Hi folks, it’s Marcus Cyganiak checking in with another week of schooling in the bag at BCIT’s New Media and Web Development program. As a self-taught web developer and graphic designer, I can honestly say I am learning quite a few new tricks of the trade as this is my first time learning about new media design in a professional setting.
My web overview class has made me much more confident when dealing with CSS and XHTML on my own. What I mean by that is that I don’t necessarily have to use Adobe Dreamweaver anymore to assist me in coding, I can just build structures with code from scratch in any text writer, such as BBEdit. With that, we’ve each been developing a make-belief restaurant website and mine’s an Italian-styled restaurant called Vannucci’s Place; a play off of my grandparents’ last name.
The larger project at hand for me though is nothing of relation to that restaurant website, in fact it has nothing to do with BCIT’s curriculum at all because it’s a project of my own. Close to four years now, my father Kris and I have been steadily building thoughts and dreams of a new domain for collecting information and content with regard to the real estate industry. With no website out there that can really claim to be a hub for Internet surfers with such information, we decided to establish BuyRIC.com, where the initials stand for Residential, Industrial, and Commercial and our slogan states us as being The Online Real Estate Magazine and Directory.
That’s been our dream for a few years now but whenever we’ve been wanting to start working on developing this project, we just never found the time to put our thoughts and ideas into any real motion. That is until last month on October 9 to be specific because one month later brings us to today, November 9, where we went forth with a soft launch for BuyRIC.com.
What the soft launch entails is a simple display of the entire design finished on BuyRIC.com. I coded the entire website using the WordPress content management system. We only have a select few pages live right now, some of which include our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Copyright; you know, the legal jargon.
With the website live to a certain degree, we plan to have BuyRIC.com fully functional by December 1, 2009 and that will be when we start offering our flat rate packaged services to realtors in British Columbia. Information about that will become available soon on the website. Through growth, we plan on expanding across Canada and into the United States but we’re being realistic in knowing we can only handle one province for now.
Where BCIT comes into play here is really the initial stage. My learnings in class really motivated me and established a clear vision on how I was to start this project. In my past experiences before BCIT, I’ve worked on a team of web developers where we’ve collaborated on establishing a website, but I’ve never really engaged in a project quite like BuyRIC.com where I had to co-found a new company and trademark our property.
It’s definitely an exciting time for me with this new venture, BuyRIC.com, and even more exciting with the fact that I will continue learning the ins and outs of new media design at BCIT. Together, these two worlds around me right now are definitely going to produce a bright light at the end of the tunnel, come October 2010 when I graduate.
I’m not being optimistic, I’m being positive. You have to believe you’re going to achieve something to really grasp ahold of that potential success. I believe I can do it.
