Last year I had this idea, that I would start a side business and help people out with web hosting, web design, and technical support. Well things did not work out as I expected but the journey was always incredibly interesting and I learned quite a lot about myself and business in general. I hope that following helps out others, or at least proves entertaining.

The Business Plan

I did not have one and perhaps I should have written one out. The problem with business plans is that they need to be done by the accounting person. The type of person who knows how to manage money and who has an eye for business managament. I am more of a rush into things and see what comes out of the chaos type of people. Essentially I thought I could make a business of helping people by selling basic design services and support at really affordable prices. However, this did not work. Most businesses need high tier clients, namely they need big accounts. Trying to survive on making $25 websites really sounds like a good idea, but in practice it does not work. Half-way through the year, I decided to change course and concentrate less on getting customers and instead on doing what I enjoyed. WebKeyDesign went from a pagerank zero site to a pagerank 5 site in less than a year. This ended up being my big success for the year and along with this I even got a few more clients along the way. My best advice is if you are going to do a business, make sure you do a business plan if this will be your only work, but if you are doing it as a hobby or side business, then concentrate on what really matters. Enjoy the work you put in to it and it will be successful.

Saying No

Incredibly, the hardest part of selling yourself and your abilities, is actually having to say no to some people. It is actually very easy to find yourself with the wrong client and end up having a bad argument which you really did not want to have. Avoiding the wrong client is crucial and the best way to avoid this relationship is to say no. It is okay to say that you do not offer certain services. In some cases you simply can’t deliver what a client wants and in others, the client really does not understand what they are asking for. You cannot please every potential client, so do not try to. At times communication works against you, you sometimes misunderstand a client or vice versa, so it is important that you establish a good relationship when speaking to clients.

Spend Less

One of the first things to pickup about business is that spending is something you need to control from the very beginning. Good businesses spend very little, great businesses spend accurately. What this means, is that you need to spend very precisely. Marketing campaigns need to be examined to see how effective they really are. You might be spending money and not actually getting anything out of it. The less you spend the more profitable you will be, but most of all you will have the funds to use in case a good opportunity presents itself. All of this requires prudence and research on your part.

With a little persistance and motivation, success is only a matter of time.

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For some reason Apple’s 15-inch Powerbook is notorious for not liking certain DIMM modules, and I have been meaning to upgrade my main Macintosh, which is of course a 1.5GHz Powerbook. After some trepidation and research on Google, I felt pretty confident in purchasing this 1 Gigabyte DDR DIMM module, which was the cheapest I could find on NewEgg.com. As it turned out the comment reviews on NewEgg were actually correct. The Patriot DIMM worked fine on my Powerbook and I have had no problems with the computer at all since installing it.

I’m not sure if this is true or not, but from I have read, it appears that the less accessible DIMM slot is the most compatible with generic memory. So if you buy a module and not sure if it is compatible try installing it in the bottom most slot. Of course be careful, as the 15-inch Powerbook is also known for having weak memory slots that will break if pushed too hard.

Right now I have the Patriot DIMM in the less accessible slot and a 512MB PNY DIMM in the other slot. The PNY DIMM I got from a retail store and is not part of the original Apple installed memory.

The Powerbook is slightly faster than before now with 1.5GB of memory. But the improvement is not as dramatic as passing 512MB of memory. So if you have 768MB or 1 GB total, don’t expect much improvement, unless you are running lots of applications at once.

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Perhaps you were at your local Best Buy store or even at Target and you saw something like Eazy SuperFast WebSiteBuilder on sale for $29.95 or you were up late watching Comedy Central and heard about how you can make $8000 a month at home with an Internet home business, or you got an offer in the mail to renew you website domain for an easy payment of $49. And I won’t even mention the spam emails from people willing to sell you your domain name for just $69. The problem with all these offers is that they are mostly scams or outright bad deals.

The true objective of these offers is to get you to pay up what seems like a modest fee for something which is either not that valueable to begin with, or not even legitimate. For example, a domain registration does not cost $69 or even $35. At WebKeyDesign, we sell domain registrations at $15, as a service to our friends and clients. Just yesterday I got an offer to renew all of my domains for $35 each, and they included search engine submission and all these extras. Too bad all these extras either cost nothing or they can’t guarantee that you will actually get them! When it comes to domains, paying too much is a bad deal, but paying too low is also something to be avoided. If you are paying almost nothing for a domain registration it means the registrar is selling the domain at almost cost, which equates to very limited support and possibly having your email address used for marketing purposes.

The easy site builder software is actually a good deal, if we were still in the 90’s. Today’s internet users expect quite a lot from a website, and the simple truth is that a cookie cutter style web site that these inexpensive software packages produce, just does not cut it anymore. There is a reason why Dreamweaver costs $300. If these $29 software packages worked well, then Dreamweaver would not exist at all. The simple truth is that you are better off buying a $29 book on HTML and using a free application like Nvu to do your web site, than buying cheap software.

The most outlandish scam of all is the one that promises you the most money. Can you really make thousands of dollars with just a web site? The answer is yes, but it requires a lot of work and investment. You either have the skills to setup and maintain a site all by yourself or you have to pay someone else to help you. Most online ventures that work either have a lot of money behind them or they are very small and do not make huge profits. Consider that there are people who have the technical skills to setup a site, yet they never do it! Why? Because, the maintenance alone requires a lot of time and some people rather use their free time for other things. If however you are interested in starting a home business and using the web to help your business grow, then it is a good idea. Just realize that like anything else you do in business, you have to know what you are doing and spend wisely. Looking for the best return on investment is what business is all about. Spending money without knowing the rate of return, well that’s how you can go out of business.

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Since upgrading my Qwest ADSL to a higher speed, I have noticed that my old Cisco 678 router was getting pretty outdated by today’s standards. Qwest primarily uses ActionTec modems which are pretty basic and a bit unreliable, depending on whether you believe the complaints on DSLReports.com. They recently upgraded the firmware on the 701 ActionTec modems and are now offering a more user-friendly 2Wire gateway modem, but I already have a couple of wireless routers at home and with Intel pushing a new wireless standard, it is just a matter of time before a wireless router will be outdated. The undeniable solution is to get a reliable standard ADSL modem and hook it up to whatever wireless router you want. In this case the least inexpensive reliable ADSL modem that I can find was Netopia’s 2240N-VGx ADSL2 modem.

Netopia makes a variety of 2200 series products. These are an inexpensive line of ADSL2 compliant routers that are meant for home consumers versus their higher end business series. The 2240N is the least expensive and is available online for about $67. The 2241N adds a USB connection, and the 2246N is a basic 4 port ethernet router. There is also the 2247NWG which includes wireless features.

Purchasing the 2240N or 2241N can be quite hard, since almost every online distributor has them out of stock. Even eBay doesn’t have much in the way of Netopia 2200 series products. I had to wait about about ten days for my 2240N to be delivered. In case you are interested in purchasing either one of these single ethernet port modems, your best bet is Froogle. Do a search for Netopia 2240N or 2241N on Froogle.com. The two major retailers are Buy.com and TechDepot.com.

The 2240N Out Of The Box

Once I opened the rather plain white box what I found inside was pretty sparse. There was the 2240N modem itself, a standard AC brick powersupply, a purple telephone cable, and a yellow ethernet cable. There is a one page sheet of instructions for setting up the “gateway”, and a setup CD that most advanced users will not need.

For setup purposes, I disconnected my Powerbook from the network. Hooked up the 2240N directly to the Powerbook. I had to change Networking to DHCP and let the Powerbook get a new IP address. Following the included instructions, I then simply used Safari to access the web based interface. The Basic Setup option failed to setup my Qwest DSL connection of course.

Two things were needed for the DSL line to work. The first one is easy, once you find the advanced options, you need to change the ATM connection to Qwest’s preferred settings. Look for VPI and VCI settings. VPI needs to equal 0, and VCI should be set to 32. In my case the last thing to do was to call my 3rd party ISP. It seems that my ISP requires that the DSL line be rebuilt or essentially, reset by them in order for new equipment to be recognized. Perhaps a simple MAC Address change would have fixed it on my end, but since my ISP reset it for me in less than two minutes, I was connected and running.

I then hooked up my Linksys Wireless router to the 2240N and hooked my Powerbook back to the Linksys, changed my Network settings in Mac OS X and I was back to normal.

Cisco 678 Versus Netopia 2240N

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