Life of an Internet Entrepreneur

It’s just after 7 AM this morning. In another 30 minutes or so, I’ll be heading downstairs to breakfast and, shortly thereafter, driving to the office in Jasper, IN, to start another day of work. It’s been a long and challenging week, but a rewarding and accomplished week, and it’s not yet over!

It’s over 2 months since my last update and as there has been no lack of progress in my life by any stretch of the imagination, I’ve finally been impressed and blessed with the time to sit down, start typing, and share.

The following is an outline and summary of the events of the past 2 months:

• Relocated From Woodburn, IN (Near Fort Wayne) down to Jasper, IN - This included not only a move of nearly all my earthly possessions, but also a relocation of what was once my business office in Woodburn to an entirely new business venture. I made the move along with my dear younger brother, Joshua, who works full time with me and the rest of the team in our Jasper office.
• Started A New Business - As this has occupied the majority of the past 2 months, a paragraph will hardly do it justice, but I will give a brief sense of things and look forward to sharing more details over the next few weeks. Through circumstances that Providence along could arrange, my brother and I met and made the decision to go into business with two bright and God-fearing young men, Nick Johnson and Gunnar Bruun. Nick and myself have both been blessed with several years of experience in web development and, when we met, we were both running successful businesses. Gunnar, Nick’s brother-in-law, was working with him full time as Joshua, my brother, was working with me. God led in our lives and the four of us made the decision to go into business together. The day after our arrival, we started work on one of the biggest projects we’d, individually, ever done. We’ve been blessed with tremendous success as we’ve moved forward and finished project after project and, though some of the days are long and our brains feel like they’ve run a half-marathon, we unanimously agree that we all love our jobs.
• Trained For, Ran, And Completed A Half-Marathon - On Sunday, October 7, the four of us, along with several other members of Nick’s family, ran and completed (in good time) a half-marathon in Evansville, Indiana. Joshua and I, along with Caleb, Nick’s younger brother, had opportunity to train for just over 3 weeks prior to the run. Prior to our training, none of us had spent much time running. We went from having never run more than a few miles at a time to being able to do easily do 8 at a time and, ultimately, the 13.1 miles of the half-marathon. We attribute the success as a blessing from God and a reward for the lifestyle choices we’ve made. All of us are vegetarians and seek to be faithful in caring for the bodies God has given us. I’m looking forward to running again :).
• Baptized - At 21 years old, though expressing a desire to follow Christ and seeking to do so with all my heart, I had never yet been baptized. On September 28, 2007, at just past 11:30 at night, I made the decision to commit my heart and my life fully to Christ and was baptized in a lake by Jeff Johnson, Nick’s father. I’ve never been happier. God has called me and has drawn me closer to Him all throughout my years and has blessed me and given me a happiness beyond expression. The decision to be baptized is a simple following in the footsteps of my Savior, a public expression of my commitment to Him. A few short weeks later, my brother Joshua, 20 years old, also made the decision to be baptized and, on a beautiful Sabbath afternoon, he committed his life fully to Christ.
• Attended Family Campmeeting - Earlier this year, two of my younger brothers, Joshua and Josiah, attended the Oklahoma Family Campmeeting. They were greatly blessed by it and, when it came time for the Indiana Family Campmeeting, Joshua and I, Caleb, Nick, Sabra (Nick’s wife), and Noah (Nick’s son), drove up to Timber Ridge for the 4 day meeting. We were greatly blessed by it and highly recommend it. I was encouraged and inspired by the testimonies and, since campmeeting, God has used the things I’ve been blessed to learn to call me up still higher in my walk with Him.
• Blessed With Ministry - A few months back, after reading Escape to God and being greatly blessed by it, I was impressed to share it, along with The Great Controversy through my personal website. You can read the offer on my list of Books That Have Changed My Life. Over the past few weeks a few requests came in, which I happily sent out. On Monday of this week, though, what began as a tiny trickle of requests began to grow into a bubbling stream. As of this morning, I’ve received over 200 requests for books from all across the United States. I’ve contacted the publisher of Escape to God and, Lord willing, I’ll be buying out their inventory of hardcover copies to fulfill the requests received thus far as well as the requests that continue to pour in. It may, at first, seem like a great expense. But in the light of the way that God has used the books to be a blessing to me and, in the light of eternity, sharing these books with all who will read them, no matter what it costs me, is the very least I can do. Both books have played a pivotal role in my life and have been a powerful influence for good. I am honored to be blessed with such an opportunity.
• And Much More.. - It’s the little things that count most of all. I have been so greatly blessed these past few weeks and months. There have been trials and great challenges, but through them all, as I’ve looked to God for strength, He’s heard my prayers and has helped me through. I can’t see what the future holds, but I trust God to take me through it and, come what may, I will continue to exercise faith in Him, knowing that He will lead me along the very best way.

It’s now time to eat and go to work. I thank each of you for your support and encouragement throughout the times I’ve been blessed to know you. For those I’ve yet to meet, I look forward to meeting you :).

May your days be richly blessed and may you be a blessing to others,

-Jonathan Wold

About a week or so ago, I was working on a WordPress project that called for an above average contact form. It needed to give visitors the ability to upload photos, receive auto responses and notifications, have built in spam blocking, and track submissions in the WordPress database.

After a bit of looking, I found cForms II, a WordPress contact form plugin developed by Oliver.

I began working with the plugin and was very quickly satisfied that I’d found a winner.

Now, in setting up this plugin, I made a mistake and was reminded of an important lesson, which became the inspiration behind this entry.

The contact form for this particular project was being used as an extensive questionnaire. As such, we decided to split it up over multiple pages to encourage people to make it all the way through. I came up with a way to do it, but it wasn’t working quite as nicely as I wanted it too.

So, I went over to the cForms II support forum and posted my challenge to see if anyone had any ideas or suggestions.

Oliver replied, letting me know that my request, though possible, was outside the scope of what cForms was meant to do. He also (and this is where the lesson comes in) pointed out the trend that people, developers especially, who’d been using and benefiting from the cForms plugin, had taken to the habit of removing credit for the work.

..And that’s what I had done.

Without even thinking it through, I had chosen to remove the credit link back to cForms from the client’s site. This seemed natural to me. The option was there; Oliver had been nice enough to provide an easy way to add or remove his credit link, and without stopping to think, I’d taken it off.

Now, sure, it’s all open source, we’re more than entitled to add or remove credits as we see fit, right?

Well, we certainly have that choice.. but is it fair?

In my case, there is no excuse. I’m a full-time web developer. I get paid for the work I do and I benefit directly from the work of guys like Oliver who’ve put their time and energy into developing a solid product. If it weren’t for him and guys like him, I’d have had to go and build the same thing from scratch.

Which brings me to the lesson that this served to remind me of, “And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.” Luke 6:31 As a Christian, no matter what I’m doing, whether it be work or play, I’m to treat others as I would be treated.

Now, being thus convicted, I began to give the situation some thought and was blessed with an idea. In my redesign of JonathanWold.com, I had finished up the work by adding a colophon. Traditionally, colophons were used in print media to provide details about the publication of the book. In the web, we’ve begun using it to provide details about what goes on “behind the scenes” of a website.

I’ve decided to start making the addition of a colophon a habit, in which I’ll provide a list of the resources and technologies used in the architecture and design of a website.

So, a big thanks to Oliver for his work on the cForms II plugin and for being very professional about the entire situation. It was a timely lesson for me to be reminded of and I thank you for it my friend :).

And finally, last but most important, I give full credit for my work, the good work I’ve done, to God. Were it not for Him, my conscience would have never been pricked and my sense of integrity would be non-existant. The things I’ve been blessed to learn and the people I’ve been blessed to meet, have all come as a direct result of His hand in my life. The mistakes I’ve made I take full credit for, but the lessons I’ve learned from them and the victories I’ve gained by applying each lesson learned, all are due to a God who’s been forever patient with me and never given up.

Have a wonderful day my friends. Remember, give the credit where and to whom it’s due.

Until next time,

-Jonathan Wold

P.S. Credit for the awesome illustration up top goes to my brother Joshua, who, in addition to his work with me and the rest of the team, does freelance illustration on the side.

Cheers to the WordPress team on another fine release :).

I’ve been holding off on the tagging feature on a few client projects for this release and now that it’s in beta I’ll be looking forward to playing around with it and giving it a healthy test run or two before it’s ready for public consumption.

Also, thanks to Dean’s Permalinks Migration plugin, I finally made the switch from my old-school permalinks to something a bit cleaner this evening. With quite a few pages indexed and pulling traffic, setting up 301 redirects was important to switching URL styles and there’s no way I wanted to go through and do it manually. Dean’s work brought it down to less than 30 seconds. We’ll see how it affects traffic (if at all) over the next few days.

Have a wonderful rest of the evening my friends.

Until next time,

-Jonathan

P.S. I started up a WordPress Tumblr awhile back. It’s still a bit small, but it has some good resources for anyone interested in WordPress development. Grab the feed and pass along any additions you may have.

I was first introduced to jQuery, oh.. somewhere around a few months ago. Having a strong background in niche marketing and then front-end web development (design/xhtml/css, etc), my “programming knowledge” had been limited to a basic ability to editing basic PHP, etc, and “making things work”.

A few client projects were calling for a bit of extra user-side interactivity, though, and I knew it was time to do some learning. I did some research and discovered jQuery. It looked really interesting and, being completely new to Javascript from a developer’s perspective, it offered me the ability to give my clients what they wanted without having to spend a whole lot more time than I had to learn how to do it from scratch.

After a bit more research and the discovery that WordPress, my current development platform of choice, now comes packaged with jQuery, I was sold. I began scouring the web for tutorials and started putting into practice what I’d learned.

Happy with the results and eager to learn more, I checked to see if there were any books available on the subject. A quick search on Amazon (at the time) left me disappointed. I kept looking, though, and not long after discovered that there was a brand new book on the horizon, appropriately titled, “Learning jQuery”.

I emailed the publishers and they graciously agreed to send me an advance copy of the book. It arrived not too long after. I had planned to set aside a few days to pour through it, but life had a few other ideas and a couple of trips, along with some rather big business moves, took away any spare time I had.

As such, I haven’t been able to review the book in detail, yet, but I’ve skimmed it through and am fully satisfied that it will be just the hands on experience I need to open up the jQuery platform to some healthy experimentation.

Once I’m situated in the new office, I (or someone else on the team) will be going through the book in detail and we’ll be sharing our experiences then.

Meanwhile, full credit to the jQuery team for developing an excellent platform. Keep up the good work guys! Also, full credit to Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg for their excellent work on the book and to PACKT Publishing for another fine release.

To get your copy of the book, buy Learning jQuery on PACKT’s website or on Amazon (a tad more expensive, but nice if you have Amazon Prime).

Until next time,

-Jonathan Wold

To set the platform for the next move in life it is necessary to rewind the clock a few short weeks back and share some of the ways that God has been leading in my life.

Just a little over a month ago, on July 10, 2007, an overwhelming growth in business led to our move from a bedroom office in our tiny home to a full sized studio in the nearby town of Woodburn, Indiana. My good friend Christopher Jones was staying with my family at the time and he was here to help with the transition.

We moved into the new office in record time and, after a few short days delay, were setup and running happily on a 16MBs Cable Internet line, courtesy of our friends at Comcast. This may not seem like a big deal, unless you knew that we’d been running the entire web development business on a dial-up line from home : ).

Here’s a few quick pictures of the office:

It’s hard to believe that was barely a month ago..

Our good friend Chris headed back home a few days after the move and we were back to work. Over the next few weeks, Joshua and I continued working like crazy, taking on and finishing WordPress projects as fast as we were able.

Despite our best efforts, though, we just weren’t able to catch up on things. Project demands continued to pile up and I knew that something had to give.

While attending HostingCon with my good friend Travis Walker, I became excited about the possibility of launching a WordPress hosting solution. The market was ready for it and my experience with hosting, along with a lot of experience on the WordPress platform, seemed to be a perfect match. I began sketching out ideas and putting together a product lineup.. then I stopped to think.

God began to speak to my heart and asked if this was really what I wanted to do. I stopped and thought about it. The money would be good. I already had several amazing opportunities just waiting for me to open the doors. The work, though hard, would be straightforward and I knew that with the right team, it would be a solid success.

But I kept thinking about it.. and then realized that, no, this isn’t really what I want to be doing. Taking on WordPress hosting, or hosting of any kind, requires a serious commitment of time and effort. I’m afraid of neither, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that setting aside the next few years of my life to pull off the kind of success that I saw possible, well.. my heart just couldn’t be in it.

So, I decided to scale back my operations and return to private web development. That meant closing the doors on a few larger opportunities and continuing to work on smaller scale projects with new and, especially, existing clients.

Not long after that, God began awakening in my heart a desire to get back to my roots in niche marketing. Being in private web development, though the pay not being nearly as good as it could have been, allowed me the time to start building up some of my old niche marketing projects as well as focus on new ones.

And then, 2 weeks ago, life began taking a turn.

I’d been praying for some time that God would open and close the doors for me on the opportunities He’d have me let go or pursue. During the first weekend of August, my brother and a good friend of ours made our way down to Louisville, Kentucky, to attend ASI (Adventist-laymen’s Services and Industries). That Sabbath night, I met Jared Thurmon, the founder of PresenTruth.com. We began talking and I became excited as he shared his vision for the project that the Lord had given him. Another visitor stopped by his booth and began to talk. I stepped away and promised to return later that evening. As I began to walk away, I was suddenly impressed, distinctly, that I needed to go back. I asked God why, but He offered no explanation, just a further impression that I needed to return.

After a quick stop at another booth, I returned. Jared and I started talking again, and then another young man (whom I’ll introduce later) came by.

Over the course of the next few days, this young man and I began talking over the phone and ideas began to spark. Just under 2 weeks after our meeting, Joshua and I drove down to Southern Indiana to visit with this young man and his family. A few days after that, we made the decision to pack up and move south to relocate and work in a new office.

In just around 2 weeks, we’ll be finalizing the move and business over the next few weeks, months, and years, will take a very dramatic turn for the better.

How can I be so sure?

Well, while many of the details are yet to be worked out, I have absolute confidence in a single fact, and that is this: God has brought us together.

God heard my cry for help and, as I’ve been willing to put my best into the work before me, He has greatly blessed. Everything about this move and transition in business made a perfect and beautiful sense in a way that only God could arrange. I’m eagerly looking forward to this next step in my life and I’m looking forward to continually sharing how God has lead.

May your days be richly blessed my friends. Until next time,

-Jonathan Wold