After spending a lot of time and money on modification to Art From Steel we learnt that the current setup cannot run under PHP5.

Our webhost will be disabling PHP4 next month and rather than spend more time patching up the current site, we’ve taken the plunge and upgraded both Joomla and VirtueMart. to version 1.53 and 1.1.1.  Whilst these numbers don’t seem like much, those with experience can attest that the upgrades make huge leaps forward from what we’ve previously worked with.

We’ve spent a lot of time with Joomla over the past few months and have an excellent understanding of how to configure it.  We are able to put a functional site together with a nice template, valuable components and modules within a couple of hours now.  We then need to add content and get custom graphics created.

We’ve built 4 sites in the last 3 days.  They all require more content, graphics and tweaks before they’re ready but we’re delighted with the increase in our productivity.

We are working on these new sites in the background and once things are ready we’ll activate them.

A few features we’re excited about on most of these sites are:

• Improved site designs with modern clean images and styles
   
• Improved coupons and gift vouchers
   
• An integrated blog for each major site
   
• Improved shipping cost calculations
   
• Accounts for wholesale and retail clients with different prices and order quantities
   
• Testimonials:  text, photos, audio and video
   
• Reviews and star-ratings for each product
   
• Integrated link pages
   
• Mailing list subscriptions built into the member registration form.
   
• An RSS Feed for each site

As these sites get completed, expect more updates from us. Realistically we’ll be moving nearly all of our significant sites to Joomla over the coming few months.  We are huge Joomla fans and love how easy it is to modify and expand site that use it. 

Rather than spend time updating the Adsense code for Calls.in.th we looked at the traffic stats and realized that this site has had it’s day.

Calls In Thailand was the first web venture we created and was once responsible for generating profits of over $5,000 USD per month. 

The site was written in a now-discontinued CMS package called TTCMS and we’ll always remember the fun we had with the main web designer who had a nervous breakdown as he worked with us.  One memorable conversation was when the man’s wife packed her bags and left him as he was communicating on messenger to us.

Calls in Thailand was created in 2001 and it’s a site we were very proud of.  In 2001 CMS scripts were quite rare and our site really was cutting-edge for its time.  We generated money by referring visitors to our United World Telecom website (where we earnt residual income on member’s telephone calls.  We also had a very exciting time pioneering VoIP calling-cards in Thailand - many years before this became legal :o).

Unfortunately we awoke one day to discover that the Thai telecom monopoly had decided to compete against low-cost providers like us.  Overnight they slashed their call prices from about $1.50 per minute to just 35c.  We were offering calls for about 60c a minute and we couln’t in good conscience keep recommending the services we offered to our clients.  We still retained some very large clients who preferred working with us and needed the anonymity that our callback service provided but our client base dropped from many hundreds to about a dozen over the space of a month.

To overcome this challenge we then commissioned our United World Telecom website to market the same international callback service but to a worldwide market.  This business has generated residual income over $500 every month with zero work for about 4 years now and will be expanded in the coming few months.

We have now redirected calls.in.th to our United World Telecom website. 

We discovered that our old ‘IsBlogged.com’ website had a number of security flaws and today we took the aggressive step of removing all spam blogs from it.

We’ve rebuilt the site using the lastest version of Wordpress MU and have filled it with 73 templates and 20 plugins.

If you are interested in having all the flexibility of Wordpress without the cost of hosting or or the time to set it up then visit the new IsBlogged.com site here.

UWT4Me.com is to this day one of the best businesses and websites we’ve created.  We became telcom agents for the company "United World Telecom" in December 2002 and, although the promotion was tough, we developed an impressively successful business in about 12 months.

This really was the first website of significance that we created and, despite the fact that the site has not been updated for about 3 years (possibly longer) we have received residual monthly income of about $500. 

The main selling point for UWT4Me.com is that we have 676 customers registered.  This is far more valuable than the website itself or the domain name.

At it’s peak, we attracted a lot of Thai businesses and were earning over $3,000 a month in commissions.  Once the market changed, the business was overlooked in favor of other money-making opportunities.

The website itself, whilst dated by today’s standards set a lot of precedents.  The ‘telecom wizard‘ was unique to the industry and was designed to help visitors choose the best telecom service.  We designed what can only be described as an "intelligent mail-parsing sequential auto-responder" to parse welcome emails from United World Telecom and to re-format them and forward them to our customers directly.

Whilst the residual income is most definitely appreciated and has kept a roof over our head during some tough times, there’s no denying that a business windfall of $6,000 would give us a lot of flexibility to promote and to develop our other sites. 

If we do not get a sale then instead we’ll consider updating the site ourselves and using Adwords to build it back up again.

Below are the real-time auction updates. We’ve chosen to test Sitepoint out this time as it has an excellent reputation and may set the way to us advertising some of our older sites for sale too.