Problem, but a good problem…

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.

May mga mayabang din pala dito.

Akala ko lahat ng tao dito ok. May mayabang din pala. May isa akong kasama sa trabaho, nagpapaturo sa akin, kung bakit hindi gumagana yung ginawa n’ya. So ako naman sabi ko sige, ok lang, tinignan ko, and napakita ko rin ang mali. Tapos sabi ko kung gusto mo pang matuto tungkol sa teknolohiya na ‘yan, pwede ka mag aral sa site na ito, ni hindi pa ako tapos magsalita, sinapawan boses ko, sabi, pagaaralan ko rin naman ‘yan sa paaralan, ‘yun na ang susunod na topic namin. Ako ugali ko, lahat ng tao willing magturo, at pag masmadaming resources, masmaganda. Masmatututo at masmagandang makakita ng iba’t ibang paraan kung paano gawin and trabaho. Tapos ibang isidente naman, sabi nung isang kasama ko, nakipag talo daw ako sa boss ko para gumamit ng ibang program na gawa ko mismo and hindi yung offered ng kumpanya. Aba humirit ulit… sabi, sigurado naman ako madaling gamitin ang offer ng kumpanya, ba’t ayaw mo gamitin? Nyack?!? Natural madali. Hindi ko naman ayaw gamitin kasi nahihirapan ako, ayaw ko gamitin kasi pangit. Masmahirap pa nga ang gagawin ko, kasi hindi pa nagagawa, simula sa simula gagawin ko. Pero syempre, ako si Benj, na mula pa nung bata, smile lang ako. Hindi ko na kailangan makipagsabayan sa pataasan ng ihi. Pupurihin ko pa s’ya! Ang galing mo ah. Tuwang tuwa naman s’ya. Nyhahahaha.

Design/Programming Freedom (includes geek speak, sorry)

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.

New Clients

New Hosting Client, Nearly done with my SEO client, and is cooking up another deal for a new website with the same client I’ve done the SEO. A small outsource on a contact form and other forms. Just at the right time I used up all my money for buying plane tickets for my vacation to the Philippines. For March my company in the Philippines will be collecting March bills and I got a few annual renewals on March so everything is all good.

Business

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.

Been Busy… Some Pictures

I’ve been busy lately with all sorts of things.

Less time to blog.

My college classmate Richard emails some pictures to our college classmates’ Yahoogroup. He posts them and ask people to come up with a caption.

Instead of giving a caption, I edited them.

He emailed these:

And I sent back these:

Now back to work…

Tables and Slices

I was a hard core tables user before in 1996 to 2004. My shift to full CSS tableless sites started when I worked at Einstein Industries. And whenever I see a heavy tables site to fix, I just do not feel like working on it. Sometimes I want to re-do everything. If there is anything I do not like doing here at work, it is fixing a tables site that is messed up. I think this is my third post in my blog about this. Because I really do not want to work on them, but I do have to work on them. I really do not like how they were made, and I believe many webmasters will agree with me. Table sites are fine, but if they are not made correctly, even if the website looks fine, they are hard to maintain. Some people using tables just do not know how to use them correctly.

Time to Upgrade

My PC has been running on Homesite 5.1, Dreamweaver MX, Photoshop 7.0 that had problems and used Photoshop 5.0 instead. GoToPdf. But I do have Homesite 5.5, Dreamweaver MX 2004, Photoshop 8.0 CS and Adobe Acrobat Standard. But I just feel that I do not have time to upgrade everything since every time I am chasing a deadline.

But I just could not stand working in Photoshop 5.0 anymore, so I decided to work on the upgrades. I started uninstalling an installing. And during the whole process, I am just watching and waiting for every step to go on. And in the meantime, bloggin.