Lots of good stuff
Man, there’s a lot of good stuff going on right now.
On the HeadsDown front, Ryan and I have done some amazing things with the HeadsDown League Managment tool. We’ve built a nice little app that allows an end user to update their website from start to finish. Right now we’re targeting roller hockey leagues (because that’s what Ryan’s made inroads with already), but once we’ve really built that up, I’d like to start targeting small retail offices, and other places that want a quick, no-hassle, web presence.
$550.00 a year (plus domain registration), would be a decent little chunk of change for a starter package with Headlines, contact, links, and customizable templates. Then everything else would be a relatively inexpensive add-on.
We’re definately going to go with a yearly subscription fee for everything, and we’re going to package some stuff up into bundles to encourage people to take the big deals. Even still, our most expensive package will be about $2000.00, which is chump change compared to what some places charge.
The way we’re looking at it is; it cost us very little to develop it. Maintenance will be fairly minimal, and it doesn’t change much whether we have 1 site or 100 sites, other than the fact that we’ll make more money with it and be able to enhance, improve, and market it better.
On the car front, I will get it by Wednesday of this week at the latest. Unfortunately the ice storm screwed with everybody’s ability to cope with anything in this city. On Friday only one out of every three people came to work, it was a little nutty to say the least. None-the-less, Margot, our friendly sales person, promised to try to get me the car by EOD Monday. I’d really like that since I need a car to get around on Tuesday (which is my downtown, then uptown meeting day). PLUS I really want to play with my new car!
On the home front, we’re very close to putting something down on a home. We’ve settled on a town (Ajax), a builder (Tribute), neighborhood (The Hamlet), and even a house design (the Haney). Now all that’s left to do is talk to a mortgage broker, and then go to the builder and say “Build it and we shall come!”. We’re pretty excited about the whole prospect…and when we do start the process, I’ll create a blog so we can update and record our progress.
Finally the job front. May will see me start my new part time job at Centennial College. I’m teaching one day a week at the E-Business school. I’d love to turn that into something more full time, and run my business on the side eventually (we’re talking 5 years). For now though, this is a great opportunity. At TSN things are going great. I was given my official new terms of employment, which haven’t changed much since my BGMi contract, and I’m being given the opportunity to really run with the ball…which is something I’m pretty good at. I really like the freedom and responsibilty that I’ve been given.
I’m currently writing something of a “Brian Garside Manifesto” for what I’d like to see happen at TSN and CTV in the next 12-18 months. It has a lot to do with adopting web standards, making our site simpler, yet more elegant, and really streamlining our back end code, front end code, processes, and everything we do. I’m so glad that the BGMi experiment is finished, and I can finally “put up, or shut up” with all of the things that I used to say I could do better.
That’s a lot of stuff going on. I guess I better actually get to some of it.