“My goal is to give people enough skills to be employable or create their own jobs.”

So says Stacey Guffey, director of Southwestern Community College’s E-commerce Solutions Design program.

Last year’s graduates of the new program at SCC were the first in the state - and possibly the country - to be awarded certificates for education in online business.

Among the graduates of this program are Carl and Jane Moyer, who run GenealogyBookstore.com, one of the area’s most visited sites. The site received over 60,000 hits in the first week it was advertised.
“Our e-commerce business has indeed been a success,” said Jane Moyer.

The site specializes in, but is not limited to, genealogy books. The Moyers also publish non- fiction books, military books and other history books. Their company published Volume II of the Heritage of Macon County and the book How To Write and Publish Your Family Book to help new authors prepare manuscripts for publication.

“It has had excellent reviews from all over the country and has been sold worldwide,” Jane said.
What Jane did was turn an interest in her own family’s past into a business.

“I had been maintaining GenWebsite [for Macon County] for over a year and had a low-key website for the business,” says Jane, who also maintains the website for the Macon County Historical Society as a volunteer project. “As I discovered after doing it for a while, the Internet is a great place to do genealogy research. So the expansion of the company into a greater presence on the web was imperative."

“For a family history book you don’t need to reach a huge audience. It is not like a best seller when the percentage of possible purchasers is high. For a family history you need to reach people that are interested in the particular family in the book. People searching on the Internet can put a name in a search engine and come up with the book listing. It can be done from any where in the world. A traditional bookstore depends on walk in traffic,” said Jane.

Another graduate of the course is Don Moore, a retired pilot who has been working with computers since the early 1970s. He created, along with websites for others, www.smnet.net/chigger, Chigger County Gazette, which displays his animation and 3-D artwork. On the E-commerce Solutions Design website, Moore advises furthering education in computer skills.

“Do it, if for no other reason than to turn the gray matter into pink,” Moore says.

Accountant Mary Moore took the course to allow her to make her services available online at www.mooreconsulting.com. She developed an interest in working with HTML and in working on others’ web pages.

Guffey sees the success of businesses such as these as important to the area.

“SCC has a big vision to create a pool of skilled people and at the same time bring in an increased Internet bandwidth. We can court people in bigger cities with employees and resources. We can replace some of the lost manufacturing jobs and revitalize the economy a nice, clean way.”

A business that Guffey can imagine being particularly successful in the area is arts and crafts.

“Crafts like baskets naturally dyed and made in the Cherokee tradition are something people all over the world are looking for,” he says. “You have to [set up an online business] that offers things that aren’t readily available. You can go to Wal-Mart and get something like a fly swat,” he jokes, “but not a basket or something like the homemade jams and jellies that have sold so successfully at the Whistle Stop Mall.

“It opens up a seasonal business into a year-round business. Tourists from Florida could look for things they saw here in the summer for Christmas,” Guffey said.

Guffey helped create the 11-month course because of his interest in web design, having created pages free lance and maintaining a public information page for Western Carolina University. He says it is designed as an introduction for people with no experience. There are two programs, the E-commerce Solutions Design program for existing business owners or degree-holders and an associate’s degree program for those pursuing a college degree and interested in learning about business skills.

Students are required to study web graphics and design, networking, security and databases and must create a website themselves. There are also elective classes offered in Photo Shop, Go Live!, hard-coding html, cascading style sheets, Internet law, Dreamweaver, JavaScript, Front Page, programming, and achieving top search engine positions.

There is a broad range of participants in the program, from ages 17 to 70, says Guffey. “Some are hobbyists, some are displaced workers, some have master’s degrees, some have no education, some use computers, some don’t. That’s what makes it interesting.”

He sees online business as an opportunity for many. The advantages of an online business as compared to a traditional storefront are a low overhead, about $20 to be hosted on a server, and the ability to be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Also, Guffey says, “A physical store is bound by geography. People will only drive so far.”

Among the current student projects are the redesign of the Jackson County REACH website, the redesign of the Town of Franklin website to make it more “citizen friendly” and work on the Jackson County Board of Elections.

“These are all really good, civic minded projects,” says Guffey, who hopes to see up to nine students graduate from the program this year.

 

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The Smoky Mountain News