Nice Work If You Can Get It: Developing Websites in Slovakia
At first glance, the homepage of the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava would appear to be the gateway to your average, run-of-the-mill website.
Yet appearances can be deceiving. For this website — for which the kid who mows your lawn on Saturdays or your nephew in Wichita might charge a hundred bucks or so – came with a price tag of over 25,000 euros (or $33,000), according to a report by Slovak daily SME.
The director of the gallery told SME that it was money well spent for the minimally designed site, though many a comment under the article disagreed with that assessment.
Of course, the Slovaks who are footing the bill for the site should be delighted that they got such a bargain. A couple of years ago, their neighbors to the south, Hungary, paid exponentially more for a presence on the worldwide web.
News of the World Website Now Linking to Offers on the Web
It’s been 24 days since Britain’s leading Sunday tabloid The News of the World shut down its print operations in the aftermath of a phone hacking scandal. Circulation for the final print edition as well as visits to the paper’s website rose exponentially after it was announced that Rupuert Murdoch and News Corp. were planning to pull the plug on the 168-year-old publication.
Three and a half weeks later, The News of World website is a very barren virtual landscape indeed. The home page to the “World’s Greatest Newspaper” shows an image containing a few of its top scoops and the words “Thank You & Goodbye.”
A click on the image sends the visitor to a site called Offers on the Web. A site which, according to its About Us section, reveals the following information:
OffersontheWeb are wholly owned and run by Aspen House Marketing Ltd.
Aspen are a family run fulfilment company who have been established since 1995.
When a National newspaper runs a special offer or a promotion, readers are often asked to write in or respond by telephone through a website or to a special address …
We are a full service fulfilment house which means we are designed to take orders by phone, post & web coupon and send out mass mailings, deal with returns, and keep everyone informed about what’s going on.
News of the World Still Very Much Alive … Online
The News of the World may have parted ways with traditional newsstands, but its website is doing quite well, thank you very much.
According to Alexa, viewership of NOTW’s website have increased by 328 percent in the past week.
Its domains — notw.co.uk, thenewsoftheworld.co.uk, newsoftheworld.com and newsoftheworld.co.uk — are still fully under the control of News International. None shall expire for some time: notw.co.uk on April 11, 2012, thenewswsoftheworld.co.uk on August 2, 2012, newsoftheworld.com on June 2, 2013 and newsoftheworld.co.uk on May 14, 2013, according to who.is.
NI’s online properties may change hands before these dates if reports about a potential rescue bid for The News of the World launched by a former Sunday Express editor are true.
Have Any Sites Ever Gone Out Of Business for Having Too Much Traffic?
Here is a question that popped into the minds of those of us at Chortler today: Can a website be too popular? That is, can too much traffic cause a site to go out of business?
Most smaller websites tend to use shared hosting which, of course, has the advantage of being inexpensive. However, what happens should the dream of most sites come true, ie, getting listed on the front page of Digg, Fark or Reddit, and the ad revenue from lower-end online ad companies can’t match the price of the charges brought on by additional traffic?
Naturally, one would think this would be an ideal situation to be in and that most sites would solve the problem. But we were wondering if there were any that hadn’t, and, if so, we would like to write about their plight.
If you know of any such websites or companies that fell victim to too much traffic, please write us the following address: webdude at chortler dot com.
Indebted Soccer Club’s Website Goes Offline
Portsmouth FC, a cash-strapped club in the English Premier League, recently had to suffer the embarrassment of having the plug pulled on its website because of an unpaid bill, according to a report in The Daily Telegraph.
Anyone logging in to the site on Wednesday morning would have read the message “Website Unavailable”. Service was eventually restored later in the day.
Portsmouth is currently at the bottom of the league standings.
