The astounding Neon Night-Rider and the return of the web

It’s been 2 months since my last update. I simply said I had moved back. Since then, I was mostly doing freelance web projects. Small things, really. The type of projects where, in an ideal world, you could finish in a week and get paid.

However, these became challenging for me in the sense they’re boring and don’t really build any skills. In this environment you must improve to learn and stay competitive. I wanted to increase my knowledge base in the enterprise, and I did.

Thanks to a colleague, I ended up working on a fairly major project, and through this project, I finally learned how to communicate in the enterprise. As a consultant of sorts, I generally separate projects by business type, and most were fairly small business consulting projects where the consultant also played the web developer, designer, content specialist, SEO specialist, etc., but in the long run, for a guy who hates producing and applying content, this is by no means ideal and never worth it. I want my deliverable to be the site I produce, but from a customer service standpoint, I know I have to grin and bear through the tedious parts of a web project. I used this knowledge and mindset adopted from working with small companies and applied it to the enterprise. So it became a surprise to the project managers when they discovered just what all I can do.

Then, taking what I’ve learned in the enterprise, I hope that I can 1) continue consulting in this direction and 2) apply the knowledge to my own ventures. It’s definitely been a difficult time since I’ve moved back (and even more difficult up until the point where I moved), but the victory here is knowing now that I can apply certain business models that you just do not come across in the small and startup business world. In those situations where the mindset is do a lot for a little, I’ve seen that:

• open source is king
• if it’s free, it’s our friend
• custom modifications are lucrative

In this particular installation of Wordpress, I didn’t do much outside of theming, but even then, theming is bread and butter for some. And WP is open source, and I’d be surprised if I saw any web design studio site not built in WP. Best of all for them, it’s free and easy to set up.

This doesn’t work for businesses. What happens if there’s a problem? Well, the response is in the freelance world and even at the last few companies I worked at is “check the forums.” Well, that’s not always a viable option for any business because I’ve always found that the very specific problem I have is somewhere on a forum… but with no solution. This may either be no response or responses telling people to do something (or suggesting an alternative) that doesn’t solve the problem. In many cases, it’s the client who chooses software or modules that cause a problem and the person developing the site has little control over that because they are confined to completing the project. Unless the client wants something outrageous or irrelevant to what they want to accomplish, a freelancer will hope that a forum can answer his or her question. Enterprise companies don’t have time for that. While open source has a great community, and from a social media perspective is a prime example of an online community, the community gives a solution when able and when it’s necessary. So, for the enterprise, they expect:

• proprietary and controlled
• regular and excellent support
• custom modifications at purchase

Change orders are expected. When the client buys the software, it’s almost implied that, especially when it’s website-related software, that the software company will in turn make the modifications to suit the client’s needs then and there. Since it’s closed, there’s no releasing of modules for others to use, the company simply knows how to make a similar if not identical change for the next customer.

Support is also mandatory. Many commercial CMS earn their revenue off support. Even open source software. Open Solaris has a free license, but support is not free. Red Hat Linux and others use this model, and those are also some of the open source software that is also used in the Enterprise. Why is support so important? Because various security issues, bugs, etc. must be reported and fixed promptly with regular releases. Additionally, it can significantly reduce costs on both ends. For the software company, paid support usually means that the companies also have certifications available, basically leading to the point where support staff communicates with an already-trained and certified individual on problems, reducing the troubleshooting time. For the client, they will not have to spend as much time researching forums for solutions.

As much as everyone wants something for nothing, a larger company knows you have to spend money to make money, and simply, they know if you pay for something, there’s more accountability for the software developer. Sometimes, the enterprise company is more accepting of spending more money for that purpose (as they have a budgeted amount for it), so it is the best value for them.

My hopes is that May will be the month of action and execution, because the ultimate victory is the be financially secure in these troubling times, and what better way to do that than write software that solves the problems you’ve picked up on over time?

Tags: applications, economy, enterprise, entrepreneurship, hardship, small business, software, victory

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