2005 Coming To A Close

Well, it's almost the end of another year. It's been a year of turmoil around the world, but whether more so than any other year, I can't really say. For me it has also been a hectic year, and I'm sure about that. This has been my first **Serious** year of web development, and the results are reasonably pleasing. I haven't really had much of a festive season this year, as I've been trying to get some major changes finished on my main site before the end of the year. With 2 days to go, I look to be on track.
Next year I plan to focus much more on marketing and less on the infrastructure and coding of the site. It has been a years work just to get a dynamic site that is indexable and does all we need it to. There are some great shopping cart packages available out of the box, but none do the job completely in my opinion. The only way is to start with something like VP-ASP or OS-Commerce which is open source (meaning you can modify the code yourself) and chop and change it into something that fits the mould.
Of course, this is more easily said than done. A shopping cart application is complex by nature, and when you have to rip the whole thing apart, rewriting whole sections of code, it can be a challenge to end up with a good solution. The other part of the challenge is to keep the application fast, and make the changes fit into the existing application as smoothly as possible.
The other issue, is that once you have your custom, one of a kind, modified application, the next version will come out, and you can't upgrade to it because of all the changes you've made.
I face this now with VP-ASP, as I am running version 5.5, and 6.0 has come out now. I am not going to upgrade, as it is way too heavily customised now. It's interesting that some of the features I've added, are offered in the new release. I've learned ASP now, so I'll just keep building the application myself.
I'm in the process of setting up another site, using ZEN-Cart, which uses PHP, and I'm setting up some smaller, more specialized stores with it. The beauty of this, is that it runs well on Apache which is a much cheaper web hosting solution. (VP-ASP does have a version for Apache and MySQL also, but it has to be purchased separately). ZEN-Cart is totally free, and I've found it to be a good package. The only drawback is that it performs a lot of database lookups, so on a limited server with 10000+ products it may be a bit sluggish. Then again, with such a site, one would be a bit silly running it on a limited server.
On top of that, in the new year I plan to improve my health and fitness, spend less time in front of this screen (or any other screen for that matter), and generally start enjoying off-computer activities like I used to. Setting something up from nothing is always a hard slog, but hopefully things are rolling now.
One of the hardest things I find, is retaining creativity when there is so much to get done. Web design is a creative thing, and as a web designer, one is always looking for new and better ways to get information out to the user, in a way that will make them favour your site. That is hard to do when you have orders to fill, 1000+ products to put on, and all the other associated tasks.