Just in case you’ve found yourself on my website for no obvious or apparent reason, it’s likely that you’re the victim of a scam which is targeting me along with several other websites. In the meantime, take a moment for calm reflection and consider more pleasant things. Enjoy the rest of your day!
Sifting through the updates on Facebook, a question caught my attention which triggered a flash of memories right in front of my eyes: “What inspired you to start a business?” This being a Sunday, I thought I’d walk through some of those early memories once more.
The question posed by StartUp Donut prompted a reply from me, but I soon started to wander off-topic, meandering into the minutia of the why and the when. So I reigned in my thoughts and decided to put them all here, on Octane.
To answer the question, I just wanted to be the master of my own destiny. The thought of working for someone else simply wasn’t (and still isn’t) in the least appealing to me.
Originally, the intention was to start up Octane with a couple of guys from college, but things just didn’t work out that way. I was, in many ways, forced into the decision by circumstances largely outside of my control.
At the time, I was working in Leeds, as a new media designer, which entailed designing and building interactive CDs, web design and elements of video and 3D production. The first 3 years were excellent, but then the last 6 months became utterly intolerable. I still don’t know what happened, but something had clearly changed in the guy I was working for. In the end, I had to go.
In hindsight (which is always 20-20 vision), I should have looked for employment elsewhere and built up my network. But I didn’t. I should have waited until I had someone who could partner with me to handle the sales and marketing. But I didn’t.
At the time, web design was very, very new. So I was striding straight into a completely new market, with all the perils and potential you’d expect. And even today, what I do is still widely unknown and new to many.
I also saw a lot of confusion on the part of businesses, business owners and marketing managers, who weren’t quite sure what the whole “web thing” meant. And inside that moment of perfect confusion, a circling swarm of web design agencies were visibly preying on the the confused and the bemused.
From the very beginning, I was determined to, firstly, do things my way, and secondly, to do things right by everyone I did business with, and to be as honest as necessity would allow, without harming my self in the process. That mentality and philosophy stood me in good stead, and I began to win the respect of not just clients, but of those other agencies who, over the coming years, would see me as a constant in an ever-changing industry.
So from 1999 to about 2004, I was more a fireman and a trauma councillor than a web designer — intervening in emergencies and then tending to the people burnt by one disaster or another. While that earned me a solid reputation and won me a substantial amount of referral work, selling directly was extremely difficult because I was guilty by association and constantly walking through dirty water.
The first 10 years really didn’t hit home until after the event, sometime in late June of 2009. Again, in hindsight, I ought to have done more to celebrate the occasion, but things were hard for everyone I knew and the moment just slipped by. But I did manage to scribble together a few thoughts on my time running Octane from 1999-2009:
“There have been trials. There have been tribulations. I’ve survived everything from the bursting of the Dot Com bubble to the current global economic downturn.
For any business to last ten years is a major milestone. But for a web design agency, I breath very rarefied air, shared by few others.”
Running your own business is a trade-off between control and stability, and it’s a trade-off I’ve been a willing participant of since 1999.
I see so many businesses and business people fail for so many totally avoidable reasons, many of which are as a result of poor decision making, over-reaching self interest, an inability to say “no”, and a lack of vision and objectivity.
Conversely, a lack of success is not always the presence of those things, but an absence of good fortune and an array of friends and colleagues to assist wherever they feel able to. Those early decisions to go alone have proved to be instrumental in my relative confinement as an individual and not a team.
But the thought of giving in and working for someone else, to be beholden to their politics, and having to be a witness to all of those bad things is to me some kind of purgatory. I simply could not stand being a party to and being expected to be a participant in a failure of thought and deed, when I know for sure there are better and more viable ways.
“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven” — Paradise Lost, John Milton
Right now, the future of Octane looks very bright! I’m presently working on a number of large projects, which I fully intend writing about in due course. Rather than tease, I can tell you about two in particular.
Qwiktax started out as a relatively modest bookkeeping web application, but has since grown into a more mature, feature-complete accounting package, designed to allow small businesses to manage not just their bookkeeping, but employee payroll, fixed assets and VAT, as well as view on-going trading results, loans and profit & loss accounts. So far, we’re making good progress, but there’s still much to do before it’s complete and ready for general release.
To Book is an existing web application that is to be re-designed and re-developed, taking it to version three. In simple terms, To Book is an accommodation management tool specific to the needs of one particular business. To Book 3 will be a generic system, which we can sell to just about anyone who wants to take control of their event management needs. To Book 3 will be, by far, the most ambitious project I’ll have undertaken so far, and I just can’t wait to get going. Right now, we’re moving through the various agreed stages of the project plan, having signed off the initial wireframe designs and flow diagrams, I’m now moving onto the actual design stage proper.
So, all in all, there’s much for me to look forward to and exciting times ahead. With winter just around the corner, and all of the attendant festivities in tow, there’ll be no let up for me, but that’s business!
StartUp Donut — What inspired you to start a business?
WordPress is more than just blogging software. It’s now a genuine, simple and cost effective way for teams of people to manage content. WordPress isn’t perfect — you only get the one content area, which isn’t ideal. Here I’ll explain a work around that’s both simple and effective.
In lieu of the WordPress ebook I’m working on (which is close to going live, by the way), here’s an advanced topic for the power WordPress users amongst you. If you’re not a power user, but understand the benefits of what this article discusses, let me know and I can certainly help out.
Here I am, re-working the Octane website from scratch. I have all these design ideas, but they all break when I take into account how WordPress 2.9 doesn’t allow for multiple content areas, which is a real shame.
A few months previously, I’d been playing around with custom fields for a client website — I’d used them to store information for the main navigation on the website, such as a shorter name for each Page to use in the navigation, and a value to tell the Plugin which Pages to include and exclude. So this got me thinking.
And the answer is a big fat yes! That said, anyone who’s used custom fields will know that you don’t get a fancy editor for your content; all you have is this plain text box. That itself could be the cue for a Plugin, but right then and there, it wasn’t an issue.
So that we know where all of this is going, I’ll explain what I was doing. I wanted to add blocks of text (containing headers, regular paragraph text and lists) to my Pages and then be able to add graphical devices in between.
First things first, you need to add your content.
Now that you have your content added into custom fields, the next thing is to get that content into your theme. I don’t know where you’re placing any of this, so all I can do is explain how you pull your custom field content in.
[codesyntax lang=”php” lines_start=”1″]
<?php $block = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘name_of_custom_field’); if (!empty($block)) { foreach(($block) as $blocks) { echo $blocks; } } ?>
[/codesyntax]
Keep in mind, you can call custom field meta data from outside of The Loop — which is to say, you don’t need to be inside the loop that WordPress uses to summon up data about a particular Post or Page.
This code runs a check to make sure there’s data in the custom field. So, for example, you could invoke a layer in your Page or Post only if there’s content present:
[codesyntax lang=”php” lines_start=”1″]
<?php $block = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘name_of_custom_field’);
if (!empty($block)) { ?>
<div class=”name_of_division_class”>
<?php
foreach(($block) as $blocks) { echo $blocks; }
?></div><?php
} ?>
[/codesyntax]
By default, no they’re not. So if you’re using them to store lots of content — such as product data, for example — people searching your WordPress-driven website won’t find any of the carefully curated content you’ve added into your custom fields. Dilemma.
However, there’s a fix for this, all thanks to John Hoff, who’s written a script that extends the scope of the WordPress search engine to grab custom field data, too — which you can download here.
I’ve taken his code (which was a Plugin in all but name) and turned it into an actual Plugin you can install into your copy of WordPress. Once installed, you’ll need to edit line 37, which includes the names of the custom fields you want searched:
[codesyntax lang=”php” lines_start=”1″]
$customs = Array(‘additional’, ‘benefits’, ‘features’);
[/codesyntax]
So, within the Array() item, just change names of the items within the single quotes.
To add a new custom field:
To remove a custom field:
You’ve now learned how to turn WordPress into a more featured content management system, hopefully without breaking too much of a sweat. As always, if you get stuck, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can help out.
What with all of the new projects (landing pages, websites, print design etc), things have been moving quickly around here. So quick, in fact, I’ve had to totally re-think and re-design the entire Octane website from scratch. So, what do you think?
And the reason for all of this furious industry is, well, you! The writing side of things is gradually (there are often consequential lead times for certain publications) picking up, thanks to Emily Cagle Communications, but the previous website and blog just wasn’t cutting it — if I want to appeal to the publications, I have to make it worth their while pointing their readers to me.
More emphasis has been placed on simplicity, speed of navigation and clarity. So when you’re reading an article, you’re not being distracted by links and buttons left and right. Instead, you just read down through the article, and when you’re done, you have the option to share the article on a bunch of popular social networks, or contact Octane for more information.
All of which is neatly squeezed into the ever accommodating WordPress — fast becoming less weblog and more content management system. I’ve been able to kid and cajole it into doing things you won’t be able to do with your common-or-garden variety installation of WordPress. Oh no. Much of what you see here is WordPress after being given the Octane treatment.
So what’s changed? Apart from everything, there’s a new home page, which is essentially the blog aspect, now called Knowledge. By pulling all of the content to the front of the website, all of the knowledge I’m pouring into Octane is right at your fingertips from the moment you step through the door.
And if you can’t find what you’re looking for, use the search tool. Or use the category browser further down the page.
Then there’s the Media section further down the home page, which is where all of my publication materials can be found. Each article is an excerpt taken from the publication itself, accompanied by a link to the PDF, ready for download.
Further down the home page is the Community panel. Here’s where you can hook up with Octane and me, Wayne Smallman, on either Twitter or Octane’s very own Page over on Facebook.
Or as close as is feasible. You see, things just keep changing. Which is fine, assuming you’re ready for change. I am. There’s still more stuff I want to do and the new Octane website has the potential to meet those needs head-on.
If you’d like to know more about using WordPress to manage your website, or you’re interested in my web design services, let me know.
Octane Interactive now has it’s very own Page on Facebook.
Facebook is fast becoming a valuable first step for any business entering into the realm of social media, forming a hub to their network of contacts from all over the world, enabling them to share ideas, collaborate on projects and expose their businesses to a huge audience, numbering in the tens of millions.
So what’s in it for you? From the Octane Page, I’ll be:
… all of which will be fed straight into your news feed, interwoven with my very own commentary.
If you’ve got any questions, such as how to sell your products and / or services through your website, or how to securely share company data across the web with your colleagues, feel free to ask and I’ll do my best to answer.
Go to the Octane Page on Facebook and become a fan right now!
Perhaps you’re new to social media and want to know more? Download my free ebook: The Beginner’s Guide Social Media right now…