I wanted to give a brief update on our web development, which, just between you and me, continues to be the most time-consuming and frustrating part of this project.

What was estimated to take three months has now taken over a year, and still isn't finished. How is that possible you may wonder? Well, it is one of the results of not having enough money to pay for the true costs; short on money means long on time.

One of the ways we are saving money is by building our site using Drupal, an open source content management platform. Drupal is great, but there have been a lot of unforeseen complications in building some of our custom functionality. This ate up programming hours and resources, and has caused a lot of delays. Development has been stuttering, moving forward in spurts, and at times, idling.

I had a long heart to heart with our web team last Friday. In short, I told them we have to get this site done sooner than later. I can feel the project losing momentum as we continually postpone opportunities until the new site launches. On the flip side, once our site launches, there's lots of light over the horizon.

Our web team was very open with me about the challenges they are facing. Having a better understanding, we discussed ways to reduce the amount of features for launch. We also have a new project manager, Ramin, who is in charge of tasking the remaining work to a developer.

I spent the early part of the week prioritizing and cleaning up a final list of features, and sent them to Ramin on Tuesday. I just got word from him today that a developer has been found, and has started working on the remaining items full-time. This is great news. Expect a further update mid next week.

Meanwhile, I'm in Houston Texas this week visiting my grandmother and helping out my dad's travel agency. If anyone needs to book a cruise or a destination wedding, let me know. :)