Seeing that a new idea is added to ingenious ideas carried out by local entrepreneurs every passing day really makes me happy. PageBoss that I will explain is one of the most effective local initiatives.

If you are an end user, you are the client asking for a raspberry cake in a bakery; you are not interested in cake cream, flour type, how paste is prepared or how raspberry sauce is added to cake. You sit down, lean back and just say “raspberry cake” to the waiter waiting an answer from you. Is the chief comfortable as you in that bakery when saying “raspberry cake”? Undoubtedly, many technical details not interested by end user are very essential for producers. Like the bakery example, if you are an end user in the web, many features that I will mention will not make any sense to you and it is possible for you to feel bored; however, web developers will like PageBoss.

Developing a website is an incredibly amazing process especially at first. You feel very confused and lit a cigarette while hundreds of questions are in your mind such as “Did google recognize my website?” “If it is so, how did?” “Who did give backlink to my website?” “Are these backlinks enough or should I buy some more?” “Do they add my website to DMOZ if I apply or do they decline by considering me as an amateur?” “Is google the only search engine? What about those more royalist than the king? Did other search engines recognize my website?” “Should I generate a sitemap? Some says I should!” “Should I pay 50 USD to that company for registering my website to 3 million search engines, 8 million indexes, 24 million IRC servers and footers of 67 million facebook user pages?” etc.

I can hear you saying that “How so? Is it not enough when you finish designing website on DreamWeaver?” Well, if it was done so quickly, we would open a new website everyday! The actual work is not to open a website, to turn our website which is submitted to wavy and stormy Internet ocean as a boat into a huge aircraft carrier (do not laugh it, this is just my dream!). Actually, developing web is like growth of a child: Your foolish belief as the most problems occur in the beginning disappears day by day. As your website grows, problems also increase.

Worse still, once you begin to develop website, you will have to deal with current websites and to work on new projects. In first days you opened your website, you check PR value of your website over Google Toolbar everyday and make search in google as “site:sitename.com” in order to find out how much brother Larry Page loves you. He is so light-hearted that as if he is Paris Hilton! Indeed, if you ask anything to Paris so much, she at least replies as “get out of my way!” Brother Larry, as you know, is a moody, manic depressive and panic attack personality; as if he was expelled from the society when he was a child or girls always made fun of him etc. Finally, he found a buddy named Sergey Brin who is a schizo-affective disorder patient. As we all know, they became “bandits” day by day. All web developers became nervous like a headmistress with menopause. Google preyed on all developers’ mind by its instabilities. PageRank changes randomly like IMKB (Istanbul Stock Exchange Market) rates. Listing results depend on PR values. You spend long nights in front of you computer for a web project and when you wake up one morning, you see that single hits of your website decreased to 750 from 5000. What happened? Larry got bored and called his brother Sergey to say; “I didn’t like this website Sergey!” According to what? According to whom? There is no explanation! What about your efforts? May the God rest his soul!

The situation may seem funny for you; however it is exactly as I said above. While the case is stressful enough, imagine that you manage numerous numbers of websites. The excitements you have when you first open your website disappear in a short time since you focus on new projects and you barely follow previous works.

PageBoss which is managed by Onur Atahan is a successful initiative aiming to answer all technical questions of a web developer about his/her website. Though it is not at a level meeting all requirements, it successfully keeps going so far.

PageBoss has a global start-up feature with its unique and high quality design, ease of use and multilingual options. I felt sorry when I saw that there were some people trying to compare PageBoss with quite unsuccessful zeytech. Zeytech was mentioning only letters; when you asked, it was saying “A” or “Q”. Actually, those were only letters known by Zeytech  However just after you write your website, PageBoss gives you a completed sentence in a few minutes. Critical information such as PageRank value, Google index number, Yahoo indexes and Alexa rank of your website, whether your website is added to DMOZ and Technorati or not are given at once by its stylish AJAX design. A browser capture image of your website is also given together with its whois information. Non-existence of “Future PageRank” also makes PageBoss serious.

However, since browser capture images are taken by a free service (SnapCasa), unfortunately “the charisma of boss” loses its influence. There are two things to do in this point actually; firstly, screenshots can be taken by directly PageBoss or WebShotPro can be used which is a successful service in my opinion. I’m sure website developers will give “the charisma of boss” back.

I saw that many of my websites were not registered to DMOZ (I already know that). From my point of view, in case that a website is not registered to DMOZ, a funny message can be displayed such as “Your website has not been registered to DMOZ yet since DMOZ editors are busy with registering their friends’ websites.” (Is that a lie? ) “Since your website is in Turkish, your website is reviewed by Turkish editors. Thus, your registration will be done in 2047.” or “Due to Dmoz Influenza, Dmoz registrations can not be queried, we are sorry for this situation.” etc.

Are these enough? As we mentioned above, a web developer is responsible for many websites. Of course it is cruelty to expect from a developer to make inquiries for tens of websites at the same time on a system inquiring from external sources. Let’s think about things that should be done for permanent solutions.

Firstly, the system is very successful with its simple usage structure. There are two options for PageBoss from now on such as being more complex or stopping to be developed; a common solution can be offered to users by having both simple and advanced features.

While we can use the current system without signing up to the website, we may define our websites to PageBoss by signing up to the system. In such a case, I can add nearly 50 websites to PageBoss in more than one hour (even in minutes by ‘bulk adding’ option). Then, I can inquiry any website whenever I sign in to PageBoss (pay attention to user loyalty here, it is not hard to imagine how mcuh user loyalty is created by such method). Even by a small script to be written, depending on choices of course, all websites registered to the system are checked at least once a day and information e-mails can be sent to users if any change occurs in their status. How can I stay unconcerned with an e-mail saying “There are changes in the status of your website “sitename.com”, please click here to review them”?!

At this point, maybe the most important data that should be displayed in PageBoss have to be Google listings in maximum 10 keywords determined by user, in my opinion. Because many web developers spend so much time to check keyword rankings of their websites.

As I know how to do all these features, I am also aware of their technical expenses. Thus, these extra features can be offered by premium memberships as an income model for small fees; I can pay such fees, speaking for myself. However, either fee of extra features should be kept on a reasonable level or advertisement displaying should be chosen for offering the service for free; no need to say that the website will draw attraction in both cases.

We will continue to follow PageBoss also from now on and inform you about new progresses; I send my kindest regards to Onur Atahan and wish him luck in this excellent project.