A: Congratulations, Robin, you are one millionth person to ask me that question. Smile for cameras, brush streamers and confetti from your hair and listen closely, because I'm about to answer for millionth time what has become one of most important and often-asked questions of digital business age.

Before I answer, however, let's flash back to very first time I was asked this question. It was circa 1998, during toddler years of Internet, just after Al Gore laid claim to having given birth to concept a few short years before.

I was giving a speech on impact of Internet on small business at an association luncheon in Montgomery, Alabama. My motto then was: Feed me and I will speak. I have same motto today, but I now expect dessert to be included in exchange for sharing of my vast wisdom.

In 1998, which was decades ago in Internet years, future of electronic commerce or "ecommerce" as it's come to be known, was anybody's guess, but even most negative futurists agreed that all signs indicated that a large portion of future business revenues would be derived from online transactions, or from offline transactions that were result of online marketing efforts.

So, Robin, should your business have a website, even if your business is small and sells products or services that you don't think can be sold online? My answer in 1998 is same as my answer today: Yes, if you have a business, you should have a website. Period. No question. Without a doubt. Thank you, drive through.

Now serving customer number one million and one…

Also, don't be so quick to dismiss your product as one that can't be sold online. Nowadays there is very little that can not be sold over Internet. More than 20 million shoppers are now online, purchasing everything from books to computers to cars to real estate to jet airplanes to natural gas to you name it. If you can imagine it, someone will figure out how to sell it online.

We do believe in healthy sense of paranoia. Not paranoia, which makes us feverishly try to distinguish ourselves from our competitors, but paranoia, which makes us feel iron hand of competition and gives us stimulus to constantly develop and improve.

It is difficult to survive in media, where everybody claims he is best and where somebody is indeed better than you. It prompted us idea of carrying out a kind of analysis of products offered on Web, similar to Esvon Classifieds. In no shape of form, we are going to judge or criticize web applications, listed below.

The search engine has brought us to following software products:

http://www.interactivetools.com/products/realtymanager/

The first impression is that Realty Manager is quite a professional solution. Scanning pages, and studying this product more carefully we learn that script is realized using Perl and text files and its functionality is really worth being paid for. PHP/MySQL and Perl ext files solutions don’t have any distinction in kind when it comes to their functionality. But PHP code is more consistent and modular and it runs faster. The advantage of PHP is also ubiquity of web server platforms supporting PHP and MySQL. Fact: Over 25% of internet's web sites are running PHP and nearly 63% of internet's web sites are running Apache web server, so give it a thought.

Those, who have encountered problem of a script running slowly, probably know, that faster grows your database of users, slower your script works. In end, it just breaks. (it happens because it is based on text files). Thus, such solution can be used only when web site you are going to build is simple.

Moreover, with their license you are not allowed to edit scripts; it can be a disaster for you when you want to customize your solution.

The web site itself is very informative; it seems to give overall description of application. In general, this software script is enough if your web portal needs don’t go far. Yet, it is quite simple and friendly but has much fewer functions than Esvon Classfieds does.

http://www.mojoscripts.com/products/mojoestate/index.shtml

The web site layout and product presentation resemble a bit previous one. The application is Perl/MySQL solution, which however costs less. The price, as we have already indicated, is not a No.1 factor for making decision. But $199 seems nevertheless too little for a powerful script with “tons of features”.

MojoEstate includes a lot of features: internal mailbox system, saved search system, multimedia file gallery, advanced admin and member panels, powerful search facility, detailed who-is-online display, auto-generated thumbnails for uploaded images, etc.

We won’t enumerate all product features, described at web site. When a visitor reads content, it is often enough for him to know what is described. But developers and more competent users know that it’s just a surface. When it comes to product in action, they might face with problem of handling extreme amounts of traffic database queries, which can bring your server down. Some customers just may skip this peculiarity.

The product is also presented in a well-structured manner and seems to be a good cost-effective solution for budget-minded people.

http://www.smartisoft.com/products.php?product=phpBazar

We see that script manufacturers have preferred PHP code in this case. As we have already mentioned, we also consider it to be better for such kind of applications in view of its open source technology and fact that it is firmly implanted in LAMP family (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) of open source web development platform technologies.