Archive for November, 2010

This change has had me wrenching for months, but I’m finally going to do it.  I am transitioning my web programming business into a media business.

The rationale for me doing this is really mostly personal, but I’ve discovered over time three things:

1. Web programming, as delightful as it is when it’s just the design and programming work, is a horrible business for a small outfit like mine to engage in for myriad reasons.  One of the biggest horrors I have is simply being able to keep up with all the different ways to develop a website and the technologies, and that’s just within the PHP/JavaScript universe.  Also, I have come to the hard conclusion that it’s become too prohibitively difficult to find the paid projects I can handle from very difficult-to-identify customer sets.  Marketing and handling inquiries has become pretty much become an impossible chore for this line of work.  And I detest impossible chores — they deplete my passion.
2. Because of #1, revenues have been way too uneven, and this has dissatisfied me to no end.  I need to have income that is more regular.  I’m sure everyone can sympathize here.
3. Developing my main media site, Louisville History & Issues, has become an increasing labor of love to the point of addiction, and I also have another media project in development that has me increasingly excited, if not riveted.  Strangely enough, the first web project I ever tinkered with in the mid 1990s was a media site, an e-zine to be exact.  So this is my first love, and I would like to make a go of it as the WebCommons business.

So, as of now, WebCommons :: Web Programming Services becomes WebCommons :: Media.

Since I am spending most of my time working on developing the media sites, this company site will be changed slowly.  I haven’t even decided on my new company logo yet. 

Further, I fully intend to take care of existing web programming customers, and perhaps even take on media-related projects that you may have (e.g., blog/sites).

The biggest thing spurring this change is my deep desire to concentrate on building a media business, and this includes running Louisville History & Issues as a commercial public service (kind of like a newspaper) for the first time — up to now, it has been run as a fully non-profit service.

As for the specific changes to Louisville History & Issues, I will post more about that over there soon.

Big thanks (!) to everyone, including my customers, for bearing with me as I make these changes.