Ricky’s Online Business Blog

I’m helping a customer, a tertiary education institution in Malaysia, to look for ASP and ASP.NET programmers from India.  The programmers can work full-time or part-time in Malaysia.

If interested, please email me at ricky [at] rickysoo.com with your contact details.  My job is simply to forward your emails to the customer.  Please don’t ask me anything about the project as I don’t have the details.

By the way, I find software developers from India very agressive in promoting themselves via email and even phone calls.  Don’t you think so?

Some time ago, I was asked to take over and transform an online dating and matching service.  Its web site was still typical Web 1.0 style which was almost dead with very few members and traffic.

Trying to keep to my principle not to do what others were already doing, I proposed a new strategy to the owner.  However, I didn’t proceed in the venture as we couldn’t agree on the right business model.  At the end of discussion, the owner still preferred a business model 90% identical with the existing one!

Nowadays, many youngsters look for friendship and relationship on social network web sites, But besides casual relationships, there are others who look for serious life partner.  So there are many offline dating and matching services around.  Naturally, some of them get online and here come these online dating and matching web sites.

The problem is that, do people trust the Internet to look for their future husband or wife?  Most do not.  They don’t think Internet as a safe place.  Instead, they consider it full of cheaters.  The trust for the channel is just not there.  We may disagree, but this is the market perception, at least for my (older) generation.

Internet presence might work for an offline matching service using the Internet to promote their service, automate some business processes and value-add to their offline offerings.  But how about a purely online matching service?  Will it work?

If you were to operate such an online matching service, how do you make it big on the Internet?  Difficult, if not impossible.  This calls even more badly for a blue ocean strategy.  Let’s not be so bounded and bondaged by the same old thought just as other competitors in the industry.

One year ago, as a volunteer work, I created a blog for an event.  The good news is, the organizer didn’t have to fork out a single cent for Internet presence.  The bad news is, the blog challenged the way they thought how a web site works.

I was helping to blog regularly for the event.  As you know, whatever we blog now comes up at the top.  I remember being told not to blog any more for time being, because the last blog post was so important that it had to stay at the top of the home page.  In another case, the committee chairman told me a post had disappeared!  It had “dropped off” the home page after a few newer posts were put up!

With the advent of World Wide Web, we became so used to the way how a web site organized itself, that is, hierarchically with menus and sections.  But blogs changed the way how a web site works.

On blogs, the latest piece of information comes at the top. Then as we put up more posts, the previous post will “drop” down in the home page slowly to the bottom, until “disappearing” into oblivion (actually hidden from the home page).

Frankly, when I first started to read blogs and publish a blog, I was not so used to how it worked too.  I thought it was not “user-friendly”.  But as time went by, I started to see the logic and got familiar with blogs now.

Instead of an almost dead hierarchical web site, a blog site is just like a live person who changes from time to time.  Rather than just looking at the same old and cold content, a blog gives a more personal touch, a plus point for businesses.  It encourages more interaction with the users, through links, search box, comments, widgets and others.

But there are still many who think blogs are not the best way to organize information.  As “the customers are the kings”, we must not be so proud to assume that blog is the best architecture for a web site.  But just like other technologies, I believe blogs will evolve to be even better and more useful.

Here are a few web development projects available for freelance web programmers. Please contact me and I’ll happily connect you to the person in charge.

• To maintain an existing match-making web site
• To develop an online job portal
• To develop a business networking web site
• To develop an online charity web site
• To develop a web site plus web application for a non-profit nationwide sports event – This is a volunteer and non-paying job. But I guess the web programmer will be given due recognition and a plus point in his or her portfolio.

As for me, I’m not a web designer and not in web development business. I developed and still maintain my own sites (yeah, I know I should not do it myself). I was a programmer and I still can program well in PHP (and that’s the only programming language I still know now!)

It’s good to have a gift in web development and programming. But it’s one thing to be a “technician” doing programming, it’s another thing to be an “entrepreneur” in business world. To turn from owning a job to a business, and from working in a business to working on a business, I just have to come out of my comfort zone called programming.

Sometimes I’m asked to develop web sites, from both commercial and not-for-profit sources. But my time commitment does not allow me to take in any of these jobs. Sacrificing precious hours for these web projects means I have to sacrifice time for other more important life goals, though sometimes these projects are good and worthy ones. In other words, doing web development projects simply drags my feet from achieving what I want!