A: Online companies with a physical presence, or nexus, in a state are required to collect and report taxes on sales made to customers living within that same state. For example, if your online business is based in California, you must collect and report sales tax derived from fellow Californians making purchases on your site.

Internet sales taxation has always been a hot topic for those of us who make our living selling goods and services online. One of more controversial points is that no one, including our own government, has a clue how to implement a fair and logical Internet taxation process.

There are more than 7,500 state and local entities collecting sales taxes in United States, each with its own system of rates and rules. A solution that satisfies them all may be a long time coming, indeed.

Online taxation has been a thorny topic for years. Even before Amazon.com sold its first book or Priceline.com booked its first flight, foreword-thinking tax collectors knew Internet might someday generate millions of dollars in taxable goods and services. The problem then--and now--is how states would get their fair share of pie.

In 1998, Congress did what it usually does when faced with a potentially explosive issue like Internet tax collection--it decided to put off making a decision. Congress enacted a three- year moratorium on collection of taxes to give an appointed advisory board time to come up with an acceptable solution.

That moratorium ended last year, and, thus far, no one has come up with an efficient way for online businesses to easily collect and submit sales tax.

A: When you say, pay someone else to do work for you, Wesley, I am going to assume that you are talking about hiring a professional Web site designer to do work and not your next-door neighbor's teenage son. If my assumption is correct, then read on. If not, go ahead and surf on over to Dilbert.com. You will get no good out of advice I'm about to give, so you might as well consult Dilbert for your hot business tips.

Should you build and maintain your business Web site yourself or pay someone to do it for you? Let me answer your question with a couple of my own. Number one: is building and maintaining Web sites key focus of your business? Number two: could your time be better spent doing more important things like, oh I don't know, say running your business? If your answers were no and yes, respectively, then you have no business building and maintain a Web site.

Remember this: every minute you spend on tasks that are not related to key focus of your business is time spent to detriment of your business. In other words, every minute you spend focusing on tasks that do not contribute to growth of your business and thereby increase your bottom line is time wasted.

If you want to be a web designer, be a web designer. However, if key focus of your business is building widgets, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that your time would be better spent building widgets, not Web sites.

Case in point: I once had a very wealthy dentist ask if I could teach him how to maintain his Web site so he wouldn't have to pay me to do it. Now my teeth had helped put this guy's kids through college, but that didn't seem to matter. At that moment he was more concerned about having to pay for changes to his Web site than my personal oral hygiene. Sure, I said, I'll be glad to teach you how to update your Web site, just as soon as you teach me how to clean my own teeth so I don't have to pay you to do it. He got point. And he charged me enough for cleaning to keep his site updated for months. Smart man.