Programming

Carol Reed

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Coolidge, AZ
All this talk about business and such got me thinking.....so.....

Emailed Brent but don't think he is looking at his Yahoo account.

I want to offer a subscription service. I need a computer program(s) that will do that. Likely there are programs available that I can tweak. I hope. It seems like there ought to be program components to receive data, make selections by prioritizing the data, check validity of the customer, and charge the customer for a download. There is more to it than that, but that is a beginning, depending on what I can find/tweak.

I wrote programs back in the '70's. Got through Pascal and Unix. Nothing since.

Any ideas on what terms to Google?
 
Hi Carol, Check your email. Folks are in town so I wasn't around a computer for a day or so. I still have the shakes from that. :D

The first thing you should do is to as completely and detailed as you can, get an idea of what you want. Mocking up the screens you want would be a good first step.

Then ask your self is what kind of service is this? Is it going to be something that could be built into an App? Apps for smart phones/tablets are very popular, and the billing can be taken care of pretty much in the various app stores.

Finding a programmer is possible at places like elance.com or stackoverflow.com, but keep in mind these folks may be able to code for you, or help you set up a website, but you would need to make sure you keep tight control over who 'owns' the code and the concept.

Is it subscription content you are looking at developing? There are lots of sites out there that do monthly subscriptions.

In that case you would want to look for things that say 'content management systems' or CMS.

There are a lot of those around, but I'm not all that familiar with them.

One I found that talks about supporting e-commerce is http://www.heroframework.com/

Leo Laporte also recomends http://www.squarespace.com/

What might be good for you is to flesh out your ideas by checking into some of the free blogging sites like wordpress, or blogger. You could get an idea of what it would take to create your site look and feel using those, and then look at what it might take to move up to a CMS that supports subscriptions. They might even have membership management plugins to support that sort of content management.
 
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