When disruptive new software is introduced the news cycle follows a predictable pattern.

Big industry bloggers do reviews

Influential bloggers with hundreds of thousands of followers do reviews which point out how the new products provide features and functionality not found in the existing products.

Many of these reviews & tutorials are very well done by these skilled presenters. If you purchase the new products based on these reviews, you quickly discover using them effectively for your own websites isn’t as easy as it looked. There are new concepts to be learned. The are subtleties to discover, and new products always come with new bugs.

Big bloggers quickly move on to new products

After all, you only earn those fat affiliate commissions once and there are always more products in the pipeline.

In depth tutorials showing build-out of working websites are scarce

You have to spend lots of time using software to find subtile problems and develop workarounds. It takes still more time to spot innovative applications and incorporate them into your site building workflow.

Over the years I’ve purchased lots of software, especially “Lifetime Deals” that seemed promising but arrived with a learning curve I never conquered.

OakCo will build out several eCommerce websites using the plugins in our Tech Stack.

Initial plans include:

MainzerCats.com

These comic cat postcards were popular in the 1950’s & ’60’s and are still available for purchase. All were created by a single European artist, which is reflected in the stereotypes they depict. They are still very entertaining with many tiny details that reward you for finding them.

They sell regularly on eBay. We have a collection of about 300 that will be excellent material for a test of SureCart & Custom Post Types on a WordPress website using GeneratePress & GenerateBlocks.

In all honesty, I already have front & back photographs of all of them, so the site can be assembled quickly.

LymanByxbe.com

Lyman Byxbe was a prolific etcher of western scenes. He died in 1980 but his works continue to show up in thrift stores, garage sales, & even trash cans, from all over the USA. They sell quickly for $50 or more depending on condition and scarcity. I have had a Weebly website displaying a few of them for years.

That site used to rank in the first or second position on Google. However, years of neglect has it currently barely hanging on to a position at the bottom of the first page of search results.

Weebly was sold to Square in 2018. Square clearly bought it for the technology & has spent the time since then using it to build their new “Squareup” platform. Squareup is not a platform with which I wish to work. So, Lyman Byxbe needs to move to more attractive location. I think the new tools I am exploring will help me regain my former rankings.

MobileHomeDIY.com

I built a mobile home repair website, MobileHomeDoctor.com in 1998. Despite hosting changes, page builder changes, technical challenges, and loss of interest, MHD still generates a couple hundred per month from AdSense.

The entire content & structure of the site needs to change, so I am planning build a replacement at Mobile Home DIY. I will use 301 redirects to preserve as many of the existing links as possible.