The long delay in posting was caused, as some of you might have guessed, by the fact that we got ourselves a busy client (at least for now). We’ll see how it all go, but so far I was faced with an interesting dilemma. Or, rather, was sort of presented with the task to solve.
Our newly signed up client owns couple of web sites that are being fed from the same database. Administering these two sites is a breeze, since any product that has been entered in one immediately shows up on another. The administrator’s interface combines both web sites, so there are no surprises so far.
On his next step this businessman decides to create another web site. This one is fed from a different database, since it was a new team of developers who created this store for him. Additionally, the admin interface is not as friendly as the first one, although the feature set is the same. It’s worth to say that all three web sites are developed on PHP/mySQL platform. The story unfolds under the cut…
Researching the competition is easy. Researching the people who you plant to work for is somewhat harder. You don’t want to rise suspicion, alienate people who you plan to work for or ask wrong questions. More then that – you want to get honest answers. Not that your future cooperation (sorry, I couldn’t figure out better antonym to the word “competition”) wants to lie to you, they just inadvertently will try to present themselves in better light. Or positioning themselves as a 
Acquisitions are nothing new. Your lawyer will call my lawyer or leave a message on my machine – or something like that. The problem starts with smaller acquisitions, where lawyer’s service would cost just as much as the cost of acquisition itself.