The Long Way Home - Chapter 18 - Gladstone Day 16

Frustrated with the issues of the website I sent this email to a mentor of mine today, just looking to let off some steam. Having read a number of posts in a Facebook Business Group – Calling All Legends Doing Business Our Way – of which I am a member about the strangulation of the mind and the inability of the small business owner to find outlets when the stress of items outside the general control occur.

Dale

I am not expecting a reply to this email. I am writing to the one person who truly understands

Following in the best ideals of Blueprint and because you can’t keep a real entrepreneur down I had a thought. I will document our trip around Oz. I will write a blog, take some pictures. Create a website and see subscriptions to the blog and potentially sell a photo or two.

Using Blueprint contacts, because it’s not what you know etc etc, why not create a small website not unlike a friend of mine who was doing the same thing with a yachting trip they were doing as a retirement transition. Using the KISS Principle (Keep It Supremely Simple) they seem to have achieved what they set out to do. That was June, they have been back and into their next phase of life. Although she is a professional photographer she was not looking to sell from the site. For me I have the blog of the original trip, 100 Chapters/Blogs (a little over 400,000 words) and around 10,000 photos or so, something to start and create a base with for a website

One night I had a dream – a Ray Kroc revelation not a Martin Luther King Jnr one – what am I truly aiming to do here. Write a one page business plan – update to a 5 page business plan (which is much larger now of course) and the plan is clear – sell the photographs and use the blogs as bait.

This revelation means the website requires a rewrite of sorts – increased investment $500. There needs to be a correlation of photographs between the chapters/blogs. Enter now a new thought. Why not group like photograph types across all the books and turn them into “Collections”. So as well as a Chapter/Blog for a selection of photographs, the Collection could be a range of shots to view

Initial uploads seem to have the entire plan working well. The Chapters/Blogs are a separate process to the Photographs/Products. All along we have been telling the programmers there will be 250 Chapters/Blogs and if initial indications are right there will be in excess of 35,000 Products/Photographs.

This size issue of the website first manifests itself in the Chapter Blog selection process. 4 x Travel Books, one with 130 chapters. How do we keep the selection down to a single screen? We came up with the idea of a fourth selection box limiting selection to a range of 10 chapters. So across the page we would have 4 boxes to create the range of shots you would see. 

Box 1 = Book (if you did not select this one you would only be able to take a Gallery selection in Box 4)

Box 2 = Range of Chapters to select in the Book

Box 3 = The actual Chapter you want to see shots from

Box 4 = Gallery/Collection

At this point we get our first “that is not possible” with the Box 2/3 setup. Within the parameters of the modal for the web store with WooCommerce attached these sorts of search are not possible to create. My development partner in crime John Tonkin is a little perplexed but we live with it.

In the meantime I am having an unrelated issue with Telstra and internet connections. I am supposedly paying for 400Gb of downloads except my MyTelstra Account suggests and the Dongle attached to the account limits it to 60Gb (the original package). Meaning as I approach the limit the Dongle “slows” production, dropping out parts of data packages creating all sorts of headaches in the uploads – don’t worry the conflict there is still no resolved either and the complaint has been escalated to priority – meaning they were supposed to contact me within 72 hours to resolve the issue. To give them their due I did receive an initial call from them the afternoon I lodged the complaint at which time I was told they were going to “reset” my package, refund the amount I paid as an overcharge. This would take about an hour from the time of the 2.30pm call. At 6.30am the next morning I watched the Dongle change billing periods, remain at the old package but certainly allow me access.

Back to the website story. We (John Tonkin and I) have created detailed procedures for uploading both Chapter/Blogs and Photographs/Products and both are working within the limitations until one day, they simply stop. 

According to the developer nothing has changed and it should be all OK, but from my end nothing is working. All I get from the developer is it MUST be “user error” – you must have changed the way you are doing things. The developer gives me admin access to the site hoping error messages will tell me what I am doing wrong. Now I am good at what I know and that is writing blogs and taking photos (or at least I like to think I am) but admin access to a self professed technophobe is a recipe for disaster. In the meantime in a thought to having the problem resolved i send copies of upload csv files showing the material we would normally receive has not been delivered, along with our written procedure (that to this point only I have used to upload anything to the site) to see what “user error” has manifest itself

That is until of course the website goes down completely. 

Unable to access the site completely this morning I contacted the business owner – enter Kody. 

Kody is a person who can translate between Geek and Customer. He will need to talk with his developer about the sorting issue, but has already started looking into the website shutdown. Each site has its own server so it should be easy to ascertain 

Kody takes time out of his busy day to call me. We talk about how things have changed from the original brief of a blog website with a few photos (100 chapters and 10,000 potential photos) to what we envisage now. The site has crashed inter alia (among other things in latin) because we have reached the 2,000 photograph limit of this model and we will need to rewrite something around a larger platform to make it work. Another increased investment of $750 plus the ongoing platform fees that will also ensue.

The joys of business and growth – and this one is yet to go live.

Ideas are one thing. Research and straw polls are another, but turning an idea into a business is not something to take lightly. We (and I count myself among those pushing this barrow) approach business with both eyes open, but in this case I am note sure they were open enough. I don’t shirk hard work, nor walk away from cost where there is a perceived benefit, including the use of a “Virtual Assistant”  who collates, watermarks and creates a set of thumbnail photographs for use in the marketing on the website. All the blog writing and uploads to the website are all done personally as well as the culling and classifying of shots, hours of work, but gven I have two other businesses to run concurrently not every waking hour can be devoted to these tasks and still enjoy what is supposedly a retirement trip around the country.

To date we are yet to be able to go live although I do have a Facebook page on which I think I have around 5 likes tending to simply share posts from my personal page as content. “Progress not perfection” keeps ringing in my ears but we are not in a place where enough progress warrants release of the site.

9 months, about the same gestation period as a human baby, but unlike the expecting mother there will be no premature or even full term birth. Whilst this is a love job and Property Portfolio Solutions earns us shit loads of money so the funding is not an issue, I am at a crossroads

It is starting to get me down and there are times when I think I should simply pull the plug, but I have invested so much of myself in this project. The money is not the issue. Am I falling into the rabbit hole covered with rose coloured glasses? 

Thank you for your time, even if, my friend, you didn’t read it.