Dhruv Boruah

Technology is just an enabler of the business and not the business itself. Execution of the business strategy and increasing revenue should be the primary focus.

How to get started ?
Step #1: Get a domain, hosting and first page
Go to Godaddy, get a domain name and a linux hosting.
Now, try creating your own personal page which stores the data in a database. You will see many websites and screen casts on these.
What you will learn are the basics of
- LAMP – Linux/ Apache/ MySQL and PHP
- HTML

Step #2: Now create your own blog which can also form as another step towards your personal branding.What then I would recommend to download,  install and familiarize yourself with existing frameworks like

• Drupal
• WordPress
• Jhoomla

Then try out some of the free themes/templates and also play with the numerous modules for these frameworks.
That is it !! You have the basics ready already !

Step #3 : Analytics with Google Analytics
Now from a investor perspective and also for you, analytics are important. Hence quickly sign up with Google Analytics and try to integrate the code and track daily traffic and much more details in your website. You can also sign up for the Google Webmaster account for more finer control of your website and search engines.

Step #4: Setup Free Email with Google Apps
Now do not you need a you @yourdomain.com email Address, Google offers free Google Apps services for 50 users. You can use services like Gmail, Gtalk, Google Docs, Calender etc for free Set it up here http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

Step #5: Setup a ecommerce site
Now if you have this cool ecommerce idea in mind and wanna have a prototype easy in 30 minutes for your investor, I recommend you to start using Magento framework. The community version of Magento is free and in many cases sufficient to start a end to end ecommerce site.

Step #6: ERP from day one
You do not want to confuse your accountants or yourself with tons of paper and invoices on your desk. Hence using an ERP from day one is the best approach to avoid long term problems from day one. I would recommend using OpenERP which has some pretty good modules to back every taxation system.

People will talk about CRM/ Business Intelligence etc but remember this post is all about how to kickstart !

This entry was posted Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Open Source, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.