The Care and Feeding of an Internet Site.

In which a paper-trained communicator turns to the Internet for fame and fortune, and from a land not her own. Will she succeed?

It would be ludicrous to say that in the developed world, there's anyone older than eight who has never heard the word "Internet." No one can listen to the radio, watch television, read a newspaper, much less ride a bus without hearing or seeing ads for this new medium. What the ads are selling or promoting is not always clear. Some are so obtuse that the older generation of marketing and advertising professionals ponders to whom these dot-com ads are specifically targeted.

Having spent the majority of my career in public relations and print journalism, I never imagined that I would become an online writer, a website owner, and to some "Francoholics," an online celebrity.

I kind of fell into it. When an old friend moved to France, his wife and he had the idea of creating a site about Paris. A group of expatriate journalists found it intriguing. We had a mission to convey our feelings about France and publish something other than the ordinary tourist guide.

We launched Bonjour Paris on AOL four years ago, thinking that the French would jump at advertising to a highly targeted travel-ready Francophile audience. How wrong we were. Each time we did an advertising presentation, the French would look at us as if we had two heads. Only now are they becoming Internet savvy, and they still have a way to go.

The backer of Bonjour Paris on AOL decided (wisely) that it was time to move on. He went to California and joined the fast track dot-com life, from which he has profited. To put it gently, Bonjour Paris was too specialized to be interesting and an immediate moneymaker.

But I was hooked. Between writing articles, monitoring our message boards, doing chats and enjoying the interactivity that quickly evolved, I took over the site in May 1998 and decided to take a quantum leap.

Help Is On the Way

In January 1999, with the help of www.iapps.com, Bonjour Paris migrated to the web as www.bparis.com. We are still a content provider to AOL and are now featured on CompuServe as Go: Paris.

None of this would have happened were it not for the president and CEO of iapps, Miles Fawcett. Choosing the right web development company is a challenge. I thought long and hard before making this a family affair. But, I finally decided that my son, born in the computer generation, should be my partner.

His company was ideal for Bonjour Paris, offering editing software that enables us to act fast when hot-off-the-wire news occurs. More than once, we've been the first English-language publication to print breaking news in France. For that matter, if a news event happens on a Saturday, the story may appear on www.bparis.com before appearing in a French newspaper. With the exception of one Paris publication, no papers have Sunday editions.

Iapps has a staff of 30 people and is headquartered in Washington, D.C. The company specializes in creating sites for nonprofits and foundations.

What makes iapps so valuable to Bonjour Paris is its Orgitecture[R], whose development tools are templates that allow the site to be manipulated without having to wait for a programmer or technician. One doesn't even need HTML, because it's built into the development language.

Another plus for us is that the site is not expensive to maintain. With only a few minutes of training, even the most computer illiterate (me) can change the screen, upload graphics and take on the technical side of updating the site. The BP staff has the "keys" to add articles, change placement, rotate articles and give the site a fresh and lively look. We do this a minimum of five times per week.

As a result of this versatility, we're able to be responsive to our readers. If a subject is "hot" on our discussion board, the editorial staff and contributors can write about it and have it placed on the site within hours. BP prides itself in being proactive and responsive. I personally receive up to 400 e-mails per day; our readers feel that Bonjour Paris is their site. I answer each e-mail as does the executive editor, the head of the "French department" and, we hope, our chat hosts, who volunteer their time and expertise.

Since its debut, www.bparis.com has branched out substantially. We no longer cover just Paris but all of France. Our articles run the gamut: cultural differences, living in France, food and wine, fashion, shopping, antiques, travel tips, destinations outside of Paris and more. We are the official English-language e-zine of Galeries Lafayette (France's top retail chain). Currently, we have an inventory of 1,300 articles and add a minimum of 10 new ones each week.

The discussion board is filled with questions and answers and is monitored each day. Sure, there are a few dumb posts, but the majority of them are insightful. In addition, we have identified some excellent writers from their posts on the message board. Each month, we run a contest asking people for their contributions on a certain topic. To be sure, nor all entries merit Pulitzer prizes. Nevertheless, they do establish a sense of community.

It Becomes More Than a Family Affair

I want to stress "community." For a specialized site such as www.bparis.com, one has to offer something more than e-commerce to keep people returning to the site. Not everyone is going to France each year (although a large percentage of our readers do). One of www.bparis.com's attractions is our varied chats, which are staffed by trained volunteer hosts.

Another indication of our readers' loyalty came after the December 1999 storm that wreaked havoc in much of France. Our readers contributed nearly U.S. $7,000 in a BP-sponsored fundraising drive to restore the garden of the Balzac Museum in Paris.

Because we have weekly French lessons on the site, we have many French chats including those for beginners. Some chats are more advanced, and we are constantly adding chats to the schedule.

The English-language chats are generally theme chats. If you're interested in French movies, we have chats dedicated to them. Ditto for French literature and music. Other chats are informational: guests (who must register in advance to access the chat room) ask travel-related questions including where to stay or ear and what to see. Regardless of the subject matter, most of the chats seem to include food and wine.

Other subjects include walking tours of Paris, Jewish Paris, the French Tennis Open, "Le Foot" (soccer) and anything that seems relevant to us. For example, BP has chats on working in France, international relations, the Euro, buying property in France, etc.

Each week, we have two cooking chats, and we have once-a-month wine chats with our wine writer. We sponsor special "guest" chats where someone, such as food critic and author Patricia Wells, Jim Bitterman of CNN, Christopher Dickey (Paris bureau chief of Newsweek) and even Leslie ("Gigi") Caron, answers guests' questions.

Coordinating the chats takes enormous time and energy, but we feel it's worth it. We have a chat-room manager, a scheduler, a chat host recruiter and a senior coordinator whose dedication to Bonjour Paris makes order out of what could be chaos in cyberspace.

E-mails are a challenge for the BP management team. There are days (especially those when I receive 400 e-mails) when I ask myself why anyone would sign up for this. No matter what time of the day or night, I have never signed on to find an empty mailbox.

What Will the Future Bring?

I would like to report that I'm getting rich.

But that would be an out and out lie. One must think of niche-oriented web sites as a long-term investment. That's why so many web sites have come and gone. It's not enough to create a site. It must be maintained and constantly updated, and that is an ongoing commitment.

Unless there are big bucks behind it, or it is the cyber version of a print publication, the site needs to count on its community. To keep them loyal, you must have excellent content (BP's is 100 percent originally written for the site) and features that make people want to bookmark it.

Loyalty is a huge factor among our readers as well as our volunteers. At the most recent Bonjour Paris get-together (the fifth) in New York City, 56 people attended. People came from as far as Chicago and Florida. A group in Chicago meets regularly, and they have become real friends instead of just cyber ones. When I was in San Francisco last May, 20 people gathered in a French restaurant for lunch.

Bonjour Paris tries to reach out. Some of our regulars have suffered family losses and have found solace in our chat rooms or e-mailing one another. Others have had critical illnesses and have developed a support system within the confines of www.bparis.com.

When any BP "member" comes to France, if I can, I try to meet him or her. I've been amazed by how really nice our members are. If nothing else, they share my love of France -- despite the frustrations, which we don't gloss over. We're right there reporting when there's a transportation or museum strike.

There are definitely downsides to owning a web sire, as well as pluses. For a journalist, it can be frustrating because people rarely read more than 800-word-long articles. For a CEO, working with people whom you've never met can and does present an enormous challenge. Many times I wish I could have a real, rather than virtual, staff meeting, to iron out problems or concerns.

When it comes to a profit-and-loss statement, one has to be patient. With so many web sites competing for advertising dollars, a site must achieve traffic and visibility.

At a certain point, a web site has to be modified. That costs money, and the decision whether or not to bite the bullet is a tough call. Already, www.bparis.com needs enhancements that will require development money. I've decided to go for it, because the more features our users find, the more likely they will be to return and to refer others to the site.

If money were no object, Bonjour Paris would have a full-time marketing and development person in both France and the U.S. At this point, we have a savvy intern who is doing it because her "real" job lacks fulfillment and she's considering changing industries. Because she is well paid, she doesn't want to jump into the Internet pond without knowing what she's getting into.

Another key is cross-promotion. We're-fortunate enough to be featured on the Paris page of the French Government Tourist Office's site. Mote than 80 sites (that we know of) link to us. Each week, another 100 people or so subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

Even though Bonjour Paris is targeted to Americans traveling to France, more and more French users are gravitating to our site. It's an effective way for people to understand one another's cultural differences as well as hone their language skills, whether French or English.

When Bonjour Paris first launched, I consulted French sociologist Gerard Demuth, who assured me that the Internet would never have the same popularity in France as it does in the U.S. During a recent conversation, he did a 180degree flip-flop. He assured me that the French and Western Europeans would use the Internet more than Americans for content and as a vehicle for e-commerce. I had to laugh, considering our earlier conversation. All I can say is that I hope and believe that www.bparis.com will be well positioned when the money comes rolling in. My feeling is that we are.

In the meantime, we enjoy sharing "our" France and being pioneers in an exciting interactive medium.

Karen Fawcett is a U.S. freelance writer and cyberspace pioneer currently living in Paris.