My Time At MonsterCommerce

My First Week At MonsterCommerce
Originally uploaded by ArcoJedi

I was looking through old pics and found this picture of me from what I assume to be my first week at what was then called MonsterCommerce. This was likely early in 2003. I've had one other job briefly, but for the past 6 years I'd been sitting at a very similar desk helping e-commerce clients and growing with and nurturing the technical support department.

At the time of this picture, I'm not yet 27-years-old and the company has about 20 employees that on average were younger than me --at least by a small margin. Our department of new technical support reps was a group of 4 or 5 guys in a small set of cubicles in a basement office. We had utilitarian carpeting on the walls and mismatched dividers.

So much has changed since then that I'd need at least ten pages to tell the whole story. This has been the best job I've had so far in my life. In summary, the company was acquired by Network Solutions in 2006 and became the Belleville office for the leading domain registrar. This purchase was a huge boon to everyone involved; NetSol got the e-commerce, web design and marketing teams that they needed, and MC's leadership got an influx of cash, tools and resources to greatly expand what they did so well and to hire tons more people.

As of September of 2009, I am no longer employed with Network Solutions. This is much to my regret considering the knowledge I've gained and the memorable times spent with numerous coworkers and what I hope will be lifelong friends. Though the separation and new personal direction will be to my benefit in the long run, I will miss the team. I could go into more detail about the separation and the reasons for it, but it would be impolite and unnecessary to hash it out here.

The question remains about what to do with this blog. Clearly the trademarked name of MonsterCommerce is owned by Network Solutions so the URL of monstercommerce.blogspot.com might need to be relinquished. But I see no real reason to do so. Regardless, the blog content is for the most part all mine, so perhaps my own "rebrand" is in order. I could reorganize this into my "Web Developer / E-commerce" blog. Or, incomplete as it is, I could just lock and freeze it as a testament and history of my time and leave it alone for all time.

Just in case someone at NetSol sees this and does want the URL, feel free to let me know but keep one thing in mind. According to my stats I've received an average of less than one (1) lonely visitor per day for the better part of the last year. And since none of the links to the NetSol owned pages that you see have been (or will be) modified, it's not like anyone is getting lost or confused. I'd still honestly recommend Network Solutions E-commerce to anyone who asked.

I'll probably write more about this at my personal blog at some point, but I wanted to update this blog page before the year ended. Thanks for visiting and please check back once a new direction (for me and this blog) has been chosen!