Site Ownership

You don't need a new website. You need to make your current website more effective! How can you do that? There is no single answer -- websites are part of a larger system, and you need to consider many different aspects to make your site effective. We've been making websites since the start of the web, and know what makes them work -- as well as not work. Take what we have learned to make your site better!

Sustainable business, open source, innovation, stakeholder engagement, AI, community development

🕑May 11, 2025 🖋John Locke 💬1

Sustainable Business and AI

Call me a radical, but I don't think a handful of billionaires controlling the majority of a country's wealth is a good thing. I don't think the ultra-wealthy need more benefits at the expense of everyone else.

Sustainable/Open Business

DALL·E 2024-03-17 17.31.45 - Visualize Moore's Law in an abstract concept, showing a curve exponentially rising from left to right on a graph. The background is filled with various bulbs and a circuit board

🕑Aug 24, 2024 🖋John Locke 💬4

The rising costs of site ownership

How much do you spend on your website? I'm not asking how much it cost you to create/build -- I mean day to day, what does it cost to own and maintain your site?

And what happens if you stop paying that?

Sustainable/Open Business

Own Your IT Systems

The cloud is all the rage these days, for good reason. And yet we keep having incidents that remind us there are big problems with putting everything in the cloud. Such as the recent celebrity nude photo scandals, ongoing privacy breach revelations, big companies getting hacked, mass credit card number thefts, and more.

As an open source advocate and user, I keep finding myself wondering why so many people trust software services so blindly, rarely stopping to look for alternatives. If it starts with "free service" people can't wait to start putting all sorts of crazy things there.

That's been a fantastically successful strategy for a bunch of online software as a service companies: get people hooked on a free service, and either upsell them to a paid account or sell them to advertisers. But is this good for you, as a technology dependent business or an individual who cares at all about privacy? Not necessarily.

What are the alternatives?

If you dig deeper, past the advertising and the hype of Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) companies, you'll find a really amazing array of completely free, open source alternatives you can run and own yourself. At Freelock, we support our business almost entirely on open source -- not only is our key offering, Drupal, an open source platform, but most of the tools we use for business are as well.

So you want a web site...

The first thing to ask is, why? Web sites have lots of reasons for existence, but for business purposes, we tend to see some combination of four motivations:

To act as an online brochure
To attract new customers from search engines
To sell things online
To build a community of people who might someday buy something from you

A web site can do any or all of these, but generally the further down this list you get, the more the site is going to cost in terms of development cost and your time.

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