Things are going great!

Well, things are honestly going better right now on many levels than they have in over a year it feels like. So many positive things happening which I'll cover for you below so you'll have the inside scoop on the exciting lives of Andy and Lea! ;)

Our business, A&L Concepts, produces websites for ourselves that bring in ad, affiliate, and subscriber revenue of their own, but we also have clients we do web work for as well. When we first started out with this whole idea over 5 years ago, I was working for Network Associates, a company that dealt with a many computer software packages, one being the Sniffer Protocol Analyzer. It was a tool that network analysts and administrators could use to "sniff" the packets on the actual wires comprising the network. If I sat between your computer and your cablemodem with one, I would be able to see in various ways many, many details of what your computer is sending out as you browse the web. I can see URL's you are vising, pictures or videos brought up (any files really), how much congestion there was on that link, how long each packet took to get to it's destination and back, all *kinds* of stuff. Really, really geeky stuff. While it paid very well, had great benefits, and even flew us both to New York for a business trip, it had zero creative outlet. It became more and more depressing for me to spend so much time on such an in-depth technical product with very little room in my life for anything creative. Something had to be done, so after teaching myself PHP and the basics of HTML, we started our first website. It was nothing more than a website where I would post and share the jokes, pictures, and other things I would recieve in emails and find across the internet. I had so much fun learning programming again like I did when I was 10-15!

Our first website was getting popular and eventually grew out of it's hosting and thanks to a friend in Canada, we landed some storage up there for a fresh new, better, faster, website with a forums this time! Building a sense of community is something I've been fascinated with since I saw my first web forums and the new site had it's own. It grew to be so large and started making a bit of money so with our savings and a great leap of faith, Lea and I agreed I would walk away from making $50k a year to persue web development even more. I quit Network Associates after 2 years of work and started working full force on a new website built from the ground up with everything handcoded. From the login and profiles system, to the forums, to the front page system, everything was built by me from scratch using nothing more than a text editor. This would be our 3rd iteration of the same concept website and from there, it grew into a large community site with links, videos, pictures, articles, games, flash, all kinds of things and *THAT* site spawned off sites like CombatVids.com, ContentBin.com, NWSGaming.com, NWSDeals.com, and PoliceVids.com.

That decision to start our business, A&L Concepts, was made nearly 5 years ago and now we work on 15 sites of our own and as of today we have 4 clients we are working with to assist them with their websites. We just signed our newest client up yesterday and now have a portfolio of working with a realtor, a car sales business owner, a cafe/natural goods shop owner in Baltimore, and a fashion design video house in LA. This is great news as our own websites pretty much run themselves, like little money machines that bring in their own revenue streams while the contract work we do brings in a whole other source of cash. It sure is going to help out with things during the pregnancy and on through the years of having baby Goin.

Lea recently quit her job so we could both stay home, enjoy each others' company, work on the house duties together, and even develop websites together. She does wonderful work on some of our clients as well as running the deals and bargains website we have. NWSDeals is about to go through a major redesign as well and she is designing what she wants and doesn't want for the website. Her quitting the job she had is something we've both been aiming for and hoping wouldn't take too long. We felt comfortable enough with the business as it stands and the future it holds to agree she would be better off staying home and helping with it, both of us focused 100% on it and enjoying life.

We're more in love and closer together than we've ever been and so excited about the baby and spending time with the family! Thanks for reading if you've made it this far! :D