Capturing Someone's Reputation/Experience In A Commercial Site

I've been doing a side project helping a guy out with his website. He's got 30 years of experience with classic cars. He specializes in lockt restoration and keys for classic cars. You can go to <a href=http://www.lockandkeyid.com> lockandkeyid.com </a> if you want to check it out.

I've been losing a little traction lately in getting things moving forward. I wanted to put some thoughts down here.

What I've done so far.....

1. Established a web presence. He registered some names at GoDaddy.com. I signed him up with Javapie.net. It's an inexpensive host and in the future, if a database driven Java app is needed, it can be done here.

2. Used Frontpage to put together some pages for his site. These included links from Google about him, a chart he uses to sell keys, and just his basic contact information.

3. Spoke with him at length as to what he wanted to accomplish with his site.

4. Scouted out the competition. Found a site called that sold lots of keys for classic cars that was well organized and had shopping carts and checkout and were seemingly tied into an inventory system. My new friend scrutinized the site. He pointed out that their business model was flawed because they were charging too little for their keys and he doubted that they were doing any good business. He also pointed out that the quality of their keys was not up to the standards of a classic car buff. Summary, although they had their technology side down, they did not understand pricing and they probably didn't know a lot about any particular cars.

It's great to find someone who's been doing something on the side for many years and is still passionate about it. From reading some of the links about Tony E, he's well respected in the classic car restoration community. I started out by throwing some things together for him. I'm hoping we can unlock the keys to turning his reputation into $$. He's already tested things out on EBAY. By the way, it's a good way to test out a business mode. Seems to work there. It's a question of increasing volume and cutting out the middelman.

There's plenty of content we can put on the site. He can put a lot of stories/content about his work. We'll need to meet again to discuss next steps. I think we'll next build a small database driven app for his site that will eventually be used to drive some sales. It's going to be a rapid prototyping model. I'll throw things up and have folks involved comment, throw away the code, and rebuild. Hopefully, I can build some of this on the code base I used for working on my Nostalgia project... By the way, I'll be putting up another blog to discuss my work on this project. In it, I'm working on all the skills I need to build database driven web apps.