HGTV Junky March 31, 2008
Posted by engjake in house plans.Tags: extreme homes, house plans
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I’m not the average guy. I don’t really like to sit and watch sports unless it’s the X-games or the Tour de france. I will if my family is, but i just don’t follow team sports like most guys do. Instead when I watch the tube it’s usually a programs on HGTV, FineLiving or whatever channel has programs about architecture, building or flipping homes. Since I used to design house plans and own a house plan publishing company.. the home industry has always been an interest of mine. One of my favorite programs which I rarely catch is called World’s Most Extreme Homes. This show features funky homes all over the world. Some are architectural masterpieces, others built from extreme materials. It’s fun to see the creativity some people have with their homes and kinda makes you want to do something a little different that the simple box with a roof that most of us live in.
off the shelf vs. custom code March 27, 2008
Posted by engjake in business, house plans.Tags: business, ecommerce, house plans
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For a small business the off the shelf software is usually the best option. Having started several online businesses I can tell you that even the most robust off the shelf systems may not have exactly what you want. We often end up having to do funky work arounds to get an off the shelf system to work. This is a little furstrating at times but most off the shelf systems are designed for a small business selling simple items like t-shirts or books. If you are selling items with multiple variables or attributes it gets a little more complicated.
As a result, our house plans business would not work with an off the shelf (pre-programmed) system. This is pretty frustrating because there are a lot ofecommerce packages out there that have some really cool features. But, for our house plans website we had to custom write the code so that the user would have an easier, more pleasant experience on our website. The upside is we have a much better user experience, the downside is we are lacking in some marketing and analytics tools that we would otherwise have. It is difficult to find a good quality ecommerce company that will customize the cart to suit your needs at an affordable price. We have searched high and low to find one and you either pay through the nose for a license to start with, the customization costs are rediculous, or both.
So whats the answer? We chose to write our own software so that it was easy to use, and we’re having to use other analytic tools or 3rd party services to get the statistics that we need. You have to decide which is more important to you. With some of my other businesses it made more sense to have all the marketing tools and work around the idiocirocies of the shopping cart, than to pay someone to custom write a website exactly how I wanted it.
designing house plans February 3, 2008
Posted by engjake in house plans.Tags: home design, house plans
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I used to draw house plans. A lot of house plans. I enjoyed it quite a bit to be honest. I would do the design work, see it built in the field and decide what I thought worked and didn’t. Next time i would implement the ideas that i liked, discard the ones i didn’t. Plans got better over the years. After a while, being in the market we are in it started to get a little old. Drawing plans that were so similar, clients not wanting to try anything new. I grew tired of it.
The other problem is that i started a couple of businesses over the years that take up a lot of my time. They also generate income that is not directly tied to the amount of time that i personally put in. With house plans i didn’t get paid until the project was done, sometimes not for months after. And if I could only do 5 projects a month, thats all i could do. I’m capped out. This is a hurdle of running a business that is basically selling your personal skills. If you are doing something that you can charge a lot for, it works well. In our market, people don’t want to buy house plans at all, so when they do pay they don’t want to pay a lot. So unless you can clone yourself, you don’t have a lot of room for business growth. You couldn’t keep an employee long because you’d be training your competition. It’s a dilemma.
I still like drawing plans to a certain extent. But just at my own terms. Its not fun anymore designing them for other peole. I don’t know why. It lost it’s luster. Bad thing is I have people asking me to all the time because they have been past customers or have seen plans I have designed. I kept doing it even though i was really short on time for quite a while. These days I just don’t want to. If i have time off from work, i want to be home making plans with my family.
