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business zealus.com

Administering web store databases – the inside out look

Database administration - www.istudioweb.comThe long delay in posting was caused, as some of you might have guessed, by the fact that we got ourselves a busy client (at least for now). We’ll see how it all go, but so far I was faced with an interesting dilemma. Or, rather, was sort of presented with the task to solve.

Our newly signed up client owns couple of web sites that are being fed from the same database. Administering these two sites is a breeze, since any product that has been entered in one immediately shows up on another. The administrator’s interface combines both web sites, so there are no surprises so far.

On his next step this businessman decides to create another web site. This one is fed from a different database, since it was a new team of developers who created this store for him. Additionally, the admin interface is not as friendly as the first one, although the feature set is the same. It’s worth to say that all three web sites are developed on PHP/mySQL platform. The story unfolds under the cut…

Categories
business

Researching The Cooperation

Researching the competition is easy. Researching the people who you plant to work for is somewhat harder. You don’t want to rise suspicion, alienate people who you plan to work for or ask wrong questions. More then that – you want to get honest answers. Not that your future cooperation (sorry, I couldn’t figure out better antonym to the word “competition”) wants to lie to you, they just inadvertently will try to present themselves in better light. Or positioning themselves as a good buy.
Now, bear with me for a moment, for this is a little longer then usual of a passage.

If a business owner is afraid of using internet store, because all his previous experience suggests that it’s not worth it – how do you explain that he’s wrong? You analyze the way he run his online store, figure out what’s wrong and provide the solution. Right? See more under the cut…

Categories
business clients

Small Business Acquisitions

Acquisitions are nothing new. Your lawyer will call my lawyer or leave a message on my machine – or something like that. The problem starts with smaller acquisitions, where lawyer’s service would cost just as much as the cost of acquisition itself.

Last couple of days I was involved in the sale of my client’s web site. He sold his Russian food web site to another entrepreneur who already owns a brick and mortar store plus couple of related web sites. Obviously I cannot disclose the amount, but let’s just say it’s not large enough to think about involving lawyers.

The way the sale was proceeding was a good example of lack of knowledge on the part of small business owners. Small business owners don’t quite realize what is being sold and bought during the transfer of rights to the web site and it’s domain name. Some people think that the actual CD with web site code and database is the object of sale. Some think it’s a domain name. Some think it’s the login and password to administration area of the web site.

In either case while being the web master for the web site in question I became a third party who revised the contract, got the CD with latest back up of the web site code and database, passwords to admin area and e-mails.

Domain name and hosting transfer are still pending, as the client who bought the web site doesn’t clearly understand the difference between the two.