Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP are user friendly. They are just really selective when choosing friends.

From Daniel Grey's first website in 1996 until about 2002, internet businesses he consulted enjoyed a relatively easy time getting discovered. It did not matter whether the company was all bricks-and-mortar, clicks-and-mortar, or purely online.

The buzz among venture capitalists swamped by a tide of business plans until March 2000 (when the dot-com bubble burst) was always about `how are you going to market this site idea?` or `how are you going to drive traffic?` which are fair questions. People who have been down the road with VCs know this sort of question means they did not easily find the answer in the executive summary and is usually a prelude to a `no` answer about funding their hobby, er, start-up. And that is because very few replies were convincing. Which is primarily because everybody knew that nobody knew exactly what mechanisms would spark metastatic web growth. The truth was that any number of sites had grown up in somebody's garage, and somehow caught fire and got noticed by millions. At that time Yahoo was the traffic driver. If Yahoo reviewers liked your site and placed you high on a Page One search result, the world beat a path to your door, and you retired a millionaire in a few short years. Common mythology.

By 2002 Google had ascended, and it was getting difficult to compete for that very exclusive real estate called Page One. Internet users were increasing, and Google searchers were increasing right alongside, but which sites made it to top rank started to elude understanding. (See White Paper) People started to realize that the Wild West days of `if you post it, they will come` were at an end. Many people realized planning and promotion would be required beyond the traditional methods. The expected growth curves of their companies would be taking a new turn. Shortly it would come to pass that it would be almost more important to impress `robots` than it would be to impress human users of their websites. Experts in that practice coined the term SEO, or search engine optimization, to feed the robots more effectively. Actually, it mostly just formed the basis of a new business model, a new service to sell to non-technical executives who desperately needed advertising performance.

Interestingly, Grey had been doing that all along as a matter of best practices without paying much attention to it. When it became clear that his sites were immediately doing better at web business as soon as a newly minted version was released, with no other promotion, Grey realized that simple site development is no longer what the business community needed. He knew site promotion is what is needed. The corollary is that site infrastructure is what governs the upper limits of eventual success for that promotion. The job called for a technical person who knew marketing.

Aside: Apparently, as businesspeople, you have only a few paths available to you in managing your online presence:

• In-house marketing folks who need to call in web expertise;
• Hire outside marketing consultants whose sales force are not particularly tech-savvy (they fake it, you sense it, but rather than get sucked into a drama of buzzwords and blather, you all quietly co-agree to gloss over that important set of facts and make a decision on how well you like them);
• In-house IT with great skills at local operating system and internal network management but as the `resident techies` they are recruited by the suits to conduct web production which proves to be a time consuming challenge far beyond expectations;
• Hire supposedly tech-savvy outside individuals at a certain comfortable pricepoint and later find it is a bit difficult to manage them since they generally do not consider your web updates to be their final career destination of choice (and they later bail inexplicably without notice), or instructions got garbled in translation to their native language.

Those few descriptions cover more than 95% of the cases we have encountered.

Most typically our clients will already have a first or second generation site in this slightly more mature internet market. Invariably, these iterations of web presence would be dated and stale, incomplete and non-competitive. It is typical that there exists the equivalent of destructive nonsense `content plaque` inside the guts of the site pages that are outside the view of the business owner or executive (about 2% of our clients have the proven they can and will `view source` of their own pages to see what is happening in the background). Often the components or hosting of a site were selected on a basis of price and that usually meant ease of developers' rapid profitable development, not richness of function or appropriateness for web promotions.

And so the primary business of GreyRx became recasting the entire marketing of companies online, starting with an upgrade to existing sites, which nearly always included a migration to superior hosting and a visual facelift while assuring that the internal page structure was technically sound for robotic digestion. Critically important these days, and this fraction of the work goes by the buzzword moniker of `on-page SEO` (search engine optimization).