I stumbled across a really obscure ecommerce system written in Perl, it had no backend management and all orders were recorded in an email. I purchased some hosting and struggled to get a working site where visitors could actually purchase products. The site was awful to maintain and every product had to be added manually with form tags.

This went on for just over a year when in 2002 I found a more automated ecommerce package called Actinic. This looked perfect, adding products through a Graphical user Interface and simple one click uploading. So we purchased Actinic Catalog Version 4 and started our online empire again. Actinic was a breath of fresh air at first but after time I found it very restricting. Although Actinic was a Windows program when you clicked the upload button it would compile a load of Perl scripts and upload them to your server.

So to add the extra functionality I needed I started hacking the Perl scripts that were uploaded, this was a nightmare as everyime the store refreshed it would replace all of the modified scripts with its new ones. The limitation really came when we purchased a system that would allow customers to create their own Karaoke discs.

At first there were only 2000 songs and I imported all of them in to the Actinic catalog. This meant customers could browse the store and add songs to their basket. The problem was the karaoke system imposed certain restrictions, for a start customers had to choose a minimum of 10 songs, they couldn't have more than 50% of the same artist, they couldn't have more songs than a CD could hold. Needless to say the Actinic system didn't work very well at all.

I decided that the only way I was going to get what I wanted was to write something myself. I did some research and purchased a PHP book from Amazon. Using the book and with the karaoke creator in mind I set about learning PHP. While learning PHP I decided to search for an ecommerce system written in PHP. I found osCommerce which seemed to be very popular and had a large user base. I downloaded a copy and got to work migrating from Actinic Catalog. In April 2004 I had completed the first version of the karaoke CD builder and our new osCommerce store was ready. (Both are still online to this day. The store: http://www.djbox.co.uk and the Karaoke Disc Builder: http://www.djbox.co.uk/catalog/proburn.php)

I continued developing my PHP skills and started learning about mySQL. I absolutely loved osCommerce, I was only limited by my skills. I continued to better my skills in PHP, mySQL and osCommerce and spent many hours playing with HSBC's secure e-payments system. I really struggled to get it to work with osCommerce. I finally got it working and during the process I met many contacts on the osCommerce forum that had also struggled with the HSBC system. I helped many osCommerce users to install HSBC and found myself being asked to do other osCommerce work.

In July 2005 I decided to start a company so I could offer osCommerce services more professionally. In all the time I'd been running an online business the one thing that still annoyed me most was the hosting companies. Their complete lack of support and service was unbelievable. So I decided that if I was going to offer an excellent service I would need to be able to control as many of the parameters as possible. For this reason I purchased a server and began learning Linux and everything to do with running a secure web server.

My first server went live in August 2005 with 1 user, me!. Shortly after that I got an enquiry from an osCommerce user about HSBC. Their hosting company wouldn't allow the HSBC system to run on their server so he became my first hosting customer. Things slowly picked up and I gradully got more and more osCommerce work. In February 2006 (after working during the day at the DJ/Karaoke business and evenings on the hosting/oscommerce business) I decided to give up the day job and go it alone.

During February 2006 I fitted out an office at home and on the 1st March 2006 I started working from home full time. The first 6 months were really, really hard. I was working long hours, new work was coming in slowly but money was very tight.

It wasn't until November 2006 that I had gained a good portfolio of customers who came back for more and more work. I had acquired many new customers that also needed hosting. Things started looking good and I started work on GoCreations. This was going to be a site where I could offer my products and services. In January 2007 GoCreations was launched, although it was slow at first I spent hours developing the site, and new addons.

In March 2007 I got my first order, since then the site has got busier and busier. It ranks really well on the search engines and gets a healthy amount of visitors.

We now have a steady stream of large and small projects on the go at once and are always looking for talented experienced osCommerce developers/designers. If you're interested we have vacancies available for both freelance and full time staff, drop us an email with some details about your previous experience and someone will get back to you.