Merry Christmas! We are finally back in business. Not so much as an online store, but as a blog. You see, for the longest time ever, I wanted to build a website that could deliver relevant content to my visitors as well as have a degree of interactivity with our customers.
So I bought multiple WooCommerce extensions from both WooCommerce.com and CodeCanyon. I ended up frustrated and even emailed a number of extension developers on ideas they could incorporate in their plugins. Some did, but raised their price to a level beyond my financial ability.
In running our online store, I also found uploading of products frustrating. It was all a tedious, repetitive process of copying and pasting descriptions followed by the uploading of photos. Frankly, I don’t know how others manage to upload thousands of products on their sites. And then it was boring.
So I took up programming at MaGiC in 2015. It was a scholarship program, which made it very affordable. But just when I graduated as a Ruby on Rails developer, I found transitioning to WordPress development challenging. It was a different language and I needed time to improve my fundamentals by coding regularly.
Back In Business: Why we went silent
So in early 2016, we were approached by a large digital advertising agency interested in a collaboration. But they were only keen to work with us on Malaysian based advertisements. At that point, I had to decide between focusing on TechGarage (our name before we switched to DigitalDestiny.co) or should I focus on programming.
It was a tough decision. On one hand, taking up the advertising contract would mean a steady monthly income and a swing towards something like Soyacincau or a tech version of Paultan. On the other hand, I want to solve the issue of monotonous, boring product uploads and possibly inventory management for WooCommerce stores. And I worked really hard during our nine weeks coding boot camp.
I guess you would know which decision I took. I buckled down on programming, spending hours in a day to go through WordPress, PHP and Laravel tutorials, exercises and eventually coding things up. I also extracted our WordPress posts from TechGarage and launched WPStarters.com. WPStarters is about how business can use WordPress and software to grow effectively.
What do we mean by being Back in Business?
As of now, we are not focusing on the online store. Yes, it is there but my main aim is to write as regularly as possible while maintaining my writing frequency on WPStarters.com. The long term goal for this site would be to
- Review more iOS and OSX Apps and Games
- Review more hardware, including smartphones, laptops, gaming rigs and accessories
- Writing more guides
- Maintaining our quarterly Best Postpaid Plans report that will benefit our readers
In short, for the next two years, our aim is to grow as a publication. I hope to make DigitalDestiny a sustainable business that could support a few full-time writers as well as gain international readership.
Back In Business: What Else?
As part of my sojourn away from TechGarage/DigitalDestiny, I picked up not just programming but some interesting software. These software would allow us to produce different types of content to make our content more relevant to you. This includes
- Videos
- Animated Videos
- Fleeqs
- Quizzes
- Viral Giveaways
- eBooks
- Calculators
That is it for now. We are officially back to business. Please stay tune as our next post will be something awesome and really useful.