After stumbling across a really obscure ecommerce system written in Perl, Neil purchased some hosting but struggled to get a working site where visitors could actually purchase products.  The system had no backend management and all orders were recorded in an email. 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 and in 2002 Neil found a more automated ecommerce package called Actinic. This looked perfect, adding products through a Graphical user Interface and simple one click uploading. So he purchased Actinic Catalog Version 4 and started the company's online empire again.  Actinic was a breath of fresh air at first for Neil but after time he 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 he needed Neil started hacking the Perl scripts that were uploaded. This was a nightmare as everytime the store refreshed it would replace all of the modified scripts with its new ones. The limitation really came when Neil, along with his partner, purchased a system that would allow customers to create their own Karaoke discs.

At first there were only 2000 songs and Neil 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 and they couldn't have more songs than a CD could hold. Needless to say the Actinic system didn't work very well at all.

Neil finally decided that the only way he was going to get what he wanted was to write a program to do excactly what he wanted. He did some research and purchased a PHP book from Amazon. Using the book and with the karaoke creator in mind Neil set about learning PHP. While learning PHP he decided to search for an ecommerce system written in PHP. Neil found osCommerce which seemed to be very popular and had a large user base. He downloaded a copy and got to work migrating from Actinic Catalog.

In April 2004 Neil had completed the first version of the karaoke CD builder and their 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)

Neil then continued to develop his PHP skills and started learning about mySQL. As Neil became more and more passionate about osCommerce, he continued to learn and better his skills in PHP, mySQL and osCommerce plus spent many hours playing with HSBC's secure e-payments system. At first Neil really struggled to get it to work with osCommerce. After finally getting it working he met many contacts on the osCommerce forum that had also struggled with the HSBC system.  Neil helped many osCommerce users to install HSBC and found himself being asked to do other osCommerce work.  In July 2005 Neil then decided to start his own company offering osCommerce services more professionally.

In all the time Neil had been running an online business the one thing that still annoyed him the most was the hosting companies. Their complete lack of support and service was unbelievable. So that's when he decided that if he was going to offer the best service possible he would need to be able to control as many of the parameters as he could. For this reason Neil purchased his own server and began learning Linux and everything to do with running a secure web server.

Neil's first server finally went live in August 2005 with 1 user, himself!. Shortly after that he got an enquiry from an osCommerce user about HSBC. Their hosting company wouldn't allow the HSBC system to run on their server so Neil gained his first hosting customer. Things slowly picked up and he 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) Neil decided to give up the day job and go it alone, full time.

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

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

In March 2007 GoCreations got its 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.

GoCreations now have a steady stream of large and small projects on the go and are going from strength to strength.