big week ahead

I’ve been pretty busy this week and i’ll be pretty busy next week too. All of course courtesy of BeerChief

For the first time ever, eyeballs other than myself and Adam’s will be viewing the BeerChief website. It will be very interesting to see people’s initial reaction, i’m not really looking for ‘great job, well done’ kind of responses, that does nothing only lull us in to a false sense of achievement I want honesty and a list of positive and negative points

I’m well aware there’s more work to be done, and in fact, i’m already putting together plans for a complete revamp. As i keep saying the bones of the site are in place, and it is looking pretty slick, but i believe there’s room for improvement… in terms of adding features and modifying things, our current set up makes it difficult. We are running open source software, but it’s heavily hacked (hacked meaning taken apart legally, not the other form of ‘hacked’)

It’s a bit like running a modified version of wordpress… it makes it very difficult to add plugins built for standard versions, particularly if we can’t find and fix bugs ourselves… it means more cash and more time wasted on problems that really only appear due to the fact we spent so much time and cash modifying it in the first place!

We won’t radically overhaul the site - the only time we’ll do that is if we’re getting a full custom built solution from scratch and that will take upwards of €50k. So if we get to that stage we’ll either have major investment or else the site will be paying for itself.

But over the coming weeks, we’ll have a good look at feedback, see what you guys think and see what you want etc… and then we’ll act accordingly. A ‘revamp’, if it does come, will come pretty fast and cheap. The only thing that would be required is a slight template re-design and adjustment of some functions code.

But exciting times ahead… starting Tuesday, 1st July, BeerChief will become my biggest project to date and hopefully, my biggest success story to date. Only time will tell though… it’s impossible to predict what will happen, you just never know with the internet. But i believe i know enough to (a) promote the site well and (b) get it to the stage where we can comfortably say we can sell this for what we paid for it.

We never will sell it of course (certainly i won’t, for any amount, within the next 2 years), but knowing you have something that is worth the same or more than what you have invested in it is incredibly important for morale and confidence.

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