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2006 ~ Year of the Dog
The year started with lots of work on 1-800-Luggage.com as order volume continued to increase every month. The e-commerce system I built for them is keeping up nicely and has reduced order processing time by 70%!!
I added a new adult client in January, Matt's Models. Matt's amateur model site has been around since 1999 and has gathered a decent following. He contacted me to take over webmaster duties of his network. So far this has included building an administration system to manage content and track sales; spreading his site from a single server to a load-balanced network of high-speed failover servers; hiring and managing a site team; and developing/implementing a growth plan. So far my work has resulted in an average month-to-month sales growth increase of 25% above the growth average of the last 5 years and a 50% improvement in the visitor to sales conversion rate.
I built a custom content management system for a new client in early Summer, Chasin Girls. They contracted with Blue Design Studios for site design, NATS for affiliate management and sales tracking, and 3 other web developers before giving me a call. After 6 months of losing money on incompetent webmasters, I had them up and running (and launchable) within a couple weeks (of course).
Late in Fall I built a new site for Matt to help manage his budding adult modelling agency. The site is Matt's Model Network and its based on a new software script I wrote called Pay-by-Ad. The idea is that sellers will pay for leads. I'm not sure if this will take off, but two clients asked for it within a few months so I built it.
In December I started a huge recoding project for 1-800-Luggage.com. Typically when I first build a site, especially one I think will have light traffic, I let my pages access the database whenever they need data. As a site gets busier - or if I expect it will be a monster site at launch - I'll convert the site to use flat files rather than accessing the database directly (note from 2007: I now write all sites using XML flat-files). 1-800-Luggage.com has a unique server load problem. The front-end traffic doesn't put any strain on the server, but the back-end admin slows the site down when there's many administrators.
During the peak of their Summer retail season, there were dozens of admins (salespeople, bookkeepers, content managers, vendors) actively using the back-end at the same time. The complex functionality of the 800 backend (which includes creating PDfs on the fly, e-faxing purchase orders to vendors, managing thousands of images, and tons of other things) requires a lot of memory. If several users are eating lots of memory at the same time, the server starts crashing. Flat file systems use less memory by limiting the number of times the scripts access the database, and thus freeing up 80-90% of the memory for complex functions. A flat file rebuild is time-consuming but well worth the effort in the long run. 1-800-Luggage.com has over 35,000 lines of code, so this project will continue into the new year.
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