Archive for March, 2009
Drupal multi-sites
The brilliance of Drupal as an all-in-one-go CMS becomes evident when we consider its flexible taxonomy structure and modular framework. But something that may go unnoticed is the ability to use it to create multi sites sharing common code base and modules but different databases and themes. Here are some materials that could make it more clear.
WWW hits 20
Some of WWW’s memorable moments on its way to success.
In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a paper called “Information Management: a Proposal” to his supervisor Mike Sendall. This document, called “vague, but exciting” by Sendall, became the blueprint for the World Wide Web which launched the following year.
A Good Interview
No, we’re not patting our own backs. We’re just bringing you an interview with the people behind A Good Company, a SME that is doing it right. Read on to see what what Caroline and Micah have to say about design, clients, and their plan to take over the world.
Micah and Caroline, thanks for joining us today. For starters, could you tell us a little bit about A Good Company, and how it came to be?
Caroline: We both went to Otis College of Art and Design, a small design school in Los Angeles. We decided to work on our senior thesis project together, it was us and another designer, our pal Nicole. The 3 of us worked together and had a hell of a time creating www.thegoodsideof.us, where people can share stories of their good deeds.
We both work really well together and during school we constantly talked about starting a company someday, we both have similar ideas of what kind of a company we wanted to create. We even came up with the name A Good Company, during our senior year in college. We thought it’d be funny and also true. Obviously we both care deeply about good design, but what we also want from our company is a business that can be good, and help other business be good. We like the idea that being good is financially sustainable.
So after we graduated college, we decided that we’d like to keep working together. And since at the time I didn’t have a full time job, and Micah was looking for a good reason to go back to sunny CA, we thought that maybe now is the best time to start a business together.
How does A Good Company operate? Do you guys have offices, or do you just work from home? How do you guys divide the work flow between yourselves?
Caroline: We both work from home. And since right now we’re working from opposite sides of the country, we mostly work together through IM. As for our workflow I’m not quite sure, there’s really no rigid rules about it, it’s more like, we each do what we know we can do best at that specific time.
Micah: We’ve worked together really closely for… almost two years, even if it wasn’t always for A Good Company. That thesis project, and school projects, had us working really close, and we got a pretty clear idea of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. I’ve been doing a lot of client-talking lately, or programming, while Caroline spearheads a lot of the design and concepting. A lot of times we trade off more menial business work with design work, so one of us is organizing files or setting up tools and the other is gettin’ stuff done. And then we trade chores.
What changes, if any, have you had to make as a result of the prevailing economic downturn, and what advice would you give other small businesses trying to stay competitive in this financial climate?
Caroline: To be honest, I dont think we have made changes at all. At least personally I dont think a bad economy is a reason for us to hold back or anything like that. We’re both generally are pretty good about keeping in budget, for our personal finances. As for the company, since our business doesn’t require us to put a huge amount of monetary investment to it, I don’t think financially the economy has affected us in a big way.
I’m not sure if I’m qualified to give business advice to anyone, but one thing that we are trying to do with our company is to … well not to lose hope. People have said to us, in this economy you want to be careful, you need to hang on to every client you’ve got, just be thankful you have clients at all. Well, I dont think the bad economy is a good reason for us as a company to lower our standards. We still believe that working with good clients whom we respect and trust, doing work that is good, intelligent, and fun, is still what we’re strive for. So i guess if I have to give an advice to people about dealing with the economy downturn: don’t compromise, on anything, we might be in a hopeless situation but we’re not hopeless.
Micah: I don’t really believe in recessions. I don’t really believe in germs, either, but the thing is, we don’t really spend much money. And I’m constantly advocating us making products, so we can be more self-sufficient. My long term goal is to make our client work optional.
Deploying a service as a small business is often a nerve-wracking task. How has A Good Portfolio fared, and what have you learnt from working on it?
Caroline: Well even though we put this project on hold for sometime now, personally for me what I really learned from it is how to be more flexible. Micah has this mentality of “an idea is a dime a dozen”. I, on the other hand get attached to ideas. I’ve always thought this was a good idea and when we had to put it on hold, I was very resistant at first. but we did have a good reason to do it. We realized that this product is not the kind of product we wanted it to be. We were searching for a product that could give us a passive income, something we don’t have to manage. After doing some research, we realize that our target audience, being students, we probably won’t make much money from it. So we put it on hold, because we couldn’t afford to spend so much time working on something that woulnt earn us money.
The reason we revived the project is because Micah has this new take on working on this product. Before, we were gonna have all these fancy features, which we both admit would be really cool to have (templates, customizable fonts, color pickers, etc). The problem was, it’ll take a long time for us to figure out how to build all those fancy things (considering that neither of us are actual programmers, I have 0 programming knowledge and Micah is a hack, though, for a hack, Micah is a genius, if I do say so myself). So what we’ve decided to do this time around is to keep it as simple as possible. We want to build only the things that we absolutely need to launch. Once we have something that’s working then we can add other cool stuff to it, but we don’t want to focus so much on the nice-to-have features right from the get go. First we focus on the essential, and once we have that, we can expand as needed.
Micah: Not that we invented that idea, or anything, but we’re both kind of perfectionists deep down, and I’ve been working hard to change my mindset about that. We were concerned at first that it wouldn’t make us any money, but realized that if we didn’t spend too much time on it at first, it’s not much of a loss. So we picked it up again, made it real quick, and we’re testing it out. But I agree with Caroline, I think it’s taught us to get over ourselves and roll with the punches a bit.
On your website, you mention that you have “big plans” for the future. Mind elaborating? Where would you like to see A Good Company go in the next few years?
Caroline: hmm our big plans… well our long term business goal is to take over the world. But I guess we need to start with small steps.
In the next few years, I’d like for A Good Company to start working with good clients, in every sense of the word. I don’t care about size, they don’t need to be famous or popular. Here’s my idea of a good client, someone who treats us like we’re a partner, like we’re real people, working together with them to help them achieve their goals, be it creating a identity for their company or coming up with a product idea that’ll help them grow their business. A good client would also have the same ideas about business as we do, which means that they want to make their business profitable by using technology, design, science, inventions, and ideas to make a positive changes in the world, big or small. If we can start having more clients like that in the next few years, then I think we’d have no problem meeting our business objective in the long run.
Micah: Yeah, honestly, I share Caroline’s thoughts on clients, but I want it to be a choice – I don’t want to worry about income or making sure we have paying clients. I want us to pick projects we want to work on, based on how much we can do to help the world somehow. Inventions, events, who knows what. A Good Company is gonna be a model for how companies and people can help each other out and make the world a better place, that’s our goal.
A Good Company, of course, like any good company, uses CurdBee to power their invoicing. Here is a screenshot of their Bee deployment at work.
“There’s always time to launch your dream” – DHH
Never let your schooling interfere with your education, someone clever once said. Being willing to sacrifice at the edges is one of the most important skills you’ll ever learn.
I’ve received plenty of Bs and even Cs for classes that I was incredibly proud of because they came from hardly no time spent at all. Time that I could then spend on reading my own curriculum, starting my own projects, and running my own businesses.
Can’t agree more with David Heinemeier Hansson on this. There’s enough time for everything in life, only just you are ignorant.
Vesess turns FIVE
FIVE? What does that mean to you? Just the number you get after 4 or the answer you
get when you divide 10 by 2? Well done, genius. Both answers are correct and I know there are more ways to explain that through mathematics and what not. But today, five means something more. Vesess is five years old, and we’re here to remember the past.
It’s a great moment for all of us. We’ve survived for FIVE complete years despite the ups and downs and kept our promise to our clients. We’re really happy that we could come through for those who had a lot of faith in our young team, especially during the first two years when we came out of nowhere. Whether you believe it or not, at the start we had just one machine (a second hand P IV desktop computer), a phone line, one table, FIVE chairs and a dial-up connection to check our mail from. I know this is quite common for most startups, but being a startup from a developing nation it was a lot harder compared to a startup in US. Prabhath wrote a great post about the third world designer during this time.
We operated from a small room in Asantha’s house at Maharagama (a suburb situated 10KM away from the capital Colombo) and were battling really hard to get out of the chicken and egg scenario. To survive, we needed projects, and that meant new clients to work with. However, whenever we pitched to a potential client, always the first question was “Can I see some of the work you guys have done already?” We had a few samples ready to show how good we are at web design and graphics. But that was not enough in most cases as most people wanted to see real work. So, this cycle continued for a few months before we opened our account with the Institute of Human Rights, our very first client. A couple of weeks later, CD Labs hired us for their website revamp and things finally got going.
So what? Did you know that prior to incorporating the company as Vesess we operated under the name FIVE for a couple of months? Yes, that was our first name. The founding team had FIVE members (Prabhath, Thiva, Venu, Asa and myself) , and we thought that it was the best name to go with. However, we soon realised the importance of having a name with a .com domain, especially since we always wanted to target international clients. Not to mention, .lk domains were three to four times as expensive as .com domains at the time, and saving cash was obviously a top priority.
Our logo during the FIVE days.
So, FIVE years have passed, and many things have changed, including our strengths. Today we have a nice office in the heart of Colombo. We also have a presence in US, a great network of clients, and everyone is equipped with laptops, and broadband connections. We’re happy about the growth we have been blessed with, but always remember that it didn’t come easy.
Since 2004, we have had FIVE complete redesigns to our website, and each iteration has brought us new and exciting things. Will we be on version 10 by the time we celebrate our 10th birthday? Only time will tell. Whatever said and done, however, rest assured that we will be here, enjoying the living web as always.
The Second Age of SMEs
World wide, thousands of companies are trying to beat the economic downturn by cutting costs. In most cases, that also means cutting jobs. Not for most small businesses though. In a global landscape that is becoming increasingly desolate for professionals, most SMEs are chugging along just fine.
For the small guys, the Internet was a real shot in the arm. Indeed, Vesess would not be here today if not for the mother of networks. The advent of online communication heralded what one can easily call The SME era. With the ability to drastically reduce communication costs, SMEs were able to operate at a fraction of the cost it would normally take them. During the earlier years of Vesess (the proverbial garage era), the team operated out of Asantha’s house, cutting out all overhead, and allowing the company to grow exponentially over the next few years. Today, over half a decade later, we do have offices, and conference rooms. However, our core thinking has remained the same.
Think small. Think efficient. Share the returns.
As a South East Asian company, we have always been able to compete with American and European players for one simple reason – low overhead. We maintain a small team, and hire infrequently. All Vesess employees are multi-talented, and every Vesess project, bar none, is a team effort. We don’t have dinky job titles (ok, we do, but they say very little about our individual roles in the company), and we certainly dont have project leaders and supervisors. When we have a problem, we throw it to the (super secret, internal) mailing list, or just ping the people we need online.
Apart from the invention of the Internet, no other global event has contributed as much to the rise of the SME as the present economic crisis. Of course, this is just a prediction, but we’re sure that posterity will prove us right. How is that possible, you ask?
Cost cutting, that’s how. Small businesses generally run very efficiently. No multiple printers or photocopiers to finance, no thousands of wasted feet of floorspace to pay for, and generally, no jobs that can be axed. SMEs also aren’t usually badly in debt, and are able to run from month to month, even if it does come down to a hand to mouth situation. Thus, our contention is that the businesses that are going to survive this depression are going to be the small ones, and especially the small smart ones.
When Hotelotravel, our latest venture, went into development, we all began wondering how we’d sell yet another travel site. There were hundreds out there, and we needed ours to be different.
The difference, it turns out, came with the downturn. As economies weakened and pictures of worried stock brokers started flooding the wire services, we realised that we could give people exactly what they wanted this year.
Money. It’s 2009, the year of financial doom for the world, and what any traveler would want is money back. HOT’s cash back feature was designed with exactly that in mind.
Think small. Think efficient. Share the returns.
By keeping running costs low, and using FOSS tools and frameworks for development, we are able to give a percentage of our commission back as cash on every booking. To learn more about cash back, check out our features page.
The point we’re trying to make, however, is that in an economic climate like this, only a SME could afford to offer such discounts, and that it is precisely this ability that will enable such businesses to flourish despite the problems we face. For the first time in years, small businesses have the ability to truly shine, and we’d love to hear how some of our fellow players are using small and efficient business practices to attract customers and grow, despite everything going on around them.
Identifying e-commerce frauds
No matter if you are a consumer or a developer, it’s good to know how e-commerce frauds can occur as e-commerce has become rather attached with our lives.
Before you can stop fraud, you need to know how to define it in order to properly identify it. Fraud is defined as the use of deception to obtain money or something else of value. Although typically carried out online, some fraudsters pursue the riskier physical fraud in which they interact with people face-to-face.
