e frequently get questions of a general nature that we thought might be best addressed in this manner. These aren't all the questions we have received, but they are the most common ones. Some are general information questions about the Internet itself, and some are general questions about your opportunity to advertise on HV/Net. We will probably be adding to these questions over time as we discover more things that can be answered here.

We are absolutely sure you will not get every answer you may need, but this is a starting place. Once you start to understand what HV/Net is and how it can assist you, feel completely free to contact us with any specific questions you may have. You can most quickly contact us via email at:

info@hvnet.com

The Questions, click on question for answer:

I already have a web site, why advertise on HV/Net?

The axiom "Build It And They Will Come" isn't true for web sites. The Internet has been compared to a giant library where all the books have been taken off the shelf and thrown in a pile on the floor. It's all there, but finding the specific thing you are looking for is impossible.

Internet index sites, like Google and MSN Search, help people to navigate the Internet, but they are not all that helpful in zeroing in on something extremely specific. You have probably experienced putting something into one of these search engines only to have tens of thousands of pages qualify for the query.

Yahoo takes a different approach. They have staff that looks at web pages submitted for inclusion in their "directory" and determine from some mysterious criteria if the page qualifies for inclusion. Yahoo hierarchically sorts submissions onto specific pages, frequently not where you have submitted the page and frequently making no logical sense. Even if you pay for consideration, an option on Yahoo, you are not guaranteed either acceptance nor placement.

Internet sites like HV/Net fill in the gap between you and the big search engines. Regional sites act as concentrators of Internet traffic and aggregate viewers based upon interest and geography. If a viewer is interested in the region HV/Net covers, the Hudson River Valley, chances are that no matter what they enter into a search engine HV/Net will qualify for inclusion in the query, and usually at or near the top of the pile.

HV/Net "concentrates" people looking for information on the Hudson River Valley into a channeled environment. In fact, 90% of all viewers that come to HV/Net never see our Front Page, they come into HV/Net onto a specific page lower down in our structure that has qualified in their Internet search engine query.

The result is that the majority of viewers that come to HV/Net aren't "grazers", people just poking around. Viewers that come to HV/Net area actually looking for information on things in the Hudson River Valley. They are actively and with self motivation searching for information on places and businesses in the Hudson River Valley. They are motivated and self directing.

When you spend advertising dollars would you rather spend your hard earned budget on scatter shot print mechanisms or on getting your advertising in front of people actually looking for you?

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How does HV/Net help my business?

It's really not very subtle at all. HV/Net gets your business and your advertising in front of the most likely set of people interested in finding you and your advertising. The demographics of the Internet are that people online are more educated, more financially secure and more sophisticated than average. They are savvy consumers making use of the Internet as a tool in their decision making process of where to spend their money.

For the Travel Industry, the majority of all travel decisions are now made online. Those hospitality businesses wanting the demographic of the people that make use of the Internet must reach out across all channels available to them to get themselves in front of this audience. Don't believe that your investment in a web site solves your problem of how to find these people. That is very far from reality.

For the Consumer Industry, people are flocking to the internet to do their research on what to purchase and where to go as well as to make use of the new simple tools to actually purchase things online. If you don't believe it, check out what your suppliers are doing online. They already know that they must put their products online for consumers to see and evaluate. They have already absorbed the concepts and are working ever harder to out flank the competition.

Answer this question: "How do potential travelers or consumers find me?" If the Internet isn't a component of that answer, you are heading into trouble. But just having a web site isn't the answer either. If the consumer doesn't already know about you they simply will not be able to find you if your total effort is a web site. You have to get the word out on the web site just as you have to get the word out on your brick and mortar store.

That is precisely how HV/Net helps your business. HV/Net is a vehicle, a very potent vehicle, to get the word out on your business and your web site. People that are making use of the Internet will go to your web site if what you sell is what they are looking for and if they are able to find your web site. In 2003 1.7 million people used HV/Net to find businesses in the Hudson Valley. HV/Net concentrates viewers interested in businesses doing business in the Hudson Valley. And HV/Net is the only one out there doing it.

Statistics show that people making use of the Internet for their research are more likely to do business with a business they find on the Internet than not. Additionally, all things being equal, these people are more likely to do business with an enterprise that has a web site they can go to than not. Your job is to make sure you are seen, and then if you have a web site to activate the hyper-links so your potential customers can link to it. HV/Net is a very important channel to help you capture these people and get them into your business.

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What is a hit on a web site?

Different people use the term "hit" differently, so you must be extremely careful. If you are being told that you get 100 hits a day on your web site, you need to know what that means to know how to interpret the success of your investment in it and your advertising.

As in most things technical, the "terms" are critical. So we will explain as simply as we can for you to understand the meanings of things. A "hit" is any request sent to the Internet Web Server hosting your web site necessary to deliver your page(s). If you read between the words, the term "hit" can be extremely misleading if you are counting on it to determine traffic.

For example, if your individual web page is nothing more than text, then to deliver the page it takes one request to the web server to deliver your page. This is a true count of the number of times your web page was delivered as each time it is delivered a single "hit" is made on the server.

If your individual web page is text with a single graphic element, then to deliver the page it takes two requests to the web server to deliver your page, one for the HTML document and one for the graphic element. Similarly if your page has two graphics, then it is three hits on the web server to deliver the page. And so on.

By now you can probably see how "hits" is a very bad way to count things, other than bandwidth. HV/Net has literally millions of hits on the web server a week to deliver the pages. But on HV/Net, the minimum number of "hits" necessary to deliver a single page is 35, the very minimum. Most pages are substantially higher in hit requirements.

What you really want to know are two other very different numbers: "pages delivered" and "unique viewers". For marketing purposes, these are the only two numbers that matter. "Pages delivered" is the literal count of HTML pages sent out by your web server in response to requests from viewers. As said before, a page can contain many "hits", but the cumulative effect of all those hits is a single web page is delivered to the viewer.

"Unique viewers" is a count of the different people sessions hosted by your web site. This one is just a bit more complicated. A "unique viewer" is an instance of a person on your web site, no matter how many pages they may look at on the visit. A viewer may look at one page or one hundred pages, but it is a single "unique viewer".

If that person goes away from your web site, and then comes back tomorrow, they are then a new "unique viewer". To think of it in print terms, there are subscribers and then there are readers. Subscribers is always a lower number than readers. If you subscribe to a magazine, the publisher knows you don't pick up the magazine once, read it from cover to cover and then throw it away. They know you keep it, pick it up over a sequence of time, and each time you pick it up is an opportunity for you to see the advertising placed into the magazine. And other people in your household do the same.

Basically, the same holds true for the Internet. The big exception is that we cannot count the "pass along" factor. If you print out the page, we have no way of tracking the repeat views. All we can count is how many times different unique visits are made to the site.

Determining what is a "unique visit" is a little technical and can be accomplished in a couple of different ways. The most accurate method is by having the web server place a bit of information on the viewers computer so the web server can recognize the viewer each time they request something from the web server. This is called a "cookie", and is highly accurate. Except that more and more people have become afraid of cookies and later version web browsers allow them to turn off the ability of the server to place a cookie on the viewers computer.

The second method is to analyze what are known as "web logs" on the server. As each request is made from a viewer, the server logs the request as it is delivered. Every single action the server takes in responding to requests from viewers is recorded into the web log. In addition, other pieces of information can be recorded, such as date, time, and your unique identification number on the Internet, your IP number. It is then possible to run programs against the web log and sort out how many pages were requested from a specific IP number on specific dates within specific amounts of time. The industry average time for elapses between requests to maintain a viewer session is 20 minutes. In other words, so long as you change pages on a web site at least every 20 minutes you are maintaining a single "unique viewer" session. If 20 minutes elapses, the session elapses. This method is less precise than cookies, but then again, it doesn't require that cookies have been enabled on the viewers computer.

The first method, although potentially highly accurate, is dependant upon the viewer. The second, although less accurate, is totally independent of all external restrictions. The second method actually will probably under count your viewers, but is potentially a more reliable number.

HV/Net uses the second method.

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What's a view and what does it mean?

A "view" is a unique instance of an HTML document being delivered to a web browser.

What is an HTML document? Simply put, a web page. Whenever HV/Net delivers a web page, no matter how large or small, to a web browser, a viewer, it counts as a "view". When you look at your statistics in HV/Net, you are seeing "views" of the web page(s) on which you are found. This is both good and bad for you and your business, mostly good.

What is good about it is that the viewer has the opportunity to find your business whenever the page(s) on which you can be found are presented to them. This is the opportunity for you to reach out and grab the motivated consumer and get them into your business.

What is bad about it is that if you don't care, your listing probably will not actually be seen on any page of businesses where other businesses really do care as their actions have pushed your business down the page and your Business Listing isn't really all that attractive when compared to Enhanced Business Listings.

That doesn't mean the consumer won't find you, just that it is less likely that they will take action based upon having found you when compared to businesses in the same presentation that are actively reaching out to them. HV/Net presents all businesses that we can find to be as complete a source of information as possible. We then leave it up to the individual businesses to want new customers and to make use of the tools HV/Net provides to reach out to them.

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How does HV/Net count things?

A slightly complex subject, so we will break it down into the different areas for you to understand.

There are two methods HV/Net uses to count things, passive and active. Passive counting is used for static presentation pages stored in their entirety on the web server. Examples of these pages would be our Feature Articles, geographically and thematically categorized pages of Business Listings, navigation pages and so on. As these pages are delivered there is embedded on each page a small piece of programming code that makes a call to the server to deliver a specific graphic image, as the image is delivered the download of the page is incremented.

Active counting is used whenever a page is delivered to a viewer that doesn't actually exist on the web server. For instance, if you use the search engine on HV/Net and something is delivered, that page doesn't actually exist anywhere, it is created programmatically on the fly in response to the query. When you look into the Calendar, the returning page is actually created by programming in response to your request. When you view the Interactive Map, the same thing happens. HV/Net makes use of this interactive creation of web pages in many ways. Whenever a request to the programming is made to create one of these pages then counters are incremented keeping track of it.

Active counting is also made use of for all "click" activity on the site. Whenever you click on something like a customer's web page, or their email, or on a banner or stamp ad, what you are actually doing is clicking on a call to some programming on our web server to deliver something back to your browser. In very few instances are you clicking on something that is actually a hyper-link directly to another object. We do this so we can count each instance of each click and keep track of it for our customers. This way we can precisely tell you how many people clicked on your web link, your e-mail referral link, your banner ad, your discount coupon and so on.

In addition, at the beginning of each month HV/Net runs programming that rectifies both the active and passive counting mechanisms against the detail of our web logs. Both the active and passive counting mechanisms have a tendency to undercount actual activity, so we want to be as accurate as possible. Consequently we run this programming against the web logs which are the most accurate source of all activity on our web sites. The programming rectifies the counts and posts the results into our data tables so you can rely on the counts presented in your statistics presentation.

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I've heard Internet advertising doesn't work, true?

Well, it all depends. It depends on who you are, who you are trying to reach and where you are selecting to advertise. As a general rule online advertising isn't important to a pizza parlor for instance. Unless...

It also depends on what is meant by "Internet advertising". Just having a web page is the most frequently used example of online advertising, and this really doesn't work too well. If you open a store and put a sign on your back wall in the dark, it will probably be a waste of your advertising money to have done so. If you put your sign out on the front of your business where people can see it, people you know are your most likely customers, it is probably a pretty effective use of your advertising money.

If you are a deli in Hillsdale and you purchase a full page ad in the Los Angeles Times, probably a pretty poor judgment call on making effective use of your advertising budget. Putting an ad in your local paper, probably a much better judgment call on making effective use of your advertising budget.

The same thing holds true on the Internet. If you are a four star restaurant in Poughkeepsie, buying online banner advertising in the Napa Valley Tourism web site isn't going to do very much for your business. Purchasing online banner advertising in the Albany Online presentation will probably generate about as much traffic as the Napa Valley site. Purchasing advertising on a site where your potential customers are going to be found is likely a rather more effective strategy?

Your job as a business person is to make use of all advertising venues that will effectively bring business to you. The most important criteria in deciding where to advertise is if the venue has large numbers of likely customers. For that restaurant in Poughkeepsie, the Poughkeepsie oriented web sites are potentially a great advertising space.

However, to be found on the Poughkeepsie site, potentials customers have to know there is a place called Poughkeepsie and that there is a site that deals with it. As you narrow your geographic specificity the chances of being found become less and less as the specificity requires knowledge on the part of the viewer. People in Poughkeepsie may be aware there is a site dealing with Poughkeepsie, but few others will. And besides, if you aren't from the area, where is Poughkeepsie anyway and why would I look there?

That's where HV/Net comes into the picture. The Hudson River Valley is a very recognizable region, a place that people all over the world are aware of. When surveyed, most people had heard of the Hudson Valley, even if they had no idea of what it was or where it was. Like Pennsylvania Dutch Country, it is a recognizable entity. HV/Net attracts a very large audience of people looking for information about the Hudson Valley. Our viewers range from people planning a visit, people thinking about a visit, consumers looking for products, consumers looking for shops and stores and on and on. Advertising within that framework is potentially an extremely effective tactic. They are there, provably there, searching, investigating, reading advertising, accepting coupons and making use of the interactivity available to them.

The question in this instance is not "Is advertising on the Internet effective?", it is rather "Are you making effective use of advertising on the Internet?".

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Why advertise on the Internet?

Simple! The demographics and the behavior of consumers.

The demographics of the Internet are that the average viewer is more educated, more financially stable, more sophisticated and more likely to be self motivated than the average person. The average Internet viewer is also slightly older than the average person. This means that your advertising is in front of your best potential customer. They are families or older people looking to travel or purchase goods. They have money and can afford both the time and expense to own a computer and use it effectively. They understand technology and have integrated it into their lives. Most of them have attended college and have been exposed to things beyond their immediate sphere.

They are your best potential customers.

They are also a pretty savvy group. They use the Internet in making decisions specifically because it gives them the opportunity to preview information, goods and places that interest them. The travel industry is being swept by the technology. All things being equal, hospitality businesses that provide appropriate information online are patronized more than those that don't.

Think about it. If you had the opportunity to view the pleasing rooms and public areas of one place and didn't for another, which would you more likely patronize? Don't be argumentative now! Hospitality businesses that provide appropriate online presentations and interactivity get more business than those that don't. If you had the choice of finding availability for one Hotel online but couldn't on another, would you likely go ahead and book a reservation with the first?

All of this is advertising. Static images on paper is no longer the extent of your advertising options. The Internet is effectively just a big advertising opportunity for you. Everything you can do on it, all the interaction and presentations, is advertising. Your choice of what to do to get customers is no longer restricted to the over priced static print world. Print advertising is still important, but put your web site address in your advertising and see what happens!

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What is "niche" marketing and how does it apply to me?

Not a totally easy question to answer, but once understood, revolutionary.

In some ways just about all advertising can be considered niche advertising. Wherever you place advertising you are going to reach a specific segment of the population. So putting an ad in your local newspaper is targeting the niche that is defined by the circulation area of the newspaper.

But that is far too broad a definition. Real niche marketing requires that you define your audience segmentation, determine how best to reach them and effectively provide them with goods and services that will satisfy them. Everyone knows the saying that "20 percent of buyers consume 80 percent of product volume," you deal with that every day. The real trick is identifying ahead of time just who that 20 percent consists of and getting more of them than your competition.

In it's simplest form, HV/Net helps you instantly identify your niche. For instance, if you are a B&B in Putnam County your advertising is simply not going to be found along with furniture stores in Greene County. Our viewers direct themselves through the filter of our navigation to your most important advertising opportunity in HV/Net, your Business Listing. Virtually every single person that would wind up on our presentation of B&Bs in Putnam County are actually looking for information on B&Bs in Putnam County. Compared with our 1.7 million viewers, that may be a rather small number, but if you are a B&B in Putnam County, it is an extremely important group of people. They are your customers. The real question is do you want them as customers enough to do something about it.

Additionally, HV/Net provides you with other mechanisms to reach the audience niches that are your best and most likely customers. If you are a ski shop and we have articles and guides on skiing in the Hudson Valley, do you think people interested in antiquing are likely to be on that article or guide? Probably not. People interested in skiing are going to be on that article. Is it valuable for you to be there for them to find? You decide.

If for whatever reason you are able to determine that people interested in Korean cuisine are great customers for your business, guess what, you can target pages on HV/Net for Korean restaurants! HV/Net's segmentation allows you to niche yourself into a vast array of niche audiences. Our biggest niche is HV/Net itself, people interested in the Hudson Valley rather than Mount Ranier.

In niche marketing you identify who are your most likely customers, where they can be found, what interests them and then put yourself and your advertising there where it will be most effective. You need to know what motivates them and what expectations are.

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Why don't I get as many "views" as HV/Net claims its traffic is?

HV/Net quotes statistics for all of its venues combined. This is how we come up with 1.7 million viewers in 2003. Individual pages will always have dramatically fewer viewers. Within a category segmentation, such as "motels" different geographic presentations will have very different numbers of viewers.

When you look at your own statistics from your Personalized Advertiser Menu you are seeing the hard counts of actual views of the pages and clicks on your various interactive features. If you are interested, you can request comparative figures for similar businesses in other locations of the Valley. This can give you comparative information for your understanding.

The critical concept of participating in HV/Net is that we are a concentrator for people looking up information on the Hudson Valley. If they are seeking information on visiting the Great Estates, then naturally they are going to need a place to stay. While on the same Internet site they can get both kinds of information quickly and easily. More importantly, you can position yourself within all manner of different presentations making it more likely that viewers will find you.

The traffic onto the pages where your Business Listings can be found is your default positioning on HV/Net. It is the very least you can do and positioning we provide to all businesses in the Hudson Valley. Placement on each of those pages is up to you. Association with thematic presentations is available to you. Bannering across the various venues of HV/Net is at your discretion.

We make sure that everyone coming to the pages of Business Listings where you can be found are the most highly segmented people looking specifically for businesses like yours. Reaching those people effectively and reaching out to HV/Net much larger audience are options you can implement.

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How can I determine the effectiveness of my web site?

There is only one measurement: "do you get customers coming to your business spending money as a result of your web site." That's it, nothing more.

Well, there is actually one other measurement that you should be very interested in, that is your ROI (Return On Investment) on your web site. To track this you must discover how many times people visit your web site in order to get a new or return customer from your web site. I know of a hotel that has a 4 to 1 ratio, for every four visits to their web site they get one reservation.

Your statistics will most likely not be that good. But it is a number that you simply must track. If you don't track the source of your business how will you know where to spend your money to increase your business? We can say that if you activate your hyper-link from HV/Net to your web site traffic to your web site will increase. But if you never get a single paying customer as a result of your web site, why spend the money?

What if your statistics were as good as that hotel, but you didn't know it? Would getting more people onto your web site increase your business? Is that a hard question to answer? Yet if you don't track your performance, you have no way of knowing.

And then, if your web site isn't performing well, it may not be that the Internet is an inefficient way to market your business. It may be the design and user friendliness of your web site. Like all other advertising, the answer isn't all that simple. All you can do is test, track and change. You do need, however, to make sure that the Internet is an important component of your marketing budget mix. It's importance is growing constantly. Print and broadcast will never disappear, but the Internet is not so slowly usurping their hegemony.

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How can I determine the effectiveness of HV/Net in advertising my business?

That's a simple one to answer, "Did HV/Net bring you business?"

How you answer that question is where the real problem lies. Unless you track your source of customers neither you nor us can answer the question for you. There are mechanisms that HV/Net offers that can assist you in tracking sources, but unless you actively participate on your end, the answer will always elude you.

For example, if you participate in HV/Net's Discount Coupon Program you will have hard evidence of people walking into your store with something they have to hand you to get the discount. But if you don't instruct your sales staff to keep those and count them, you will never know.

You can also look at your statistics available from your Personalized Advertiser Menu. Assuming you have activated a hyper-link to your web site, what is the ration between views and clicks? It should be fairly high if our claim to attracting a qualified viewer to your advertising is correct. Bet it will be high.

But no matter what, we cannot determine effectiveness of your advertising. We are here to partner with you to find the right mix of options for you to use on HV/Net to effectively use the opportunity. If we cannot find that effective mix, we don't deserve your business.

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Can HV/Net help me get more people to my web site?

Absolutely and definitely. But only if you activate the hyper-link from HV/Net to your web site. HV/Net does not link to any commercial enterprise in the absence of that enterprise purchasing the hyper-link enhancement. We have had reports of traffic to web sites doubling and tripling as a result of the hyper-link from HV/Net. If I were you I wouldn't count on anything near that level of traffic.

We can effectively direct traffic to your web site, we guarantee it. We are so confident, in fact, that we have even provided you a way to subscribe to the service without you having to make any assumptions or believe us at all. You can pay just for the actual clicks from HV/Net to you! You pay only for actual performance, not for claims or speculation! Will any other advertising venue offer you anything close to that?

Subscribe to our click rate and only pay for actual clicks. Set a upper limit so your bill cannot go higher than you are willing to pay. If you are tracking the performance of your web site and working to maximize it, you won't want a limit. Or you can hedge your bets and subscribe for a flat rate for the year. The choice is completely yours. We believe in our positioning and know our performance so well we can offer you this unique opportunity to prove us wrong.

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How can HV/Net help me get more business if I don't have a web site?

From the beginning, we have conceived of HV/Net as being all the Internet presence required for some businesses. Small mom & pop stores really don't need a web site, but being able to be found in a context appropriate for the business on the Internet is potentially the most effective way to advertise on the Internet.

In addition, having an appropriate presentation of your business on HV/Net, and attaching your business presentation to all appropriate locations within HV/Net, can easily eliminate the need for a web site for a whole lot of businesses. Having a web site and being found on the Internet are two very different things. "Build A Web Site And They Will Come" is a complete lie that you should run away from as fast as you can. Having a completely ineffective web site is nearly as bad as having no web site at all. Having a presence where a large aggregation of customers are gathering is more important than having a web site in many instances.

Through our many programs, HV/Net can offer you effective tools to get your advertising in front of Internet users without you ever having to go to the time or expense of a web site. But if you do have a web site, making sure it is linked to from HV/Net can mean the difference between making money from the web site or not. Making use of the interactive tools available to you through HV/Net's Partner Program and your participation in our other programs can seamlessly empower your web site with interactivity and enhanced viewer experience.

If you don't have a web site but want to market your business on the Internet, consider making full use of HV/Net and all we have to offer. They are completely non-dependent upon your having a web site. We can bring you customers just from your participation.

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How do HV/Net's rates compate to other sites?

Like all other service businesses, HV/Net publishes our "List Price" on our Rate Sheet. For us, that is the starting point.

We will work with you to find the right mix of programs and price to make your use of HV/Net cost effective. When you start combining programs, flat rate discounts start being applied. We are constantly creating short term special programs to attract new customers. You can find the current line up on our Special Pricing Rate Sheet.

Additionally, HV/Net is always creating new industry specific programs and pricing to attract groups of similar businesses, enabling us to spread the development and maintenance costs across a group of businesses rather than forcing a single business to sustain the full costs. Examples of this are our B&B/Country Inn and Real Estate Agency programs. They are tailored to these business segments bringing real value and enhanced interactivity.

You also need to compare HV/Net's rates against the various print opportunities you have that are similar in nature. For as little as $100 you can attract viewers from HV/Net to your web site, that is an annual charge. That comes to about 27¢ a day. For as little as $250 you can add more text and a graphic to your Business Listing. That comes to about 68¢ a day. How much does an ad cost in your local daily paper? How much does a business card sized ad cost in a tourism magazine? How much does participation in one of your Tourism Promotion Agency ads cost? How much does it cost to have an ad in the brochure put together for your county?

Compare us and we think you will see the opportunity we offer. It's truly extraordinary.

Philosophically HV/Net is always going to be a bit more expensive that some other sites. People have asked us about our rates in comparison to generalized national sites, for instance in the B&B industry. To understand the pricing difference all you need do is understand the difference between the sites.

National sites are extremely general in nature, they make their money from getting large numbers of businesses to buy into their systems. On that scale, they play in the tens of thousands of businesses as possible customers. HV/Net is a completely regional site. We rely on large numbers of businesses to buy into our systems as well. However, the scale of the numbers is extremely different. In most instances we are dealing in the dozens or at most hundreds of similar businesses, not in the tens of thousands.

HV/Net also brings a very different audience to you. Large aggregate sites bring people to the site and allow them to graze through their listings, counting on a certain percentage of performance from the grazing process. HV/Net isn't a grazing site when it comes to finding specific businesses. We provide targeted highly motivated potential customers that are specifically targeting and drawing your information to themselves because they want that information. Pound for pound they are much more likely to arrange to do business with you than on the larger scale sites.

And, HV/Net provides you with a suite of tools allowing you to directly interact with these potential customers. We allow you to collect information and make offers to these people through our programs. We magnify the possibility of forming a business relationship with these potential customers.

HV/Net is a very potent way to reach your potential customers and draw them into your place of business. We bring the very best to you, and encourage you to optimize your outreach to them.

And finally, don't believe any of the above. Call us liars and thieves. Enhance your presence through Click Rates and only pay us for actual performance. If we can't do what we say, you won't pay anything! What is there to loose except customers to your competition?

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Why doesn't HV/Net design Client Web Pages?

HV/Net fundamentally believes in partnering wherever possible. HV/Net also believes in not dissipating it's talents or resources into business ventures best undertaken by others. Combine these two statements and you have why we do not take on web design services for hire.

Designing commercial web pages is a full time occupation being persued by dozens and dozens of companies and individuals in the Hudson Valley. They spend time and money gaining experience and expertise in the specific capabilities necessary for that task. Creating commercial web pages requires a specific set of tools and talents to be successful. HV/Net would rather encourage these businesses and be a source of work than be yet another source of competition.

When businesses we encounter in the Valley express the need for web pages, we happily provide a list of who we consider to be the best local sources for the talend and experience. We do this knowing that the suite of tools we provide are fully integrateable into the customers web presence enabling us to partner both with the business and the web designer to maximize the capabilities of the businesses web use.

We have also been in business enough to have lived through the early days where enterprises set up web sites calling them regional presentations but in reality only showing those businesses they have charged money to for creating the web pages for the business. Those type of sites still exist. From our point of view they are not guides to anything other than the client list of the company creating the pages. They are little more than self promotion.

HV/Net didn't want to be in that position. We want to represent the entire Hudson Valley, not just our design clients. We determined that the best way to avoid it was not to be in the business. We determined it best to avoid the possibility of a conflict of interest completely and allow others to take on the task of web page creation for commercial clients.

Believe us, running an enterprise like HV/Net is more than a full time job for several people and is more than sufficiently distracting all on its own. So as a company we want to work with businesses in an advisory capacity assisting them in the process of discovering the appropriate uses of the Internet, pointing them to the resources that can best deliver the product necessary. In the process, we know each business will better understand how HV/Net can assist and become a valued tool in the end.

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Where is my business found & how do I know?

Discovering the answer to this question explains the underlying power of being found on HV/Net.

In creating HV/Net we established a multi-tiered structure enabling the segregation of all of the pieces of informatino we gather. For business listings, these tiers are:

1. Geographic Location
2. Zip Code
3. General Type of business, e.g. accommodation, shopping, etc.
4. Specific Type of business, e.g. B&B, Motel, Women's Clothing, Gourmet Foods, etc.

In creating this structure, we have allowed ourselves the flexibility of combining these pieces of information and sorting each business apporpriately. Although the number of actual businesses being listed by HV/Net at any one time varies, it generally hovers between 18,000 and 22,000. We constantly cull our listings by actually calling each business and removing ones no longer there. We additionally are constantly adding to our listings by accepting submissions, working from brochures and surfing the web.

As a business is entered into our databases, the four fundamental types of information are carefully added, along with many other pieces of information about each business. Then twice a month, usually around the 1st and 15th, we completely regenerate all of our pages of business listings across all of our presentations. The programming takes into account the four structured pieces of information and sorts everything in the process.

So, if you are a Motel in Ulster County, after the regeneration of our pages you will be found on the following pages at a minimum:

• Ulster County - Accommodations - Motels
• Middle Hudson Valley - Accommodations - Motels
• West Bank of River - Accommodations - Motels

There are instances where an individual business has more than a single aspect to it. For instance, an enterprise that offers B&B accommodations and has an antique shop. Or a Country Inn that welcomes patrons to it's restaurant. In instances like these, there will be more inclusions of the business listing. Taking the B&B with an antique shop as the example that is located in Dutchess County:

• Dutchess County - Accommodations - B&B
• Middle Hudson Valley - Accommodations - B&B
• East Bank of River - Accommodations - B&B
• Dutchess County - Arts - Antiques
• Middle Hudson Valley - Arts - Antiques
• East Bank of River - Arts - Antiques
• Dutchess County - Shopping - Antiques
• Middle Hudson Valley - Shopping - Antiques
• East Bank of River - Shopping - Antiques

Added to this is our consumer shopping presentation:

dutchess.countyshopping.com - For The Home - Antiques

Were the business located in New Paltz, one of our Town Sites, it would also receive these inclusions

newpaltz.hvnet.com - Accommodations - B&B
newpaltz.hvnet.com - Shopping - Antiques

Different businesses located in different places in the Hudson Valley qualify for automatic inclusion in different presentations, based completely on where they are located. In essence, all of this is driven by their zip code. The zip code identifies the county and any town site or regional presentation they automatically qualify into.

Very soon, the zip code will take on an additional importance as we establish our "Radius" presentations. This process will allow our viewers to say something like: "show me all the antiques stores within 20 miles of Newburgh", and up will pop all the antique shops within that radius. The calculation is made based upon the geo-code for every zip code in the Hudson Valley. This query system will be built immediately into our Partner Program allowing anyone participating to show the same type of information.

For instance, a B&B will be able to show all the restaurants in a 10 mile radius, or all the historic museums, or all the hiking trails and so on. A very powerful addition to HV/Net's suite of presentation tools.

Additionally, HV/Net currently has a search function allowing viewers to search for businesses based upon key words. A viewer can look for B&Bs in Orange County. Or look for a motel with a jacuzzi in Ulster County.

So, back to the question. Every business is automatically sorted onto "static" pages of information based upon zip code, general type of business and specific type of business. These pages are static in that they live out on the server as real files and are all dynamically indexed by the various search engines and directories on the Internet.

When you log into your Personalized Advertiser Menu, these are the pages that are listed for you to see. By logging into your Personalized Advertiser Menu you can get the list of every one of the static pages you are included on and you can interact with each of them and make changes to each one, independently.

From your Personalized Advertiser Menu you can also look at your Activity Statistics. What this shows is the view actividy of each one of the static pages you are found on. You can see how many times they have been downloaded and consequently how many times a viewer has been able to find your business. Additionally, you will be presented with a count of how many times your Business Listing has qualified into HV/Net Search Engine and how many times your business has qualified into any partner call into the system.

Now, as to the power this means. Because the viewer has to navigate our presentations by geography, then by category and only then by type, they have indicated that they are very interested in this sub group of businesses, that is what they are actually looking for. They have self-directed themselves through multiple layers of navigation to get to you. They have reached the specific "niche" in which they are looking for real information, the "niche" in which you can be found.

Or they have searched dynamically through HV/Net's Search Engine or through a partners call because they are looking for information about a specific type of business with specific ammenities or in a very specific location.

They are looking for you!

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Why does HV/Net look the way it does, not "high end" design?

Back in 1996 when HV/Net first started, the possibilities of design on the Internet were still pretty limited. At that time the primary option for doing graphic design was by making use of what are called "plug ins". These required the viewer to install the plug in, reboot the computer and then come back somehow to the web site.

Not a very efficient way to display information. So we determined that we would implement no features on any of our venues that required a plug in for our primary displays. That created major limitations on the display of information and graphic images.

In essence, it limited the presentation to individual graphic images embedded into plain text.

Over the years things have become much more friendly in the world of the Internet for more complex presentations. But as with all things, there are down sides to everything. The more complex the presentation the longer it takes to download.

So, we further developed our design criteria along the following guidelines:

• For our primary presentation of information, we will implement nothing that requires a plug in.
• As much of the internet is still accessed via dial in low bandwith connections, we will attempt to not do anything that will slow down the loading of our pages too much. We do implement things that take time to download, but we attempt to make use of small java applets and other things to make the download as fast as possible.
• For the forseeable future, we will always stay about two versions of the primary browser technology behind.

We do these three things to make sure that our presentations are as accessible to the most people and viewers as possible. In designing our interfaces and presentations, we try very hard to keep in mind our large viewership that is accessing our presentations on older browsers and slower connections.

Consequently, this eliminates a lot of presentation possibilities. We do implement some higher end presentation technologies but only in very specific ways on very specific presentations. For example, we have 360° panoramas that either require a pretty fast connection or patience for the download. But these are very specialized and not in the normal pathway of information gathering.

The other factor in the implementation of design on HV/Net is that we react very proactively to our viewers and what they say to us. We have experimented with other color combinations and presentation specifications and have always been asked to leave the primary presentation the way it is. People have said to us over and over that it is easier to read and see.

Design seems to get in the way of easy reading. So we keep our presentation pretty plain and straightforward. This seems to satisfy the most viewers. As tastes change and the majority of viewers gain access to high bandwidth connections, we look forward to changing our presentations to newer more graphically rich specifications. Until that time, we work hard to keep our viewers as happy with our presentations as we can.

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