My dad said grow up stupid. So I did... Duuurr :)

Well we are growing at a good pace now, and I can see that there are some things you have to really make sure you keep a control of as a company before they get out of hand.

I guess you have to decide how large you want to get as a company and where your 5 year plan will take you.
Do you want an office with permanent employees?
Do you want to spend all your time on the golf course making the deals?
Do you want to remain a code monkey?

It started off that we, like most other small companies didn’t want to refuse any work, because why would you turn down business if it is coming in?
It then gets to the stage where you find out you are spending a good 50% of your time on the phone and in meetings procuring new work, and a lot of the remaining time project leading teams to carry out the work on jobs you have mapped out.
It then dawns on you that you are now spending less and less time doing the thing you love, using tools to solve problems. I love sitting down at a machine, and I have a language/technology to use to get a PC to do something by the end of the day. I treat it like a puzzle every day, and that is a love of my work and the reason that I can spend my working life sitting in front of a monitor. I am not a person that wants to be spending my time running an office and getting the deals.
There are some people who are brilliant at schmoozing, and I am happy to leave procurement to them. As long as we don’t get to the company situation where we have a salesman who doesn’t have a clue about the technology and undersells something that they blagged.
So now where do we go from here? We have to be careful in that me and my Business partner Dave both keep control of the work that comes in, and that we are the ones that sets up the skeleton structures, and plan and runs the teams to solve the systems. This means that we keep the control over how problems are being solved. I guess we now have to look at our company size and say we now have the opportunity to grow very quickly, and a very important part of that growth is keeping control and not letting everything spiral.

We now have a very nice bank of repeat customers, and the word of mouth reputation is spreading exponentially. That is allowing us the freedom to pick and choose the type of extra work that we go for, and we are even getting to the stage now where we may be able to think about writing some of our own products to launch out to the mass market place and see how our ideas fair. That is where I think our BIG money lies.


As one fine philosopher once said:
This time next year Rodney, we'll be millionaires.


Aaah well, back to work. I have a doozy of a problem to solve and a smile on my face.

altFusion is now running on other domain names.

We have recently registered some other domain names.
I know that this doesn’t help out with Search Engine Optimisation for our main Cambridge and Peterborough Software IT website, but it does stop anybody else buying up the domains and hurting our web presence. Each domain also has their own page ranking for the pages inside them, and although I am not actively going to promote the other domains, they might bring more traffic in just by being there and allowing indexing over time.
Domains we have now registered and a brief description about that type of domain top level extension are:
1/
http://www.altfusion.biz/ - A general online business extension and altFusion is an IT online business.
2/
http://www.altfusion.net/ - A general extension to say we are on the Internet.
3/
http://www.altfusion.org/ - A worldwide organisation domain. As long as it isn’t postfixed with the uk subdomain then there aren’t restrictions on it like it having to be a charity organisation.
4/
http://www.altfusion.eu/ - A European Union domain extension, that suggests that altFusion is a European company that offers IT solutions and applications for the whole of Europe as well as the UK.
5/
http://www.altfusion.info/ - This is for an information website, and along with this blog I believe that altFusion can always be welcome to offer advice to somebody as well as to provide a full IT system or software application.

We dont see any need to register any other domain names at the moment.
Just as a side note, I have already mentioned that we have got a fun website filled with Games and Gadgets and Widgets and things to experiment with here.

Google Apps.

It was brought to my attention recently that Google Apps had re-branded and are now trying out different tools to help people with their web presence.
We wanted to register a new domain to have a play around with this, so I joined up and registered a test domain here:
Cambridge and Peterborough software developers test partner website.

So I signed up at the Google Apps pages, and registered the domain.

From the front menu there is a bit of confusion with 2 categories of pages to sort out. There is a link to sort out the start pages, and there is a link to sort out the web pages.

I didn’t know the difference, so I thought I would sort out the start pages seeing as it makes sense to start at the start.
What happened then was I sorted out the content, and put on a couple of blogs, a weather report, and a calendar.
I then waited to see this start page turn up at the http://www.altfuzion.com and after about a week, it still never turned up. It always stayed at start.altfuzion.com
So I went back and re visited the account and saw that the webpages were still blank even though the start page was set up. I then set up the webpages which at the moment is a title and a piece of text just introducing what I am trying to do with the Google Apps account.
That now does come up at the intended application URL.
Because I now have an ASP.NET (dot net) website that I don’t want to break so I will leave that alone, and I can now use www.altfuzion.com as a blank canvas to try out any number of tools and technologies.

I have found so far that Google states they do not give any preferential treatment to pages or websites that are held and created on Google Page Creator.
It just has the same precedence as any other website on the internet.

It should be worth mentioning: We have registered our test domain http://www.altfuzion.com to run through googlepages, although with my googlepages account I can actually register 4 domains in total to have other domains to experiment with. These domains are all within the http://########.googlepages.com area however so I don’t really see a need to explore this further, I will be sticking with http://www.altfuzion.com which points to http://www.altfuzion.com-a.googlepages.com/ only for my experiments.




I am now looking into Google Gadgets and Widgets to see what it is about, and there seems to be a wealth of Widgets that have been written for google pages.
Some of these are free and some are costly, but all are supposedly easy to install through my main Google Page Creator.
I am going to have a test page to hold gadgets and widgets that I will make public.
You can view my google widgets test page here.

Questions I have to be answered are:
Can I make a robots.txt and sitemap.XML ?
It does state there is 100MB of storage space. Can I upload pages directly to my space, or do I have to go through their interface.
If I can upload pages, can I upload aspx (ASP.NET) pages, or is there any kind of server side technology that I can utilize?
Is there any database technology that I can utilize on their storage space?