Current Projects
-Finishing a an SEO site.
-Finishing a design for a Taekwondo site.
-Closed a deal, design, SEO, domain and hosting for a real estate related website.
-Closed a deal, design, domain and hosting for a food business.
-Closed a deal, hosting and 2 add-on domains.

In the works:
-A mortgage company who is waiting for the requested logins from the domain registration company for nameserver changes. Once changed, another new web hosting client.
-A web designer just thinking of a domain name. Once he decides on what domain to get, he is another new hosting and domain client.

The rest are all proposal.

They are all coming in and I am not even hard selling yet. Just passive selling and they come. Thank you Lord.

Now what is the problem?

Too much work. 😀 But is a good problem. But I also know the mistakes of Action Online, my first web company. I was spreading myself too thin, doing everything, to the point it cannot be done. A lot of promises made to clients that were not achievable. But I know what do to now, since I already learned from those mistakes. This is one reason why I am only doing passive selling since I know what my limits are and has to streamline my whole business process first before I go for all out selling and this streamlining is in progress.

I was assigned a project at work involving a shopping cart program.

I think the first shopping cart I made was in 1999, for HMR Group, I also did one for Kenstar Travel, for Linux Consultants Asia, for Expocraft, for Asian Property Listing and others. Newer ones under my company like PowerHomes and Funtastic were mainly Mike’s work using my designs. My first ones I made were in Miva/dBaseIII,(without using Miva Merchant, it was really from scratch Miva shopping carts.) the later ones were all PHP/MySQL. I’ve been using payment gateways since… hmmm 2001 I think.

I started out when there were no popular ready-made shopping carts like Zen Cart, OS Commerce, Agora Cart, Interchange Cart. So I basically made everything from scratch.

During those days I was a hardcore HTML tables guy, so imagine shopping carts where the product catalog, has programming loops, they needed to count the products on every line and make some <TR> tags when needed. That really sucked, especially when the client says to change the layout or something.

Now in the CSS age, being a CSS advocate ever since I embraced the styles, I never wanted to do tables again. And my shopping cart programs in tables would be sooooo much easier with floating <div>s. Each product will just wrap down the next line. I was excited to work on this project.

And now the company wants me to use x-cart. Which is nothing but a shopping cart program they bought some time ago. There is not much design freedom and code is sooooooooo long. I guess that is how it is in any program when you try to make it 100% customizable to anything. The code is full of a lot of things not needed by the client anyway. Now I am forced to understand the programming of some other guy who made x-cart. And what I need is just a simple bare bone shopping cart with only the requirements needed by the client. Making code short and simple and easy to maintain.

I wanted to make a common easy to maintain shopping cart easily customizable for everyone to use here at work, but for some reason the company wants me to use x-cart, maybe because they are selling the product as well and showing the value of x-cart on the x-cart website.

But custom programs are even more expensive, and I wanted to make one customized for the company and I was not charging a cent. I was just happy and excited working on a new cart that will maximize the use of CSS. Well all of that happiness is going down the drain.

I will have to deal with x-cart. I hate reading someone else’s programming code. It is too time consuming. It is sometimes faster to make one yourself than trying to figure out other people’s work. But I am charging it to experience, I guess for me to feel better I will just consider everything a lesson in x-cart. So if ever I have a client that needs a shopping cart and I feel lazy to make one and I do not care about the appearance, I will give x-cart and since I have used it already, using it again should be easier this time. But on second thought, maybe not, x-cart is not free to use. Agora Cart, Zen Cart, OS Commerce, Interchange Cart are free, if ever they are paid, they are bundled with any hosting with the latest cPanel. If you need a good, reliable webhost that has cPanel, go to YDS Web Solution.

I have been so busy lately, doing all these sites. Currently for my business in the Philippines. If ever sales is made outside the Philippines, this is an online transaction and the purchase goes straight to the Philippines.

But I cannot hold office, have a business bank account, and interact directly here. But once I got my business up and running here, along with my marketing collateralsm, I’ll be doing sales all the time when the opportunity arises.

I’ll start out as a sole proprietor since my business has always been a SOHO in the Philippines. And what I will do here is basically repeating everything I have done in the Philippines.

I got so much to read. Especially on what are taxable in my services and how much tax is paid for the service I render.

Well right now, my mind is more on my vacation with my family next month. And finishing all the projects I have right now before I leave.

When I get back from my 3 week vacation, it will be more business again.

Ever since I went into business in 1997. I can still remember Click Me! Computer Sales and Rental Service. I was doing good for sometime, then went bad. Then the same with Action Online Co. Ltd., ups and downs.

I am no graduate of any business course. And is basically a self-taught businessman. And I learned the hard way through mistakes. But I just consider what ever losses I had as my tuition fee to my own business school.

My business started as a product business and eventually became a service business where I deal with some amount of projects. When they were a bit few, they were easy to handle, but as they got more, everything started to get harder. Along with many mistakes done in the old company that can be summarized as doing to much that the company can actually handle without a back up plan of how to handle too much projects. It was unsuspected growth that messed everything up.

I always wanted to save on money and did not embrace technology right away. Everyone started having pagers and I did not have one right away. But also bought one eventually. Everyone started having cellphones and I did not opt to buy one right away, until my clients were always asking my cellphone number, then I assumed I needed one already. I did not want a PDA, and used the conventional pen and paper. My partner was the first to decide on having a PDA, and I was convinced with the productivity advantages and got one too.

Today I manage everything I do through my PDA synchronized with MS Outlook. But for many years everything was still not running smoothly. Especially when working with teams. Coordination was always a issue. It was like you have to follow up everyone on everything all the time and that alone is time consuming. And sometimes people’s free time to accommodate you don’t jive at the same moment. But somehow I was still able to handle that for half a year with my company YDS Web Solution.

Now I am here in the United States, and is also working for Einstein Industries, who has literally thousands of websites made by a big number of Webmasters in teams of three people. Collaboration is crucial for flawless delivery of projects. A small misunderstanding or something not followed up can break everything up. Fortunately our company had a project management system. We informally call it the “tracker” since we can track the status of projects. It seemed as a very effective tool that solved all problems I had in the past with regards to project management in working with teams. The software though looks proprietary, or probably a modification of something of the shelf.

For my own company, I knew I needed something similar and I came across dotProject. It had all the features I needed and work very similarly to the project management system I used at work. Right now I am just happy using dotProject and it made life a lot more easier.

Sorry I am not placing a review of dotProject here, I will probably place is somewhere in my students’ blog someday. All I want to do here is express my happiness using it.

If you are in search of a web hosting service that has a Project Management System like dotProject installed, you can contact me. Send me an email.