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I'm just about done with ArtByBrett.com for the time being. Order Processing is complete. Order Management is now available.  The only things left to do are: - Show a detailed overview of the order, with separated ship dates and custom text when purchased.
- Administratively view the orders to be shipped and manage their status.
- Test like crazy!
All do-able in the next two days. Web site ready by the end of January. Milestone accomplished.I spent a lot of time tonight in PayPal's developer "Sandbox," which is a pretty cool feature. Effectively, it's a mirror of the PayPal site, but with dummy transactions for thorough testing. One nice thing that PayPal does is to hand back to me the order details in a posted form, so that I can retrieve the purchase information (payment status, payment date, transaction ID, etc). I mentioned a couple of days ago that I might work on Art I Can Afford.com later this year. To be clear, that's not a replacement of ArtByBrett.com, but rather it would be a web site for artists to post their work to sell, such as Kris does. She uses her comments section as an auction block - ingenius. If ArtByBrett does well, then I'll work on Art I Can Afford and build auctioning into it. But it would be a completely separate and independent web site for use by multiple artists to sell their work for less than $100 (hence, the "afford"-able theme of the site). And with that, time for bed... |
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Went bowling with all the kids and with Nick's girlfriend, Ali, yesterday. Here's Nick posing...  You can click on the picture to play a little video of the Cub and Austin bowling and goofing around with Nick. After dropping the boys off at Jackie's, I went to a friend's family's house and played "SceneIt" for the first time. Coincidentally, that had nothing to do with the recent movie quizzes, but I do think it's kind of fun to do. And then lots of coding into the wee hours and again this morning... I'm pretty much done with the order process and I'm now onto order management. I could be done by tomorrow. Then lots of testing and - (gasp!) - painting! Yayy! I couldn't be more excited. |
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Know your movies? Try this... Name the following movies by the scene depicted. Leave your answer in the comments, but no peeking at others' answers! #1
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Was up pretty late last night after the boys were tucked into bed and got a lot done. I'm now pretty close to finishing the order process - maybe three hours of coding left. Then order management and fulfillment. And then I'm done with the web site for now and I can open the store!  I'm considering opening Art I Can Afford.com, based on the code that I've created here. That site would be available for other artists to post their work and collect payments. Maybe later this year. That site would be pretty similar to this site, so a couple of weekends and it could be done. I have to think through the strategy canvas and competitive matrix before I begin any work on it. Now, off to bowling with the kids! |
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Can You Name These Movies? |
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The greatness of any business plan is not in the plan's thorough rigidity, but in the writer's flexibility. Circumstances change. In a game of survival, adaptation wins.  After a lot of thought, it seems to me that the web store needs to open prior to April 1. For several reasons... but most chiefly is to try out this grand design of mine. I could create the bestest plan in the whole wide world and if the product sucks, then it's not worth a damn. Or if the web site doesn't do what it needs to do, then I've got a problem on my hands. The wrong time to fix that is when I'm getting the retail store market going. Better to work out those kinks now, when the volume can be low and problems fixed quickly and without the distraction of order fulfillment.
So, the grand opening of the online store is now sometime in February. To do that, I've ordered the card stock and envelopes that I need and I'll print them myself. If that works well, I may just continue to do that and forego the employment of a printer for a while until the volume is simply too much. One side benefit of this strategy is that I can respond more quickly to a surge in demand of a design style. Flowers sell? Paint more flowers. People sell? Paint more people. This way, I'm not weighted down with an abundance of extra cards that no one wants. I've learned that getting the customer's information to process the order is a longer code cycle than I expected. I'll slip past January 31, but only by a few days. Once I have the basics of the order capture down, I'll start to paint and release cards in a gradual and weaved way with the coding that remains. I'll let intuition drive the development. And I miss painting. I'm anxious to see what will happen. So I tweak the model. I'm tired of programming at the moment... I'm excited for the time that I cease using that skill so much. |
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I've got the checkout page written, although I need to add some elements to it.  And I've been able to integrate it with PayPal.  I have a lot of testing to do with it, but it's time for bed. I need to attend the regular Friday 6:30 AM meeting tomorrow to discuss business venture #2 with Mike and Adam. ETC: Woo hoo! |
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How Many Days Have You Been Alive? |
I've implemented a "Days Alive Calculator" in the "Things To Do" menu up above. Just type in your birthdate and click Calculate. Why did I do this? Because an average life is less than 30,000 days. Think of how much you do in a single day. Or how little. You don't get very many days... so make the most of every one. The calculator on the left is my invitation to not trivialize anything. Love people! Say what you feel! Pursue your life's passion! Live regret-free! "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it." - Ferris Bueller Amen, brother... |
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