Tales of the BossLady is a collection of entries from a private journal I used to keep, detailing my frustrations in working for a woman who thought she had a boatload of geek cred. This all happened and was written several years ago, when I took a much less gracious view of people like her (as evidenced by my disdainful remarks below).
BossLady has a certain domain registered, and she uses it as the main Web site for our business. She used to have the domain “pointed” to a certain prefabricated Web site that was made by a company that makes sites for Realtors. Basically, she didn’t have to do any real work on the site, just occasionally log in and post that we had a new property listed, or something along those lines, and all the HTML wrote itself. Recently, BossLady started playing around with the site because it wasn’t satisfying her; she copied the HTML without really understanding a single line of it, and played around with making changes to it to suit her. At this time, she repointed the domain to her personal site rather than the prefab site, but the HTML was essentially the same.
(A note about “pointing”: We’re not talking about “redirecting” here. What “pointing” means, in this case, is that when you type in the Web address for our site, it loads another site into a frame, rather than simply redirecting the user to the other site. You will see “oursite.com” in the address bar, but you see the contents of “personalsite.com” in the browser window.)
Then I came along and completely redesigned the whole site. The domain was still pointed at her personal site, though, so that was where I had to upload the files.
When I asked her about the frameset, she was completely clueless. I wanted to know why the frameset was there and why we don’t just have hosting for this main domain, rather than having it “point” somewhere else; frames, generally speaking, are a bad thing in my opinion, and my opinion is borne out by most standards-espousing authorities. But BossLady pretty much had no idea what I was talking about. (She tried hard not to show it, of course; she babbled on for several minutes about “pointing.”) She registers domains rather willy-nilly — she’s told me that she has several — and then doesn’t do anything with them, she just “points” them at her personal site.
People like this don’t really belong on the Internet, do they? Why would you register a domain if you’re not going to make a Web site? Why would you register multiple domains when don’t know how to make a Web site?