The Care and Feeding of an Internet Site

Communication World, August, 2000 by Karen Fawcett

In which a paper-trained communicator turns to the Internet for fame and fortune, and from a land not her own. Will she succeed?

It would be ludicrous to say that in the developed world, there's anyone older than eight who has never heard the word "Internet." No one can listen to the radio, watch television, read a newspaper, much less ride a bus without hearing or seeing ads for this new medium. What the ads are selling or promoting is not always clear. Some are so obtuse that the older generation of marketing and advertising professionals ponders to whom these dot-com ads are specifically targeted.

Having spent the majority of my career in public relations and print journalism, I never imagined that I would become an online writer, a website owner, and to some "Francoholics," an online celebrity.

I kind of fell into it. When an old friend moved to France, his wife and he had the idea of creating a site about Paris. A group of expatriate journalists found it intriguing. We had a mission to convey our feelings about France and publish something other than the ordinary tourist guide.

We launched Bonjour Paris on AOL four years ago, thinking that the French would jump at advertising to a highly targeted travel-ready Francophile audience. How wrong we were. Each time we did an advertising presentation, the French would look at us as if we had two heads. Only now are they becoming Internet savvy, and they still have a way to go.

The backer of Bonjour Paris on AOL decided (wisely) that it was time to move on. He went to California and joined the fast track dot-com life, from which he has profited. To put it gently, Bonjour Paris was too specialized to be interesting and an immediate moneymaker.

But I was hooked. Between writing articles, monitoring our message boards, doing chats and enjoying the interactivity that quickly evolved, I took over the site in May 1998 and decided to take a quantum leap.

Help Is On the Way

In January 1999, with the help of www.iapps.com, Bonjour Paris migrated to the web as www.bparis.com. We are still a content provider to AOL and are now featured on CompuServe as Go: Paris.

None of this would have happened were it not for the president and CEO of iapps, Miles Fawcett. Choosing the right web development company is a challenge. I thought long and hard before making this a family affair. But, I finally decided that my son, born in the computer generation, should be my partner.

His company was ideal for Bonjour Paris, offering editing software that enables us to act fast when hot-off-the-wire news occurs. More than once, we've been the first English-language publication to print breaking news in France. For that matter, if a news event happens on a Saturday, the story may appear on www.bparis.com before appearing in a French newspaper. With the exception of one Paris publication, no papers have Sunday editions.

Iapps has a staff of 30 people and is headquartered in Washington, D.C. The company specializes in creating sites for nonprofits and foundations.

What makes iapps so valuable to Bonjour Paris is its Orgitecture[R], whose development tools are templates that allow the site to be manipulated without having to wait for a programmer or technician. One doesn't even need HTML, because it's built into the development language.

Another plus for us is that the site is not expensive to maintain. With only a few minutes of training, even the most computer illiterate (me) can change the screen, upload graphics and take on the technical side of updating the site. The BP staff has the "keys" to add articles, change placement, rotate articles and give the site a fresh and lively look. We do this a minimum of five times per week.

As a result of this versatility, we're able to be responsive to our readers. If a subject is "hot" on our discussion board, the editorial staff and contributors can write about it and have it placed on the site within hours. BP prides itself in being proactive and responsive. I personally receive up to 400 e-mails per day; our readers feel that Bonjour Paris is their site. I answer each e-mail as does the executive editor, the head of the "French department" and, we hope, our chat hosts, who volunteer their time and expertise.

Since its debut, www.bparis.com has branched out substantially. We no longer cover just Paris but all of France. Our articles run the gamut: cultural differences, living in France, food and wine, fashion, shopping, antiques, travel tips, destinations outside of Paris and more. We are the official English-language e-zine of Galeries Lafayette (France's top retail chain). Currently, we have an inventory of 1,300 articles and add a minimum of 10 new ones each week.

The discussion board is filled with questions and answers and is monitored each day. Sure, there are a few dumb posts, but the majority of them are insightful. In addition, we have identified some excellent writers from their posts on the message board. Each month, we run a contest asking people for their contributions on a certain topic. To be sure, nor all entries merit Pulitzer prizes. Nevertheless, they do establish a sense of community.