Things to consider before starting your own field of dreams:

1. Is your idea unique?  Are there currently others doing what you want to do already out there on the Internet.  Remember just because you are using the Internet as your medium doesn’t mean you aren’t going to have to do the same market research as you would if you were opening a physical business location.  If the market (the Internet) is already saturated with other online stores just like yours and you have no unique features to set yourself out from the masses already in existence on the web, who is going to buy your products?  Why?
2. Are you prepared to wait awhile for the site to make you money?  If you build it they may come… but it may take several months of marketing before they do.  Can you afford to wait – three months, six months, a year?
3. Are you prepared to invest in marketing to promote your site and thereby attract more pontential customers to it?  There are a variety of marketing techniques used on the web, but the bulk of them fall into the category of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).   If you build it and do not spend the time / money to make sure your site is search engine friendly, no one may ever find your site but you.  Are you willing to spend money to advertise your site?
4. Build your site in stages.  Especially in the area of ecommerce, start slow.   Are there marketplace websites already in existence on the web that you can use to sell your wares?(ie Etsy.com or eBay.com)  Start a store on one of those first.   Then as interest in your wares grows and you start making regular sales, build your own site to sell your wares.   Use a service like PayPal or Google Checkout as your method of ecommerce payments until your sales grow large enough and regular enough to sustain regular payments to a merchant ecommerce service.

If your idea has survived consideration No 1, you are able to wait as No 2 suggests, you are willing to spend as No 3 recommends, then take it slow and plan your site.  Rome was not built in a day, neither will your Internet success.  Do your site in stages; using sites like eBay and Etsy can significantly increase your exposure on the Internet and at an affordable cost.  Don’t get caught up on the hype of the all-in-one ecommerce solutions that some sites offer – why spend $300/month when as little as $16/month is all you initially require. 

Visibility on the Internet is a challenge.   Make sure your site is search engine friendly.  Google ‘tag cloud’, submit your site pages to one of the tag cloud generators in your Googled results.  Verify that the keywords that show up in that tag cloud are the ones you want to identify your site, if they aren’t you will want go back and edit your site text to focus your content for better search results.   Once you have your site ready, the next step is increasing your site exposure on the Internet.   Find directories and indexes on the web that list sites like yours for free or for a fee.  Get your site listed on these, focus on the ones that do not require reciprocal links first.  Search engines such as Google count the number of links going to your site without reciprocal links back and use that number to help determine your overall site rank.  

Last but not least use a SEO analyser like Google Analytics to monitor your site.  The amount of information you can get about your site and your site visitors is awesome (and it is free!!!).   You can find out what pages interested your visitors most, how long they spent on your site, what search words brought them to your site.

For many of us, we purchased a wireless router from one of the many office supply, and home electronic stores.  We plugged it in, connected it to our high-speed modem and that was it.  Voila we had our convenience wireless connection.  If this sounds familiar, you may not be WEP’d.

WEP stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy.  WEP is a security protocol for wireless local area networks. It is designed to provide the same level of security as that of a wired local area networks.

So what does that all mean?  Let me start by explaining wired networks.  Wired networks are inherently safer due to the fact that one must connect to the network via a network cable.  With a good firewall in place to protect you from an intruder off the Internet, a wired network provides you with a relatively safe work and play zone.  Generally outsiders cannot access your network without you knowing about it. 

A wireless network using the standard default settings that most home and small office versions of wireless routers come configured with do not provide you that same level of security.  It is very much like locking the back and front doors of your home but leaving your side door wide open for the more inquisitive intruder to find and let themselves in. 

Let me explain further.  The standard wireless router comes configured as an unsecured device.  While you can conveniently connect your wireless laptops and other devices to it, so can anyone within a range of up to 46 m (150 feet) indoors and 92 m (300 feet) outdoors.  How well do you know your neighbours or that car that keeps parking across the street?  It sounds a little extreme, and for most of you it probably will be, but do you really want to risk being part of the small percentage that is a victim of identity theft every year?  Especially since configuring your wireless network to use WEP isn’t difficult, and gives you that added level of security. 

WEP secures your wireless network by requiring those using your network to have to input a “key” to connect to it.  There are two encryption levels that you can choose from to use for your key – 64bit or 128bit.  When in doubt use the higher level of encryption.  If you login to your router (please check the manual that came with your router for the instructions on how to login), you can usually find the WEP setup in a “security” menu under your wireless settings – again check your manual for instructions on how to set up the WEP for your particular router.

When you configure your WEP, you will note that there are four keys – you only need to configure one of them.  Remember which key you chose, so that you can configure your wireless devices to use the same key.  Copy the key you created and store that copy someplace safe.  You will need to configure every wireless device that you add to your network with that key in order for it to access your network.

While you are in configuring you WEP, if it is the first time you have ever accessed you router, you should change your router’s password.  The default passwords are well known, so again for your security you should really change it.

As a computer techie, I’ve been installing and servicing more and more wireless networks.  Each time I set up a new router, I am astounded by the number of unsecured wireless routers I see when I configure the client’s computers to connect to their router.  Generally there is at least one unsecured network that anyone could attach to easily.  What is increasingly disturbing is the number of times I have discovered this is settings where data privacy should have been paramount to the network; for example a multi-doctor clinic I recently did an install in.  Each doctor had their own computer equipment -two networks at that clinic were running unsecured wireless networks!