lot of back-biting and distrust between people who once worked together.

Since last year, I have been in contact with the original founders of CARA, who reformed the company as TMP spun off its consulting business as the Hudson Highland Group. CARA is doing well and I wish them the best.

All of this makes me think of the consulting business and how it can become so distant from the goals of the founders. Most people, myself included, enjoy consulting because we are producers who love helping other companies with things they cannot do themselves. But when smaller consulting firms become part of behemoth global companies, I think consulting takes a back seat to milking clients for all they have. I've worked with those kinds of companies, too.

A lot of the Chicago tech industry is recorded in The May Report. I wish Dallas had a similar online rag, because I still receive it and read it. Nothing exposes business culture like the employees themselves.