Category: business

This section is for articles pertaining to web development, design, or marketing and businesses that uses these tools. It may also cover stock market trends or trading insight.

  • 2025

    2025

    After launching three eCommerce websites on Shopify in April, I was laid off when CoffeeAm was sold to a company in Colorado. Those three sites were over a year’s work and over a thousand product graphics made in .GIMP. And that came after a vacation with my family. This is the life of a marketer – always vulnerable in a lay off.

    The good news is I was scooped up by a local manufacturer that produces outdoor displays. All their displays are high-end and engineered to withstand just about any thing thrown at them. But please don’t throw things at our displays. The company has over 25 thousand displays shipped in countries all over the planet.

    I was hired to create and maintain their social media accounts and push their marketing online through Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. There are two brands – BoldVu and MRI. MRI is a bit tricky as there is an ocean of content already bearing that term. After getting that off the ground and establishing a pattern of posts I turned my focus on their sites.

    The first site was set up with a proprietary theme hosted on WP Engine. The walled off theme replaced the Gutenberg block system with it’s own so I replaced the theme with a child theme of Frost; a free theme from WP Engine. The second I built in the spring of 2026 using a the same approach with Frost. Both are up and available on BoldVu.com and MRI-Inc.net.

    Up until 2026, I was using AI as a jump start on content and as assistance with large blocks of code. At MRI, I’m leaning into it by build a whole suite of WordPress plugins. It also batch processes large sets of images – cropping, color adjustments, exposure, and a bit of filling in. The filling in works like the stamp tool but it just isn’t as good as manually adding edge filler in GIMP.

    2025 was a year I dedicated to leaving Microsoft Windows and Adobe in favor for open source. So, now I’m running fully on Pop!_OS, Pulsar, Shotcut, OBS Studio, Android Studio (for Flutter), GIMP, Blender, and Figma or Inkscape. I’m almost completely off print work but I did have a client request a simple poster in June.

    Also, I moved everything I could off of AWS. We’re done with that. The pricing was too complicated – hidden costs in “free” services that turned out to not be free. I’m now hosting three sites and an app (gunicorn+flask) which is turned off and costs nothing, all on Digital Ocean. The prices is less than half of what I was paying.

  • Gourmet Coffees

    Gourmet Coffees

    On April 7th, myself and Artic Leaf launched a website: GourmetCoffess.com. This redesign, of an outdated eCommerce site was a very long time in the making. There were a number of things I took away from this project and can now apply those processes to two more sites in development. From the site, you can see that there’s a much cleaner look overall for gourmet coffees. The font is now a reasonable size and the colors follow a design pattern.

    There was a massive life with the product graphics. There was a “waterfall” incident as well, but I won’t write about that here. That said, there are 180 product images, each with a unique background, a group label at the bottom, and text on the label which was adjusted for each. Originally, there would have been double that and miscommunication led to the waterfall moment. I was the primary person driving the product with a considerable amount of assistance from Kelly @ Artic Leaf.

    There were a handful of integrations that were pulled into the new site with the largest being Klaviyo. The flows/automation was duplicated from another site and a fun little bug hunt trying to connect the _dmarc record which require the value to be wrapped in double quotations. A support ticket notifying their team was sent in the hope it will help someone else out there hitting the same brick wall. Using .liquid, I created custom page and collection templates as requested.

    Enjoy!

    https://gourmetcoffees.com

    Before:

    After:

    If you have questions about the process, the graphics, the software used or something else related to this project, please feel free to reach out. I’d love to discuss this or other site plans for business. If you’re wondering, this is a custom version of the default theme for Shopify: Dawn.

     

  • Open

    Open

    A month ago, I opened Altimeter. I did so with no expectation or reason to believe it would be successful, but rather it would be available to anyone who wanted it. Sure, the deal is someone would have to supply their email. But whoever wants it, can get a solid (if not perfect but unusual) theme for $0.00. I think it’s important to give you more context to Altimeter. I don’t have a lot in the ol’ bank account and I’m struggling to get ahead. I’ve also been lead to think I could lose my job at any moment for any reason, which, comes with no benefits and no assurance of raises or promotions . . . ever.

    Needless to say I’m in a pickle.   -redacted for professional reasons

    The good news is I’ve been accepted to the University (January is go-time) of West Georgia at the Richard’s School of Business where I will work (extremely hard) towards a B.B.A. in Management. I’m following a path I started in 2022 when I earned a certificate in Project Management and I have another project on the front burner to boot. I even had to turn down my closest friend’s offer to finance a crypto mining operation I was looking into. Sorry Tij – we’ll get there somehow.

    With that in mind, I have two amazing children that continue to amaze me week in and week out as well as a working wife who is feeling the strain we’re both under. The bills keep coming and you can probably relate to the pressure I’m in as you navigate your own storms, pitfalls, and unfavorable outcomes. If you know me, you know how much time and emotion I have invested into WordPress and the open source community. So much so that I’ve been watching as WordCamp Atlanta doesn’t happen this year.

    Open is easy to understand if you use it and don’t “give back.” However, I’m not that person. Open is like giving away something you care about because you may care more about the community or humanity than the project you worked really hard at. And when I read that Matt Mullenweg said “WordPress is mine,” my jaw dropped. The very next thing that popped into my head was, “there’s probably a reason behind this and I need to slow down.” Which is what I did.

    Slow is not normal at this point in history due to a trend towards instant gratification, as well as, instant access to information. Reading about “going nuclear,” “lawsuit,” and “spat,” is a bit alarming, but I was glad to learn that WordPress.org has always belonged to Mullenweg. It’s a bit more complex then just that and really interesting how WordPress consists of more than just .org and .com – the open source learning platform and the commercial business that is built on top of that platform. I’d rather let him explain it at 4:57 of this video:

    Apart from opening up Altimeter, I’ve also spoke at WordCamp ATL and volunteered at WordCamp 2016. I’ve also attended two other WordCamps and gave a talk about setting up a drop-ship site using WordPress and Printify. I’ve given back. It wasn’t easy because we’re wired to ask, “how do I get compensated?” I can see the side of WPEngine as well. I don’t remember seeing or reading about requirements to give back to WordPress and other companies use the platform with the expectation to do so freely without any returned help.

    So, Matt (ma.tt) decided to (what I think is a pretty smooth choice) let the company (automattic) vote on what it wanted to do with his decisions. He offered them six months of salary. Would you leave a company that gives six months salary, lets you work remotely, and encourages you to do something you love? Am I licking Matt’s boots? No. He gave to the community as well. I respect that. I don’t always agree with his decisions, but it’s not my company and it’s not my software. To add to that, WordPress has so many good things going on and I think this is blowing way out of proportion.

    So why am I writing this? Well, I applied to Automattic in 2021, but sadly, did not get in and I’m at peace with that. Maybe I’m not Automattic material and that’s ok – I have Outright and I am working on a new app that I’m excited about using Flutter and .dart. It’s wild and I can’t wait to share it with you – this is the project on the back burner.

    So is WordPress “open?” Yes. Is Matt an advocate for open software and WordPress? Yes. You also need to know he’s making money for a for-profit business at the same time. I couldn’t pull that juggling act off. In conclusion, I think I’m just going to stick with Matt on this and say good luck to everyone. Keep writing and building the internet – see you online.

    None of the statements in this article are paid for and I do not endorse any of the services mentioned above. I am not receiving compensation or any other benefits from what I write.

    References:
    https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/4/24262232/matt-mullenweg-wordpress-org-wp-engine

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUJgahHjAKU