Joe and Steve,
Thank you both so much for your response.. timely response and honest
.. I could not ask for more... I thank you both, wholeheartedly.
I pretty much expected the huge cost for the NS MySol Spot site. It is
extremely well done and I also expect it should provide an online
environment and community that will serve NS well.
I have already established the website, and it is presently sitting on an NS
server waiting for some development. I know what I want my customers to
experience, and frankly it is not more than a place where they can meet,
discuss and advise each other on matters of various sorts (I will not go into
specifics here). The need for forums, PM, chat possibly, some
news/info on front page only to direct people towards a thought or area of
discussion (forum), log in ability for tracking purposes (marketing info), I
would say those are my specific needs at this time.
Selling product is not on my list, unless one would count selling of
information gathered from the site as an item to sell, which it is, and that is
an obvious goal for me and the site. This is actually where I am
having some trouble ... devising the right structure and then
it's implementation, in terms of how do you construct a site (from the start) that
will give opportunity for people to discuss etc (again no specifics here) and
then be able to garner the "habits", information, data, data, data,
so that it can be used as a tool for major companies, whom are interested in
the data (raw or otherwise) to devise product, direction, etc.
I did look at “WordPress”, and have seriously thought about it as a
platform, and I am presently banging “Joomla” around with a nice template I got
from a friend. “Drupla” is also on my hotlist of tools to help me develop
the site. I will definitely look at the others you mention.
You can see from my profile, I have years of
experience on the hardware end of things... being in the computer industry and
in management of PC Design and the tools and technologies used to design IC's
and the boards that they mount to. I have programming experience,
although nothing of today's tools, since I have been in management for 20 years
or so, and we managers don't do anything in terms of real work, just tell
others how to do it! Seriously,
you definitely lose the "do" part of work when you manage… and
actually, I enjoy the management part, the strategic side, which again, brings
me to another problem...
You may or may not heard of the book: The E-Myth Revisited, by Michael E. Gerber,
it basically describes the reason why many of small companies fail is that
the owner is playing all of the roles. The baking, icing, selling,
marketing, opening, closing, books, taxes, etc. etc,. of the company. It
is NOT possible to survive in that mode. Someone needs to "run"
the business, while someone else (or others) is doing the baking, if you get my
drift. Well, simply put, I need the baker, the rest I can do.
Well, therein lies the problem, finding a person whom I can give the problem
to, and we together develop a strategy and formula to construct the site.
In the meantime, I am plugging away at constructing it myself with the tools
aforementioned. If you know of a good person who would be interested in
building/ownership and want to take on this project, you can email me... I
would be greatly appreciative.
I truly appreciate your inputs and suggestions. They have not
fallen upon deaf ears. This is why I do business w/ NS.. you guys are
great !
Peace to you both.
Don
P.S. You need to put a dynamic spell dictionary into this forum
so I do not have to check my spelling my self.. I hate that ! and I don’t spell
as good as I used to… I cut and pasted this into my MS Word, fixed and pasted
back into here;