$320,000 Per Year
Here's the problem.
My fee for authoring a
website like the Sugar Loaf Guild (to make it worth my stopping what I am
already doing) would be $320,000 dollars per year with a five year contract
plus some other conditions being met.
Therefore charging
people anything at all for the truly drop in the bucket aspects of that
would just be misleading.
It is probably not very
obvious to people, what it takes to put together a Sugar Loaf Guild style
website, so I understand why the value might not be recognized.
Don't forget, this
website is purposely designed for simplicity and ease of use while hiding
the complex details of the technology at work behind it.
In fact the goal is for
a user to think nothing at all happened on the site; they just found what
they were looking for and maybe learned something new about Sugar Loaf.
The extreme technical
excellence of the website should not even enter their mind.
Except those who have
done their homework understand that sites coming even close to the Sugar
Loaf Guild are increasingly rare on the Internet, and that makes it even
harder to see how truly far ahead of the curve the Guild site is.
In fact the Guild is so
far in front of the curve that even taking a straight line direct run trying
to beat it will likely fail.
Truly post-tweetie-face.
The person most likely
to understand what I am talking about is Brad (Clay Boone's son), because I
spent some time with him one on one explaining the technology.
But even Brad only
glimpsed the smallest tip of the iceburg, enough to get him up and running
with his own site but actually not even the tip, just a cartographer's rough
drawn map implying the direction in which one might go to find the tip.
The full story would
more closely show how I am able to do such things as teach Google to provide
the world's best presentation of:
SUGAR LOAF IS SPECIAL
That,
my friends, was a quick lesson in semiotics but outside the scope of this
discussion.
So like I said, it
would take $320,000 per year in a five year contract (tax free) just in my
own pocket with some other very important conditions met.
For one I would need at
my disposal a roomful of programmers, because the last six months has taken
me off my bicycle too much and I put on weight.
I will not do that
again.
A roomful of
replacements would be needed to take over the coding because programmers
trained on the newer slower tools would need extra help to keep up with what
I can do on my own.
The other requirement
would be a massive promotional budget to help get the word out using old
timey standard print and other traditional advertising methods.
We have spent over
$15,000.00 in the last few months, and that is not nearly enough to show any
remarkable improvement over the interest I am generating online for free,
but it might be nice to inform some of the people who are still languishing
on the other side of the digital divide.
The final necessity is
that whatever project the website served would have to be culturally
significant and extremely so.
Which brings me to the
final reason I am doing all this for free.
The most important
requirement for me is cultural significance, it far outweighs the
considerations of time and money, but there is nothing in the world more
culturally significant than what is happening right now today in Sugar Loaf.
That means I am
obligated to provide the service at any cost to myself but free to everybody
else.
I know it can sometimes
be hard to spot the cultural significance of what is happening in Sugar Loaf
because of the number of shops that routinely come and go after buying into
marketing nonsense enticing them to follow corporate schemes specifically
designed to make them fail.
Such stuff as banners,
e-blasts, online networking, and standard advertising that mimics shopping
commons and big box stores but doesn't provide a shred of possibility of
beating them at their own game.
Or as Clay Boone has so
aptly described shops who follow that line, "... those folks who only bring
the brown trucks into town ignoring the fact a brown truck can just as
easily deliver direct."
Those marketing ideas
come from corporate stores which only wish they could compete with Sugar
Loaf and only hope to cut short a few startups by distracting them into
wasted effort on proven paths of failure.
Consider this.
Yesterday a first time
couple from New York City
came into the Endico studio.
They were taking a
random ride out in the country specifically to get away from the City, and
they just happened into Sugar Loaf, and just happened into the Endico
studio.
They were beside
themselves seeing such high quality art in a little out of the way place
decidedly not New York City—where
they had assumed all the great art to be.
In fact they soon
realized that not only was the work they were looking at as good as anything
in New York, it was actually better.
So Mary explained how
that happened to be, how it was because of her process, and how that process
is one which could not be supported by living anywhere else (especially in
New York City despite her work having been shown there on occasion and
recently used on the home page of the country's top watercolor show at the
National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, NYC), and how she enjoys an
international following with people coming from places as far away as
Ireland, Japan, Europe and South America once a year to "check in."
As an aside Mary is not
the only one in Sugar Loaf with such a following because of doing top level
work.
Further aside even a
local print publication purporting to specialize in regional arts has missed
this fact in the past, nor am I sure they get it yet.
Therefore since I am
the only one around with the understanding and specific skills set deep
enough to effectively put it all online, it is my absolute duty to do it,
and to do it for free.
I am an artist and have
absolutely no interest in becoming a "web designer."
The Sugar Loaf Guild
website and process is a profound resource helping make this the best place
in the world to build a solid business in the creative arts.
This website is only
one of the special supporting infrastructures like none other in the world
available only to businesses in Sugar Loaf.
More people are
becoming aware of that fact every day.
(see also:
Truth - Beauty - Art)