I teach Web Site Design at a high school. A few nights ago, I attended an articulation meeting at the local community college to see if our students could get college credit for taking it. I was told no, but the reasons astounded me.
I teach web site design using straight XHTML and CSS and simple tools like Notepad and Notepad++. The college professor uses Expression Web. You read that right. Microsoft Expression Web. According to her syllabus, they finally get around to learning about tables and lists in week eleven of the course. They never talk about div-based layouts. It’s an exercise in how to use a WYSIWYG editor to hack something together.
I’m in week 7 of my class, and already, my high school students could teach the entire curriculum at that community college.
When asked why she wouldn’t articulate with my high school class, she looked down her nose and said, “Expression Web is a totally different animal.”
This makes me sad. In so many ways.
Very soon, I’ll be starting a freelance web site design service. It’s something I’m good at and enjoy doing. My eventual goal is to maintain multiple streams of income. I imagine that a year from now, I’ll have income from the following sources: teaching, software licenses, and contract design work. I’m also strongly considering writing a textbook based on the Web Site Design class that I created and currently teach at a high school. I think my approach to teaching is innovateive and different than the other textbooks on the market. I have two other strong software business ideas which could easily be producing hundreds or thousands of dollars of income each month.
Common advice to young entrepreneurs is to stay focused and not get distracted. Work on your project and nothing else. I happen to believe that the older advice of not putting all of your eggs into one basket makes more sense. Freelancers and contractors rarely rely on a single source for their incomes.
In the near future, I’ll be revealing the details of my web design services. My focus will be community organizations and small businesses, along with clients located in the Minneapolis area.
Everyone says that if you start a business, you need a blog. I’m not so sure about that, but I’ll give it a try. Most blogs serve the needs of the writers more than the readers, and I don’t expect this one to be any different. I blog mostly for myself. But there are two other groups that might possibly find this site worth reading: customers of my software and other small business owners.
I wrote Attendance Management System because I needed attendance software for a local Civil Air Patrol squadron that I was in, and nothing that was on the market really met our needs. I just wanted a tool to say who was here, who was gone, and provide some decent reports. I tried forcing our attendance into Excel, but that was like trying to put a square peg in a round hole. The only other software available was expensive time tracking software for businesses, which we didn’t need. So Attendance Management System was born.
We could set up a computer at our meeting facility, give everyone a password, and have each person sign in as they arrived. Our policy was that members needed 75% attendance at weekly meetings in order to participate in fun, extra activities. I built the software to say who was eligible and who wasn’t, and I kept it flexible enough to change the reports if our attendance policies changed.
Over 200 organizations are now using the software worldwide, including schools, fire departments, nursing homes, scouts, athletics, and all other types of organizations. It’s been field tested and found to be very robust and reliable through over five years of use. I plan to use this blog as an outlet for reflection on my experiences as an organizational leader – I suspect that most of my customers are also leaders of some sort – and also to talk about what it’s like to have a small business. Of course I’ll keep you updated on any new developments with the software as well.
Thanks for visiting!