About Me

My name is Byron Thurman, I am a 26 year old web developer from Houston, Texas. I currently live on the beautiful 3rd coast of the United States. Currently I live a pretty normal life like most people. I go to work, come home cook, maybe play a game depending on my mood, and even occasionally watch television. My point is I’m pretty much like anyone else with a dream and the ambition to do it. If you are here on my site then you probably have a similar dream that motivates you to do something better with you’re life.

One day I plan to be a full time web publisher and entreprenuer, some people think that laziness is the motivation to make money online. If you believe that then you are simply in the wrong place my friend and have been fed mis-information. Yes, you can make a LOT of money with the right skills and some creativity and you can make almost as much money as a doctor after several years, and the advantage is that you may only be working 4 hours a day. Sounds like a great dream to me, but you will find that it is a lot of work unless you have a love for it, a passion to do it. If you have those qualities you will never have to work again because you will be doing what you love to do and that is the key to being successful in whatever you do with your life.

How did I first get into web publishing?

Well in a strange sort of way I always had an interest in it, I remember planning websites before I even knew how to build one. But that’s not unusual for me, I am interested in almost everything. I first began building websites as small projects when I was younger just because people found it impressive in those days. It’s like a dog receiving a treat when people are impressed with your work. I made a few websites about this and that, a school website, and some sites about other people or for their businesses. But I never thought about making money from it I just wanted to learn so that i could build websites for other people later after I had established my skills.

I quickly realized that my interest doesn’t lay in building websites for other people but for myself. If all I do is build other people websites then I still work for someone else and that isn’t what I choose out of my life. I want the full freedom that comes from working for oneself, and all the stress that comes along with it. That is how I got into web publishing for the most part. And it was jump started by my best friend when he found an online game for sale on ebay.

After winning the option and forking over $3000 to the 13 year old who built the game. I was the proud new owner of a website that I knew absolutely nothing about. Sure I knew some html but that wasn’t what I would consider programming. And this game was written in ASP (Active Server Pages), javascript, and html. I was screwed. And I couldn’t pay the whopping (LOL) $8 an hour for Dan Breese to make all the changes that I wanted. After several months I shut down the site because I just couldn’t do it anymore. It was a valuable lesson to say the least.

Where does that leave me today?

Well over the years I’ve learned a lot, my best friend and partner created a fairly successful website named YourTVlinks.com and made quite a bit off of it his first year. Which just made my appetite to be successful online grow. There is absolutely nothing else that I want to do except build websites and work online, it is my passion.

So after a while of doing some soul searching to find out exactly what made me tick I realized that you only live once and if I keep worrying about what may or may not be instead of jumping off the diving board headfirst then I’m never going to know what I could have accomplished.

I looked at my life and decided what I wanted to change, after all I was quite happy with my life. My job was lenient and I had job security in the first major depression in years. I couldn’t pay my debts but the money I owed in other peoples name was always paid. I mean what more could I want?

Simply put I loved my job and the people there but it was stressful and I found myself agitated by my co-workers on an almost nightly basis. It’s not that they meant to, it was just a high stress job in Food service.

So I decided that if I could get a job at a hosting company I would absolutely love it, but why would anyone hire me? No college degree, I finished almost half a year of ITT Technical Institute in Richardson Texas but they’re not even an accredited school? No real work experience in the industry, I mean who would give someone like me a chance?

This is a perfect example of how we all sell ourselves short of our abilities, and I know for a fact it’s not just me. Each of you has the same doubts and fears that I have and had. What matters is what action we take. Fear is overcome by action.

I decided that nothing would make me happier than working for one of the top hosting companies in the country the question was which one. When I had worked at the Vistor’s Center in Kemah, Texas I had spoken with a woman that came in to promote her business. We got to talking about what I do all day while I’m at work and I explained to her that I build websites and told her a little about what I do.

She told me her son is into computers and stuff like that and has a hosting company. You may have heard of it before, HostGator.com. That was one of the last things I expected to hear, I was expecting a small no name company that operated locally and did well not a huge global company such as Host Gator.

She ended by telling me I should go apply there, and I explained I don’t have any real work experience and only a little bit of formal education after high school. She told me I should go ahead and apply that they don’t care too much about that after all Brent dropped out of college too.

I never applied though, so I figured that’s where I would start, I sent in my application and at the end it told me that if I didn’t attach a resume it would take longer to process the application. But I didn’t expect that option to be there so I had no resume available to attach. I knew if I didn’t send it then I never would. So I sent it anyway without the resume, better something than nothing at all I figured.

They were quick to contact me back and quick to help me get aboard with them. I’ve never been at a job that made me feel like they really wanted me to be there. It worked I jumped on it. I received a phone interview and a date that I had to push back because I couldn’t afford to go. Eventually I decided to just go, so I did.

My roomate and I both left our jobs and went to Houston. We lived in hotels at first hoping to get on our feet but that was proving too expensive. I quickly ran out of all the money I had saved to go get a place to live. I was stressed and had no home but I had a job and a laptop so we went to Denny’s every night and got to know the manager. And nobody ever knew the difference.

We technically lived in a tent for a week although we only stayed there 5 days of it someone eventually found out and offered us a place to stay while we got on our feet. The funny part is we have a house back home, the irony still amazes me. Eventually we got an apartment and got to lead a semi-normal life.

I’ve been working for HostGator.com ever since and I absolutely love it. It has dramatically accellerated my rate of learning in the industry. I can’t even imagine how much longer it would have taken for me to solidify the skills that I have developed working for Host Gator. Six months in the industry taught me more than several years of personal development.

I’m still developing many of my skill sets just like everyone else that works there, but I’ve since been asked several times what my personal skill sets are so I’ve decided to outline what I do a bit in my incredibly long about me article.

What I Do

The last three years of my personal development have dramatically had the most effect so I will focus on what I have done the last three years more so than the little bit that I have done over the last ten or so years.

Basic HTML Scripting
I began learning HTML about 10 years ago, and can still script basic HTML and write a webpage or website using notepad and Adobe Photoshop. Yeah that’s real design work screw Dreamweaver and Kompozer right? Nope they are much faster designed more appropriately for handling the code although at times they mess up the code that you write depending on what it is just like most WYSIWYG editors.

Wordpress Installation
When my best friend had his successful website he coded it using an editor and built the site from scratch and we were really looking for more of a content management style websites. We experimented with a few systems including Joomla. But ultimately I decided that Wordpress was the best publishing platform to use for us. It was the most simple to understand and easiest to get working. But at the time it didn’t have the ability to nest categories like we wanted. I ended up having some major issues with one of my sites that had categories nested several levels deep and kept several “ghost categories” that were non-existent. You couldn’t edit them or remove them, but the posts were set to them and they were included at the bottom of the list. Really odd, and I’ve still never removed them to this day and have found ways around having them effect the look and feel of my site.

I currently use WordPress to develop almost all of my sites and I currently manage about 50 websites by myself, I do have a little bit of help here and there from my partners and vice versa but for the most part all of the development and writing was done single handedly over the last 3 years.

Having so many websites has made a bit of a necessity to automate certain functions on certain sites. So naturally I went into auto-blogging to create much of the content on my sites. For those of you who don’t know exactly what auto-blogging is, it is using a variety of methods or plugins to a system such as Wordpress that allows it to pull content from other sources and syndicate them into a blog feed to be used on your site. When done right they can be very successful. But when done wrong will get you banned from Google so you have to be careful about how you implement your strategies.

I have developed working knowledge on many of the functions of Wordpress and have also created a few themes from scratch as well using a variety of tools and code.

Host Press
Host press is the culmination of my work in the hosting industry meets my love for the ease of blogging. My goal is to create a framework of tools on the Wordpress platform that allows you to run an open-source hosting billing system similar to popular programs such as WHMCS, and WHM Autopilot.