The Technical Entrepreneur » Michael

New Web Design Project – Dressing Room Launched

Michael — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:33:06 +0000

Beamstyle is proud to announce that we have launched Dressing Room, which is an e-commerce website selling woman dresses and goods.

Please feel free to browse the website and let us know what you think.

Google Local Search – Performance

Michael — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:02:22 +0000

Recently, Google has implemented the local search for Google Hong Kong (or at least I just noticed), and we are on the top 10 list. The result has been awesome. We are getting a lot more conversions since.

In April, we are not getting much traffic from search engine (most are referred from Yahoo), and the number of conversions are not too spectacular.

In June, we can find our own website on Google’s local search, and the result is awesome. We are getting more new inquiries than ever.

Optimizing for local search is extremely important, and it gives a newer site like ours a chance to be on top of Google.

Yahoo! Store vs Self-hosted E-commerce Solution

Michael — Sun, 31 May 2009 08:20:16 +0000

Many people do not understand the differences between Yahoo! Store and a self-hosted e-commerce solution such as Prestashop. Both solution has its own advantages and disadvantages. Some customers ask us whether they need a self-hosted e-commerce solution or not. I always tell them that it really depends on what their needs are. In general, if our customers are unsure of their sales target and just want to open a store, I would recommend them to first use a simplier solution such as Yahoo! Store to test the market. Otherwise, I believe a self-hosted e-commerce solution will save more money in the long run. Here is a simple comparison of the two solutions.

Feature	Yahoo! Store	Self-hosted e-commerce solution
Cost	Yahoo! Store costs around $400 HKD for the initial setup fee. In addition, for its starter package, it has a monthly fee of around $320 HKD and a 1.5% transaction fee (does not include credit card payment or Paypal payment fees). For its professional package, it costs around $2400 HKD monthly and a 0.75% transaction fee.	A self-hosted e-commerce solution has a one time setup fee (which includes web site design and programming fee) which is significantly higher than the Yahoo! store (depending on the functionality). In addition, there is a server cost to host the solution. There are no hidden fees.
Design	Somewhat customizable, but it requires a programmer and graphics designer to do it (cost depends on the rate of the design team).	Fully customizable, and the cost is already included in the solution package.
Reliability	Depends on Yahoo!’s server uptime	Depends on the hosted server uptime (you must ask yoru server provider what is its guarantee uptime)
Functionality	Limited to what Yahoo! offers to its customers (cannot add new functionalities)	Fully customizable (for example, you can integrate the shop’s user account system to an existing user database)
Ownership	The shop is hosted on Yahoo and it belongs to Yahoo. You cannot easily move your shop to another provider.	The shop belongs to you, you can open the shop on several different web sites without paying anything extra (except for server fee).
Performance	Depends on the performance of Yahoo!	Depends on the hosted server (you can choose the location of the server. For example, if your shop is opened in HK, then you can get a server in Hong Kong to get optimum speed)

Summer Job

Michael — Sat, 30 May 2009 10:37:07 +0000

We received some emails concerning having an internship position at Beamstyle Web Design HK. Regretfully, we do not have any have any plans of taking any internship positions. Please do check back regularly for any news related to Beamstyle and Web Design. Thanks!

Please Respect Your Occupation

Michael — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 10:06:05 +0000

This weekend, I went to my friend’s birthday party and I met someone who made me quite angry. Being boring person myself, I usually ask people I just met what are their occupations (I know it is not an interesting topic starter) after I asked them for their names. So I approached this guy (let’s call him guy A) and asked him what his occupation was. Well, he didn’t tell me. So I talked to the guy beside him (let’s call him guy B), and eventually I found out he is a programmer. We had a nice talk about our jobs and we both have genuine interest in programming.

Later on, I do not exactly how, but we ended up asking “guy A” again what his occupation was. He talked quite unwillingly and quietly said that he has “the same occupation as you guys”. Then he said that he is a programmer, not an I.T. person (In Hong Kong, an I.T. person is usually someone who setup and fix computers). I also asked what does his role at work, and he just said “don’t mention about it”.

I do not know why he doesn’t want to mention about his work and his occupation. It is true that programming/software engineering is often not treated as important as some other occupations in Hong Kong. Being a financial center, Hong Kong’s economy is based on finance and real estate. Programming is usually just a supporting role for these industries. However, I do not understand why he felt so shameful to be a programmer. I am guessing, it is because some of the girls in Hong Kong are materialistic, and they think that programmer makes a low salary. (There are some girls in the party and maybe guy A does not want them to know about his occupation?) In my opinion, if he feels shameful about his job, then he will never succeed in that field. In addition, he is completely disrespectful and has successfully made me angry (since I also write software for a living). If he is really so shameful to be a programmer, he better should just switch fields, perhaps to the failing iBanks.

How to start a Web Design Company Step 5: Business Plan III – Marketing Analysis

Michael — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 01:10:36 +0000

We will continue to discuss about the business plan for this update. The next section of the business plan will be the marketing analysis. This section is another important section as we will use this to clear think what products we should offer and at what price. The main ideas we must sort out in this section include:

Customer Analysis
Company Analysis
Competitor Analysis
Marketing Program
Future Plans

For the customer’s analysis, we need to define what our target customers will be. Different customers require different tactics to approach them. For example, if your target customers are kids, you might want to have an interactive and cartoony website to showcase your product. Also, the prices should also be cheaper if it is a target for kids. For Beamstyle, we believe that most of our customers would be from the retail sector. We will market and price our solution to be attractive and affordable for these customers.

Company analysis is a section where we discuss our company’s strength and weakness. For Beamstyle, our advantage is that we use an agile approach to create our solutions. This approach is not commonly used in Hong Kong, and we may gain a slight advantage as one of the early adopter of this approach.

The competitor analysis is perhaps the most important point in the entire section. By gathering our competitor’s offerings and prices, we would know what kinds of service we should offer and at what price. For example, if your competitor can offer web hosting at a low price while you cannot, it might be better if you focus your marketing strategy on something else such as web design.

The marketing program would be a description on how you will market your products to your customers. For Beamstyle, it would be mainly from searches using search engines and referrals/word of mouth.

After the marketing analysis section comes the Operation Strategy and Process section. This section will outline how the business will run ideally. It will include the different steps from how to approach your customer and how to hand off the final piece of your software to them. For example, in our business plan, we outline the simple steps of our development process to how long we should provide our warranty process.

Our next update would be the final part of our business plan guideline tutorial. Be sure to come back and check it out. Please feel free to leave some comments if you would like to question me on the details.

Step 1: The Founding
Step 2: The Naming
Step 3: The Business Plan
Step 4: The Business Plan II
Step 5: The Business Plan III

3 Points to consider when choosing a potential web design vendor

Michael — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:53:53 +0000

Find out what your needs are.
If you want to show off your company’s core business and it hardly ever changes, then you may not need a full blown CMS solution. If you want to sell a couple of products online, maybe all you need is an online form with Paypal integration, not a complete e-commerce solution.

Pay for only what you really need.
Please make sure you are getting the services you want. I have heard stories where companies only want a simple Paypal integration for the couple of products they are selling, but the solution provider keep asking them to get a full e-commerce solution. The resulting price ended up about 300% higher than what it would’ve been, and the customer had gained nothing as a result. In addition, there are a lot of companies boosting that they can do SEO. Make sure SEO is really what you need before agreeing to pay for it. If your website is just your online portfolio which you want to show off to your friends, then you probably don’t need SEO.

Make sure you are getting what you want for the package.
Never assume what you are getting as a part of your package. Once the agreement is signed, it is rather a difficult (and unwilling for most solution provider) to change the requirement for free. Make sure that if you need web hosting or domain registration, you need to ask if it is included in the package.

Make sure you remember these points, even if your solution provider is Beamstyle Web Design Hong Kong

Starting Up a Web Design Company: Step 4 – The Business Plan II

Michael — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:08:40 +0000

Welcome to part 4 of the multi-part series on starting up a web design company. We will continue to talk about the business plan and discuss on my experience in writing one. Please be sure to check out the first article on the business plan as well.

Last time, we left off writing section 2, the company history. We will now continue with section 3 of the business plan, the business concept. The business concept would answer the following questions:

Products/Services the company provides
The target customer groups
How does the company’s products/service will stand out
Distribution method/how it will run

For Beamstyle, we initially defined our services to be web design, online shop, and graphics design. We only defined these three services because we would like to first build our branding among the group of services which we expertise in. Our initial target customers will be local SMEs and non-profit organizations because we know projects from this group often are smaller. Due to our smaller team size, we believe that we can create our solutions with higher quality when we work on smaller projects.

We believe our agile development model will make us stand out from our competitors. In Hong Kong, agile development is rarely used because Hong Kong is a market where changes are not easily accepted. It is extremely difficult to have a customer in Hong Kong to adapt to the agile development model. However, Beamstyle uses a modified version of the agile development model that is created for the Hong Kong audience. We believe this will let our customers slowly understand the advantages of the Agile development model and accept this as the mainstream model for software development. In addition, our small team consists of members with over 10 years of web development. Each member has his own area of expertise. We understand a cross functional team is required for a full quality solution.

For our distribution method, we defined out how our company will work with our customers. This would include how we would arrange meetings with them. We defined the main flow on how we approach our customers. For example, we would first give out a sample quote for a project. Then we would write a detail requirement document. If our customer accepts the project, we would start to kick off. It is also a good opportunity to determine when to charge your clients. For example, at Beamstyle, we normally break our payment into three parts.

Other parts in the series:

Step 1: The Founding
Step 2: The Naming
Step 3: The Business Plan
Step 4: The Business Plan II
Step 5: The Business Plan III

Starting Up a Web Design Company: Step 3 – The Business Plan

Michael — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:19:32 +0000

Welcome to part 3 of the multi-part series on starting up a web design company. We will talk about the sections I wrote my business plan and how it is useful to define your business. I won’t write the details of the different sections of the business plan. You can find some good resources on writing the plans in Business Owner’s ToolKit or from About.com’s Business Plan.

Many people think that a business plan is not useful unless they are using it to get funding from an angel investor or getting a loan from a bank. I can tell you that it is not true. I believe that the business plan is the single most important document I have written for Beamstyle. Some of the advantages of this document include:

Letting your partner understand the business to prevent arguments later on
Defining your business scope
Learning more about the market and the competition
Defining your market segmentation
Knowing more about your financial situation

The first part of the business plan is an executive summary where I basically summarize our entire business in one page. It defines what the rest of the document would be about. In my executive summary, I have written:

The type of solutions/products we offer
Our competitors and what they offer
Our advantages over them
Our team
Our goals and future development

I strongly recommend anyone of you writing a business plan to start with the execute summary as it gives you a strong guideline to follow for the rest of the document.

The second part of the business plan is the company history. This section would go in detail about the management team, showing the team’s strengths and weaknesses. It is a good opportunity to set the roles of each person in the company given the analysis of each member in the team. For example, after this analysis, we found out that we got a person who is a programmer, but he got a great deal of experience dealing with clients. We assigned him to be our business analyst and the job really suits him.

We all continue to discuss about the business plan next time, as I have to get back to work on the Beamstyle projects again. If you enjoy this series, please feel free to give me a vote on dzone.

Other parts in the series:

Step 1: The Founding
Step 2: The Naming
Step 3: The Business Plan
Step 4: The Business Plan II
Step 5: The Business Plan III

Banned from Helping

Michael — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:36:58 +0000

Yesterday I was on an online forum, I was trying to be helpful and help somebody with a web design problem. My signature happened to have a link to the Beamstyle website. What happened after? My account got banned. Oh well.