cakephp.org is back up and running! > Your ability to grow your company has more to do > with your marketing, project management, customer relationships and > organizational abilities, then it has to do with the technical > advantages cake brings to the table.
Going completely off topic now then. I generally agree with most of what you say about marketing, project management and CRM etc. However, in my circumstances this does not ring true. I run a one man web development (self-taught HTML, PHP and MySQL - some Ajax/JS - lots of bad habits) and hosting company (www.webbedit.co.uk) servicing 50+ customers, mostly charities, I would say 50% are hosting only customers (I manage my own servers). I am married with one gorgeous daughter and as my business doesn't bring in enough money to pay all of the bills, my wife works full time as a nurse (regularly finishing at 9pm). We have no family nearby so when my wife is at work and my daughter is not at school I stop work and look after my daughter. As such 100% of my available working time is taken up by coding for customers or carrying out business admin (accounts, VAT, chasing money). There are no funds to employ an external marketing agency and if I were to do so I would not currently be able to cope with much of an increased demand, hence my company is firmly stuck in the category of lifestyle, as it really only pays my bills. Although this is a million times better then being in full-time employment, I have aspirations of being more succesful and executing the various marketing plans that I have drawn up over the years. I know I can't compete with established web agencies and I want to diversify into running my own websites rather than creating them for customers. I have a great business idea, which recently got me into the finals of a regional entrepreneur competition, but I don't have the spare time to code the various sites/apps I need to launch this new business. CakePHP offers me a growing light at the end of the tunnel. 1. It has forced me to get to grips with the MVC design pattern which will help massively with maintainability of projects 2. Once I am competent in using CakePHP, its convention over configuration approach should drastically cut development time for projects 3. Although I am a one man team, I can call on the collective knowledge of the CakePHP community 4. When I do have the funds to begin employing people, I know my coding will be more understandable to those I bring in Then I can concentrate on marketing and managing my business and it's customers more effectively. The idea is that I can get bigger, better projects finished faster .. giving me the time I need to launch my new web business which promises to quickly become much more than a lifestyle business. It's been a steep learning curve over these last few weeks, but I am steadily growing in confidence in using the framework, and know that even if I have made mistakes, the principles it's based will make them easier to find and correct. BTW, my organisational skills are terrible and don;t think I can improve them, but my wife is super organised so when my business makes enough money, she will hopefully join the company and keep me in line. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CakePHP" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
