mark.beihoffer.com

Although I am currently in the midst of re-branding our company with the help of my cousin and business partner Nick Christensen, we still maintain a fairly active website over at Dragonfly Networks.

Dragonfly Networks is the company I started in 1998 (has it really been ten years already?) to provide services and technical support as a network architect, primarily working with attorneys with smaller practices who couldn't afford to have a full-time employee doing technical work. It's had it's ups and downs, like any small business, but overall I enjoy the work we've done and am proud of the reputation we've built around the Twin Cities.

The most fun part of being self-employed for me is that I get to spend quite a bit of time experimenting with code, writing custom applications, integrating existing open source applications with our business, et cetera. We didn't really want to have some of the projects we've worked on appearing on the front page of our main business site, and hence, the Dragonfly Networks Beta site was born.

Check out the cool theme - very retro and video-gamey, hunh? ;-)

I can't possibly relate the amount of time we've spent tinkering with code and experimenting with various new technologies to utilize our resources as best we know how. We've built wiki's, installed dozens of testbed content management systems, written plug-ins, developed themes, dabbled in graphic design, worked with RSS syndication feeds; almost every new technology under the sun is bound to catch our attention sooner or later.

And perhaps that took away from some of the time that could have been spent better serving our customers. We'll never really know. All I know is I've had a blast, especially over the last five years or so that Nick's been helping out. It's just great fun and very rewarding building systems that are streamlined for ourselves, and the smiles of satisfaction our clients get when we roll out new, cutting-edge, hip, and usable websites for their projects makes it all worthwhile. Needless to say, I don't miss the on-site service calls much.

And so, at long last, Nick and I have been spending quite a bit of time discussing it, and we think that now is the time for us to migrate away from the technical support side of things and into the wild world of web development full-time. We've already got a registered LLC (limited liability company) by the name of WebNetiques, LLC which has a site similar to the one we're running at Dragonfly Networks, but neither Nick nor myself is terribly fond of the name.

We've picked up some new domains over the last week, and a couple of them look very promising for a new company name. Re-branding is a lot of work, but it's also really fun to be able to sit down and look at what we're going to be doing for the next ten years and brainstorm about the various names, logos, color schemes, look & feel, and, well, you get the drift. We're really excited about it, is all.

In any case, we're going to keep the Dragonfly Networks site up and running, and I'm definitely going to be posting more to the beta site in the future, since much of the stuff is coming along quickly and we're on to new projects almost every week here.