s-go Consulting has been building websites using content management system based, open source applications since 2003. It was in 2003 that an engineer that I was working with showed me a Harley Davidson Club website that he had built using phpWebSite. It blew my mind. It had a database with user ACL, cool photo albums, an interactive calendar and many other functions. I could not do the same things with the dozen or so sites that I had built since 1997 using Frontpage and Dreamweaver. Plus I was not in the web design business, until I saw a CMS!

I was going through a rough period between 2002 and 2004. In 2001, I left the company I had founded, Glyph Technologies. I was the CEO and grew the company in 9 years to be a dominant brand in the audio production market. I bounced around a bit from 2002-2004 looking for my next great job/opportunity. In 2003, I started a new part time venture, s-go Consulting out of my home. Once I saw the phpWebSite CMS in action, I became very interested and starting working with it. In late 2004, I heard about an application called Mambo. It seemed much more polished and professional that phpWebSite and the community was much more active. I immediately dropped phpWebsite and started learning Mambo as it was far superior. The template and plug-in selection was much larger. I actually built two Mambo sites for clients in late 2004, early 2005.

After a few unsatisfactory employment stops, I decided to jump in and run my one man marketing consulting firm full time. s-go Consulting launched offering a wide range of services, including CMS websites built with Mambo. I opened a new office in my little village of Spencer, NY on April 1^st, 2005.

Then a crazy thing happened. In August 2005 after getting comfortable and happy with Mambo 4.5.2, there was a fork in the project as a group of core developers had a disagreement with Miro International Pvt Ltd, the original developer of Mambo. The core developers developed a website, Open Source Matters, and in September rebranded Mambo 4.5.3 as Joomla! 1.0. I had my first serious business decision. Do I continue to use Mambo or do I hook my wagon the new Joomla group? Having spent a great deal of time in the Mambo forums, I knew that the real talent and players had left Mambo and created Joomla. It was an easy decision. We did not build another Mambo site after September 2005.

About 150 websites later, s-go Consulting is making a living with Joomla and open source applications. While we offer other marketing services as well (such as video production, graphic design) , website development and hosting is the bulk of our business/revenue and what we enjoy the most.

Part two of this post talks about why we are writing this blog, and who it is targeted at.

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