I live in South Carolina and the fossil hunting is great here. I dig in the dirt and dive in the black water rivers of coastal South Carolina searching for prehistoric fossilized Shark Teeth. Back in 1998 I built my first internet site to share my hobby. It gradually evolved into an internet fossil site Black River Fossils, and now hundreds of other amateur fossil hunters like myself share pictures and stories of our fossil hunting adventures. As of July 2008 Black River Fossils has over 250 active members from all over the world from such places as England, Germany, Holland, France, Belgium, and the United States. Across the US, Black River Fossils has members from South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, California, Texas, and more. New members join every day and contribute valuable localized knowledge about fossil hunting, geology, techniques, finds, and more.
So what does fossil hunting have to do with a software company? Over the years, Black River Fossils has evolved into a sophisticated application capable of so much more than its humble beginnings. Now it is a shopping cart framework built around DotNetNuke, an excellent open source ASP.Net driven portal solution. The application had to evolve because I met some people who needed exactly what I have been building for years.
The first person I met was Mark Havenstein. He owns Lowcountry Geologic, a professional full service fossil operation. Our relationship began because I was selling him my extra fossils. When one hunts for fossils, eventually the accumulation of fossils grows to the point that it can no longer be stored. Eventually, I built Lowcountry Geologic a website, too. Now, years later www.lowcountrygeologic.com offers its Shark Teeth, Trilobites, Dinosaur teeth and other Fossils for Sale 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
One day while I was at Mark's shop helping him do an update to his site, I met another guy who had it together named John Fradella. He was returning some scuba gear that he and his former girlfriend had borrowed from Mark. John's ex knew Mark. He dipped in the shop for 2 minutes and we met. I told him I built Mark's website, and he said he needed a website built. I gladly took the challenge.
John's website was based on an idea he had while visiting Hawaii. He wanted to do some activities while he was there, but he couldn't find anyone who could get book him for the activities he wanted to do. So he met with hundreds of individual activity operators in Hawaii and made agreements with them to make bookings over the internet. www.HawaiiDiscount.com was born, and when John and I met, I adapted my application to book Hawaii activities. Hawaii Discount books tours on all the major Hawaiian islands: Big Island, Kauai, Oahu, and Maui.
By this time, I realized I was actually a software developer, so I started Serrated Software, (www.serratedsoftware.net). I thought it was a clever name because some shark teeth are serrated like steak knives, implying sharp. I won't belabor my thought process for anyone who has actually made it this far reading what I have to say.
Hawaii Discount was doubling its sales every year, so it was doing great. But John, a Citadel gradute, was not satisfied. He enlisted the help of search engine optimization expert Bruce Clay. They evaluated Hawaii Discount and told us everything that was standing in the way of better search engine rankings. I attended a 3 day training seminar near their Simi Valley, CA headquarters. During this exclusive training, Bruce Clay taught me how to build a website properly. Everything I thought I knew about the web changed dramatically.
During the months after the training, I re-engineered my application to take advantage of my new knowledge. Now, every feature in the cart is optimized with proper search engine optimization priciples. I had to change a few things in the DotNetNuke core functionality as well. I know the DNN community as a whole frowns on that, but my optimizations aren't required, they just help the whole process along. Most changes are required in the skin. I will not list them here because those changes are the key to the entire optimization process and well beyond the scope of a bloated About Me page. Search Engine Optimization did not end with the application changes. After that, the actual content inside the pages had to be adjusted, and that process is ongoing. Results are often many months beyond the actual work, and that process, too, is beyond this.
Our SEO well under way, sales began increasing to the point we could clearly see that the process was working. We hired someone for a short period of time, and she shared an office with our payment processor. John was in the office showing her some things on the site, and his phone kept interrupting their conversation, just like it does every conversation. Her boss Mike decided that John knew what he was talking about as far as websites go, so he enlisted us to build a site for him.
Mike's web site is www.discountfurniturewholesale.com from top manufacturers like Vaughan-Bassett. From inception to execution, it has the benefit of all our experience so we also expect great things from it.
