[RonTheLogician]

Hey Dani,

The other day I watched your last 10 vlog videos and was pleased with what I heard concerning your academic and technology upgrade plans.

In dropping your three courses, I hope you had the good sense to do so before you accrued financial penalties for signing up for them in the first place. I guess you are now left with two courses, and it sounds like you are on track to complete them successfully. Keep it up.

I admire your attention to long-range planning. Given your assessment that finishing your degree will now take longer than you had hoped, it makes sense that you are seeking a non-DIY solution to the challenge of a site upgrade. I don't know the numbers of how you share revenue with the FTV folks, but you report that they don't see it in their interest to provide an upgrade to your site gratis, at least for now.

You say that you are now endeavouring to save the estimated $15,000 to do the upgrade you desire. I can't begin to tell you whether this is the best investment of your money or not, assuming that your only motive is financial gain. But I am inclined to agree that you should make your site mobile-friendly, because ever more everyday people are ditching the PC for a smart phone. (PC makers are staging a huge marketing campaign even now to try to get more people to buy a traditional PC again.) You should learn the term "responsive design" - read a bit about it at your old friend Wikipedia here.

It was once the hope that developing for the Web would be especially simple and cheap, because by its d?but, people understood how adoption of standards could help make this happen. Alas, the high-stakes competition fostered highly antagonistic interests, which means that accommodation of, and testing on, the most popular viewing platforms is needed today. Attempts to find common ground meet with limited success. There is the so-called "World Wide Web Consortium" (W3C) founded and headed by Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee, FRS and head-quartered at MIT. But it has limited practical power, despite what one might naively imagine is its moral authority.

For example, about three years ago W3C convened a community called WebPlatform.org that is charged with creating a set of online reference documents for Web standards. The project is a collaboration between W3C and many big or important digital software technology players - Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, and Opera. Alas, even today the project is only in "alpha" testing! (Learn the terms "alpha" and "beta" testing if you haven't already, e.g. here. ) And the most recent official blog entry is a year old! But at least the Web Platform project discusses responsive design, here.

I don't recall everything you spoke about concerning site redesign, but I do remember that you wanted to highlight the last few new shoots in a new way. May I offer the perspective of an outsider? To a new customer, EVERYTHING you've EVER done is "new"! So I suggest that you ALSO feature a single, random, rotating OLD item from your entire inventory on your "home page." You might even try experimenting with a (e.g. 10%) discount available ONLY during its limited tenure presence on your home page. "Artificial shortage" is a common, classic sales technique that forces maybe-buyers off the fence and into action.

Also note Web-based (i.e. automated) sales lets one collect MASSIVE amounts of sales intelligence at basically ZERO incremental cost, e.g. a complete, detailed record of ALL sales since company foundation. Such data would let you test things like the "price elasticity" of sales, e.g. how much did the number of sales per day increase (if at all) during the month you featured an item at discount, compared to that when it cost full-price? Interpreting such data requires a basic knowledge of statistical significance, which should MOTIVATE your close attention to such a math class in college!

Finally, I don't want to sew trouble where none exists, but have you ever taken a critical look at the issue of "Hollywood economics"? Since it is so costless to duplicate your snapshots and videos - there is no physical "product inventory" - it is also easy for people to make illicit copies. You are very well aware of this issue as regards your clients and customers, but the same considerations apply to your business partners who complete the actual sales activity, whether this means FTV, CCBill or anyone else. Anyone who makes money on unit sales (vs. production), like yourself, should ask if there is any way to audit whether the reported sales information is truthful. Remember that, even when audited by a "Big Five" accounting firm, Enron managed to "cook the books" to the downfall of oh-so-many innocents!

Best of luck in your academic and commercial efforts.