beerchief

BeerChief is GO!

*sigh* it’s been a busy day… I was up extra early this morning like i said i would be… that was after a late night of polishing up some BeerChief pages.

I had to send out ~150 emails (not manually - i’m not that hard a worker), update the BeerChief blog, fix some errors, send a few normal emails and try to respond to feedback whilst trying to update my own BeerChief profile and add videos, photos etc…

I can just imagine the chaos it would cause if i actually *tried* promoting the site

To access the site, go to beerchief.com/beer

• username: beer
• password: okok

In some sort of twisted / evil ‘coincidence’, my college results arrived today in the post as if to say, ‘we come first’. Repeat form etc… included… i have to repeat maths. Loads of time for that though. 6 weeks at least.

BeerChief comes first

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

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.

It’s all about BeerChief

The BeerChief blog was down for a few days there… we were moving it to a subdomain and ran into some problems but we’ve figured it out and now the ‘new’ blog can be found at blog.beerchief.com

It’s just running the default theme at the minute, but i’m working hard on trying to come up with something more unique. Blogging of course is an area we won’t have to worry about

I won’t have the freedom i have here though…. i’ll have to (a) watch what i say and (b) blog about a specific subject (beer). I’m looking forward to it though. It will become my second ‘big’ blog after this one.

Whilst we’re talking about BeerChief, let’s get to our BETA launch date… When is it? July 1st. We’ll be sending out emails tonight/tomorrow to make it official and then again on July 1st with login details (don’t forget it will be username /password only entry).

So just 5 more days to wait and from that date on you’ll never hear ‘BeerChief’ and ‘coming soon’ in the same sentence ever again

keeping myself busy

Although i may not be earning much these days, i’m probably working harder than ever before. This blog is looking and performing better than it’s ever done before and i’m determined to grow it further.

BeerChief is of course literally days away from being launched in private BETA mode so there’s an awful lot of work to be done for that. It’s work that most people wouldn’t bother with, but i’m trying to make every single detail ‘perfect’.

Bit by bit i’m getting there. For example the email addresses are using squirrel mail, but i want them linked in to our existing gmail addresses so that any mail we get is forwarded on to our current email accounts. That way we can deal with it instantly.

Again, normally it’s not a problem but because we’re on a dedicated server it makes things more difficult. But i’ve figured out the problem anyway so it’s one less item on my ‘list of things to perfect’.

I also have to get the BeerChief blog back working… i’m trying to move it to a subdomain with little success but i won’t give up. When i do get it up, i also have to customize the design to match our new site design. Then i’ve to install all the latest plugins, bla bla… i haven’t even gotten to content yet. And that’s just the blog, with regards the site itself, i’m also trying to tie up deals with plugin programmers to install additional features on BeerChief.

Content-wise, i have to create a full list of beers with short blurbs and pictures… i also have to update our blog, send out emails… implement a custom 404 page, favicon, send out a newsletter…

Then we have the usual emails back and forth to my Adam (co-founder) plus my daily blogging here at smemon.com.

I still have to create some ads for the sidebar and experiment with a leaderboard at at the top of the page.

It’s not all fun and games you know The rewards, if there are any, will not come today or tomorrow… but when they do come, it’ll all have been worth it