McStyles Software

We’ve been busy here, especially during the last several months. McStyles has created over 100 web sites, and is responsible for maintenance for over 100 web sites. Most of the sites we have produced are content sites supported by advertising. Others are business storefront sites.

The work we’ve done recently is a big change from doing primary contracted software development. As it became apparent that Kristyne McDaniel, our primary consultant, was going to need to work entirely from her home office, it was also apparent that it was not possible without a paradigm shift in our business model. We had three contracts last year for contracted software development that was to be done in our own home office, but the clients were not happy with the reduced level of personal contact with Kristyne. After several failed attempts, we decided that our current clients would not be able to make the transition effectively, so we had no choice but to allow those contracts to expire.

Meanwhile, our foray into internet marketing has been slowly gaining ground. While we are not yet fully up to the revenue levels we previously experienced, we believe the climb in revenues will continue and will completely replace our lost contractor programming revenue. This is great news for Kristyne, who has opted to stay near her disabled spouse to the maximum extent possible.

More news to follow soon!

I am still doing new development work in Visual FoxPro, although at this point all new development has an eye toward changes on the UI side of the equation. While the data files will remain accessible for many years to come, it is likely that the actual application development tool will not stay usable a long time past the planned obsolescence announced by Microsoft.

All but the oldest and most stubborn programmers of VFP applications know other languages as well and keep themselves ready for work in multiple areas. It is only wise to keep options open, whether you are writing in VFP or VB or C# or whatever. At present, a lot of my work is now written in PHP and MySQL. These tools are generally supported on all web hosts. It only makes sense to use the most widely available, reasonably priced, and portable tools.