Beginnings
Jim McGregor, has worked in IT since the early 1990’s – gaining experience in computer hardware, mainframe, server and personal computer software applications and systems. You can check out Jim’s LinkedIn profile for more.
As a programmer and analyst, Jim worked on many development projects of all sizes – including the development of financial applications, early knowledge based delivery systems, decision making software (early A.I) and communications in many different forms.
Jim participated in early PC to mainframe communication and transmission software engineering projects and wrote some of the first data encryption software application code.
As a PC and Networking Engineering Consultant, Jim gained a firm grounding in PC based networks and consulted to many companies locally and abroad.
The Early Internet
In 1994 Jim founded one of the first Internet (ISP) companies in Western Sydney.
Macarthur Localnet soon expanded to become Cybernet with an area of operations encompassing the Greater Sydney Area, Richmond/Hunter, Illawarra and Southern Highlands.
Cybernet primarily supplied dial up Internet and later, broadband service, as well as providing web hosting and email services as part of the product mix. During this time, Jim was compelled, out of necessity, to write the company billing application. The invoicing challenges that are presented to the suppliers of online services are unique.
As well as managing the team at Cybernet, Jim consulted to other ISPs in Internet specific telecommunication systems and associated billing applications. He also consulted on systems including large database applications driven by SQL, Cisco and other manufacturers routers and switches, Windows NT and Linux Operating Systems and Servers, Firewall, Security and anti-intrusion systems, Core Internet Application Server layers such as email systems and web servers.
Work accelerated over the next few years, with Jim travelling to every state of Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific and USA – consulting to ISPs in startups and also assisting in mergers and ISP acquisitions. In 2002 Jim sold his share in Cybernet, becoming a full time freelancer.
WordPress
In 2009 as a response to refurbishment requirements, emerging technologies and new opportunities, Jim rebuilt all of the technical aspects his company, taking advantage of new server farm technologies, large network and high redundancy infrastructure.
At this time, Jim who had been an early adopter of PHP, social media and blogging (he started blogging back around 2000) used this knowledge in creating websites with PHP / CSS and mySQL instead of the traditional HTML / CSS websites.
Using these languages allowed websites to be written more efficiently.
This led to our adoption of WordPress with it’s PHP based framework / CSS and MySQL and includes a content management portal which allowed the customer to log into an administration area of the site in order to add new content or change existing content without any programming knowledge. With plugins by many authors around the world, code modules can be slotted in to fulfil functional requirements.
WordPress has gone from strength to strength over time. Over 40% of the websites in use on the internet are running on WordPress. We continue to build and maintain our customers websites using WordPress and the core codebase.
Secure Hosting and Maintenance
We have built a large portfolio of client sites which we developed and hosted.
We noticed that the majority of problems websites faced involved security breaches or breakdowns that were due to out of date code modules (plugins) and lack of ongoing website maintenance .
In some cases clients were coming to us with sites that had been hacked months prior to detection, so no clean backups were available to restore. We were able to rewrite their websites from scratch. Also at this time, Google Search Indexing and Rankings algorithms were changing and threats of malicious code, DOS Attacks and hackers were increasing alarmingly.
This is why Sydney Web + Tech manages all the maintenance of our hosted websites. This includes code updates, anti spam and anti virus and intrusion detection. To help with speed, databases are regularly compressed and optimised. For peace of mind, all websites and servers are backed up regularly to an offsite location.
Sydney Web + Tech does more than Web Development (we pride ourselves on our designs and solid back end). We are passionate about providing managed website hosting that is fast, secure and Australian based.
It is increasingly becoming a necessity for every website.
