Featured Work

MattsModels.com

Matt started his amateur models website in 1999. Last year he noticed that sales growth had hit a plateau and he needed help.

One of his biggest issues was that maintaining the site was taking up all of his time, preventing him from sourcing new models (and enjoying his life). So, my first task was to build a complex content management system (CMS) that allowed us to easily upload content and schedule the site to automatically update. One of the biggest benefits to come out of this is increasing site updates from twice a week to adding several new updates daily.

During the development of the CMS I also recoded the entire website to improve efficiency and optimized the pages for search engines. I also reworked the navigation and the layout of many of the pages to make surfing the site easier.

The toughest challenge I faced in rebuilding the site was improving the load speed by eliminating the site's dependency on the database. Many of the pages were taking several seconds to load as the server looked up all of the model and content data needed to display a page. Since my goal for this website was to increase traffic, I knew that load times would only get worse. To solve this problem, I converted the site to run on flat files, rather than hitting the database every time the site needed to display a page. The pages only change once a day, so I added a flat file generator to the CMS that writes all the pages as HTML once a day. This has increased the load times of the heaviest pages to under a second.

Once the front end of the site was under control, I turned my focus to sales and conversion. In order to increase revenue, you have to know your metrics. So I built several tools to analyze traffic. These tools allow us to see what sites are sending visitors versus what sites are converting visitors to subscribers; which pages of the site are triggering a sale; our conversion rate per channel and site-wide; and which subscription types sell the best. I also built a Campaign management tool that allows us to track any advertising by cost per sale through the use of tracking URLs. We've already used these tools quite a bit to nurture relationships with the best converting sites and determine which areas of the site need work by seeing what pages don't convert well.

The other big project I tackled for Matt is building out his physical network infrastructure. We noticed that during heavy traffic times the site would slow down to a crawl or not load at all. After an investigation I found out that his entire site was located on a single low quality, low bandwidth server. Incoming potential customers were sharing bandwidth with members, who were downloading around 1 terabyte of content per day. Not only was this very expensive (a single server's bandwidth costs increase dramatically once usage rises above 2tb a month), but it also killed site performance.

My solution was to spread the load out to several servers. Non-members now have their own dedicated high-performance server which has nearly doubled the conversion rate. I moved the member's content out to several low-cost servers and built a loadbalancer that spreads the usage out evenly. This has increased download speeds and reduced monthly bandwidth costs by 40%.

The overall result of my work so far is a network with unlimited exponential growth potential, a dramatic reduction in site management time, an improved ability to analyze and increase sales, and a reduction in overall operating costs.

1-800-Luggage

I was contracted by this multi-million dollar retailer to implement a better back-office system that would enable them to closely monitor their online ad spending.

After 3-months of research and planning, the client decided that none of the off-the-shelf back-office solutions met his needs at the price he was willing to pay. So, I designed and developed a custom back-office system centered around online channel management.

The system allows his in-house designer to manage the content of his online store, provides his sales team the tools to manage orders and fulfill drop-shipments through electronically faxed POs, and let's his marketing team quickly assess and maximize his online ad spending.

The system also imports UPS shipment tracking information 3x a day and sends tracking numbers to customers automatically.

Hegre Archives

Petter Hegre, a semi-famous European photographer, hired me as a webmaster to develop a content management system for his growing website. Hegre's website (seen below) is a collection of his fine art nude photography, a passion that came to fruition after many years as a commercial photographer.

In 2002, the year before I was hired, Hegre sold $20k in subscriptions to his growing online collection. My system automated the daily publishing of his content and helped us manage the streams of traffic, allowing us to market his work to the far corners of the Internet. The result was an astounding increase in annual revenue to $3 million in 2003.

As webmaster I also managed the 14+ servers required to handle the 2 million visitors entering the website monthly. Some of the bigger technical challenges were fighting off the 300,000 daily hacker attacks and trying to limit file sharing of his content.

Brio Energy

If you read my Project Management expertise page, you know that I stepped in as project manager at Brio Advertising on several occassions during staff changeovers.

When I got to Brio, all of the agency projects were managed on a big whiteboard in one of the common areas. Every morning the entire staff would stand around the whiteboard and discuss the projects. Clients were updated on project status once a week by email or fax after the account manager spent a couple hours writing up the progress sheets.

Being a programmer and web designer, I naturally thought this project board would serve our staff and clients much better as an intranet. So one day I slipped "Brio Intranet" onto the project board and thus began development of the new client intranet.

Below you can see examples of how it turned out. Clients were thrilled to be able to check up on their projects at any time from any internet connection. The staff was thrilled to not have to stand around the whiteboard every morning.

I built this client intranet in 2002. It amazes me that there's still companies out there that don't provide online access to project progress. How 20th century!

Penny Stock Finder

Back in 2006 I got involved in day trading - mostly for the thrill of it and its a pretty easy way to make money. Although I have a few safe, solid slow growth stocks, my favorites by far are penny stocks. These are stocks that trade below a buck and are usually for companies with either no earnings track record or terrible financials.

The reason I like penny stocks is because mathematically you can make just as much on penny stocks as you can on the major stocks (like Microsoft or GM). A dollar rise in GM will net you the same profit as a dollar rise in a penny stock for the same amount of shares. The key difference is that penny stocks are a lot cheaper, which means you can buy a lot more shares.

Google shares cost about $400 each. So for a grand, I can buy 2 shares. If Google rises $1, I make a whopping $2. For the same grand, I can buy 300,000 shares of a penny stock that costs .003 per share. If that stock goes up $2, I just made over half a million on my grand.

But alas, this is easier said than done. Penny stocks are the most volatile stocks in the market. Day traders buy and sell huge blocks of shares daily based on rumors, news, short-term charts, and many other things completely unrelated to the actual companies represented by the stocks in an effort to profit from a 2 cent rise over the course of a couple days. Most of the time these guys actually profit from a rise they created themselves by spreading rumors or hype on message boards.

Due to this, I stay away from day traders and research the stocks on my own. I have found that good companies generally rise over time, thus most of my research work is in finding penny stocks of good companies. With nearly 10,000 penny stocks on the market, this is a huge task, compounded by the unfortunate fact that most research sites (like Reuters) ignore penny stocks.

I needed better tools for finding stocks so as usual I built one myself. Its a pretty simplistic interface since I built in 6 hours. Basically it allows me to search for penny stocks in a specific price range or by the day's change/volume. The database updates once a day with new market data. I'll probably increase this to hourly updates once I have time to work on it some more.

Anyways, a fun and free tool to find penny stocks.