Before I started the new project I had the design for the entire site coded in perfect CSS/xHTML and thought it would be easy to just hock it up to Magento. But boy was this a misstake, I have now read several hundred pages of the online documentation for Magento and so far I haven’t managed to get my new design working ontop of the CMS.

The biggest problem so far is the way the entire design is structured with XML and small snippets of HTML. Basically you store your HTML skeleton in the app/design/frontend/theme/default/template under different sub-categories. And then you have the rest of the structured in the app/design/template/frontend/theme/default/layout as blocks of XML that are calling for the html files.

It looks like this,
<block type=”page/html_notices” name=”global_notices” as=”global_notices” template=”page/html/notices.phtml” />

<block type=”page/html_header” name=”header” as=”header” template=”page/bimp/header.phtml”>
</block>

Okey it gets even weird’er when it comes to css and images, since they are stored in a different part of the three structured and called through a lot of different sets of rules.

I’m not a coder, I haven’t written a single line of code for more then three years. I should probably leave this to the professionals. So I will probably post this a new project on GAF if I don’t solve these issues before the weekend.

I feel that I can’t give you the entire business yet, but since it will be online before the end of June I promise I will write more about it during next week. Last year I made some tests on the Magento platform and until last week I had plan to use that for this project. But a friend of mine introduced me to Shopify that already have a great working platform with everything you need to a good price. And the best thing is that you can style it any way you want.

Next thing is to get the page coded in perfect CSS/XHTML and thanks to previous work I have good connections for that in South America. Hopefully it will be finished by the time I wake up tomorrow. After that I will start doing the back-end coding in PHP.

I’ve also contacted some potential partners for this project. The project will be two sites, one English for UK and one Swedish. The will have different content but almost the same design.

Since I’m going to sell things on the site but don’t want to handle a large stock of products, I think I will solve this with Drop shipments. That means you don’t have to keep all the products in stock, you have someone else keeping the goods for you. And they ship the products to your customers. One other way that I’ve been talking to friends about would be to link to other e-commerce sites that have affiliate programs. I haven’t decided what way to go yet, but I will before the end of the week.

I will have these two projects up before the end of June.

The biggest news at the moment is that I’ve left Testfreaks. The economic recession and the fact that people don’t buy as much consumer electronic products as before have gotten our trafic and conversion to go down. The company therefor decieded to let 5 people go inkl yours truly to cut some of it’s costs.
My task when I got to Testfreaks was to found a operations team outside of Sweden that  could provide high quality work at a resonable price per month. And this I have been doing with a fantastic achievement. We started working with a Ukrainian company that have evolved into a very good relation. We do also work with Chinese, Philippines, Russians, Brasilians and Indians to mention some of the other people working with Testfreaks.
When I left Testfreaks my operationsteam was a well oiled team with 25 people working close together with Skype, msn, gtalk, YahooIM and other communication plattforms, to make Testfreaks the largest and best review site in the world. .I will still keep my stocks in the company and I’m still convinced that the company will do great online.

Due to the recenssion and the fact that the company needed to save money I figure they will cut the spending on some of these workers and therefor they also thought it would be best if I left as well. I’ve done a great work and have the best recommendations from our CEO but now it’s time for me to do something else. The big question is what?

Currently I’m working together with an old friend of mine with his new mobile application that will be release on the techcrunch meet up in Stockholm in the end of may. I promise you it’s a great product. Available on almost all platforms except Windows mobile. (The iPhone app is really great).

I’m also evaluating the possibility to either take a new job or create my own company. I’ve also had a thing for e-commerce. I think there’s still big potential for e-commerce in Europe and especially in Sweden. I haven’t found any e-commerce site that have done what I want to do regarding design and functions. This is also why I’ve started experimenting with a Magento which I think is a great back-end system for e-commerce.

When I was working with Testfreaks I couldn’t find the time for all my small projects that I been wanting to tryout for several years. What I have done during these 2.5 years I’ve worked with Testfreaks is to write these idéas down and bought some domains for it. Now is the time to start working on these idéas.

I’ve gotten an office space in central Stockholm (Kungsholmen) thanks to my friend Per at Grandriver. So I will use that space three days a week and the other two days I will work with the mobile application company that I wrote about above. But you don’t become a great entreprenuer by just working 5 days a week. So you will probably see me with my laptop on coffee house during the weekends as well.
If someone with a great idéa or company are reading this and would like to hire me either for work or for something else don’t hesitate to contact me. I’m available on this blog name @ gmail.com. You can also take a look at my Linkedin profile or follow me on Twitter.

No more American Express for me!

So my main questions is – should I go with an Iphone or maybe a Palm Pre. Palm has been out of the game for a long time when it comes to smart phones. But with their new smart phone Palm Pre they have a good chance to be the new champion again.

Here it is, and sure it’s really beutiful and slick. The phone was presented during the CES 2009 and since then it’s been a lot of writting about it in blogs, forums, news and review sites. The really nice thing with Palm pre is their new webOS that the phone is runing. So the phone handles CSS and HTML which will make it a really webphone and probably a lot of widgets and other programs. It will also have no problem at all with webpages. The Palm Pre also have a touch screen in the same way as the Iphone.

Here’s a video about it

My friend Stefan Svensson have gathered a lot of pictures and video reviews of the Palm Pre on his swedish blog, please check it out.

But what about the Apple Iphone? I’ve heard rumours about a new version of the phone in coming out in June, I guess that the best thing is to way until then before I order a new Iphone if I’m getting one. Or I buy a new Iphone now and when the new version is getting out my girlfriend can have the other one. The reason why I would choose an Iphone is all the widgets you can have. I see a real need of at least three of them that I really want and would make my life easier.

I will continue thinking about this for a while. Send me your comments if you have idéas on other phones that I should get instead of Palm Pre or an Iphone.

In Sweden a competitor called, Bloggy have started up their business and managed to move a lot of the Swedish Jaiku community to Bloggy instead. The guy who funded it is name Jonas Lejon. I don’t really the point in creating yet another one of these sites. Who will win? Twitter haven’t really found a good way to make money on yet. In Japan Twitter are experimenting with this ads (See the Toyota ad below). Perhaps something for Bloggy as well to start with.

So how will these microblogs platforms make money? Why don’t they charge companies for their followers. Say for example that a large company would be on Twitter to communicate with their fans then Twitter could charge them like a buzz marketing company that do Word of mouth marketing. Perhaps this would be something for Bzzagent to use. Does anyone know if they already use a platform like this?

I really need to start posting more things on my blog…