Ignatius Ackermann.

The diploma that never arrived

I matriculated from Afrikaans Hoër Seunskool in Pretoria in 1976, did two years of compulsory military service at the School of Armour in Bloemfontein, and then spent three years at Technikon Pretoria studying Interior Design.

I completed the course. I never received the diploma — I had one subject to re-write, Model Building, and by then we had learned that the Design Institute of South Africa was not recognising the National Diploma anyway. So I walked away from three years of study with nothing on paper.

It is the first thing on this page for a reason. I have never had a qualification to hide behind. Everything after this was learned by doing it.

Shop windows by day, stage lights by night

I went into visual merchandising — Foschini in Pretoria from 1982, then Hepworths as Senior Visual Coordinator covering Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Free State, until the company closed down in 1986.

Then I played music for a living. Six years in cover bands, mostly on three-month contracts with the Holiday Inn group, and in clubs around Johannesburg and Pretoria. It is not a detour I apologise for. Playing to a room that did not come to see you teaches you to read an audience fast, and to keep going when the room is not with you.

A run of gigs brought me to Durban. I heard there were visual coordinator posts going, walked into Miladys, and got one. I kept playing part-time until 1996.

Twelve stores, then none

Miladys until 1995, then John Craig — men's clothing, aimed at an upmarket and increasingly confident black customer in a country that had just held its first democratic election. I was responsible for the merchandising and visual presentation of twelve branches across KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape.

It was the best decade of my working life to that point. I sat in real commercial conversations, got involved in stock movements, sell-off rates and profit, and my input was taken seriously.

At the end of 2001 John Craig restructured. KwaZulu-Natal was left with four stores. My position went part-time, then redundant. I was kept on contract through 2002 to look after what remained, and then that ended too.

Starting again at forty-four

I was forty-four. Retail was struggling and I could see that finding another position doing what I had always done was not realistic. So I sat down and studied web design.

It was not a leap into something foreign. Graphic design, visual display, merchandising — the work had always been about making someone want to walk closer. A web page is a shop window that has to earn attention in about three seconds.

I built HTML sites for tourism and information businesses through 2003 and 2004. Then, in late 2004, I put everything into learning Joomla, because clients kept asking for something they could update themselves and the demand for a real content management system was growing fast. In 2004 the features Joomla gave me — shopping carts, booking engines, classifieds — were otherwise only available to PHP and ASP programmers. I was neither. That was the whole point.

From 2005 to 2007 I freelanced: tourism, corporate, information and e-commerce sites.

The work I am proudest of

Nyko Manufacturing, from 2008 to 2010, built industrial shrink-wrap machinery. I built their site and got them into the top five on Google for shrink wrap machine, blister pack machine and skin pack machine — second, third and first respectively. Specific, boring, measurable. My favourite kind of result.

Then Southern Circle Tours and Safaris, from 2010, with the Soccer World Cup coming. We rebuilt the site and ran an aggressive international marketing programme through the tournament, then had to hold those gains afterwards against a client base that was 99% international — Britain, Europe, America, and increasingly Japan and China.

The part I am still proud of: online tour booking with credit card payment. The commercial systems for this were priced far out of reach of a small or medium tour operator, so we built our own on Joomla and Jomres. At the time we were the only medium-sized tour operator in South Africa offering it.

One hundred and fifty websites, then two hundred people gone

Overflow PLR was primarily a call centre, and it needed websites behind everything it was promoting — the programmes the agents were selling, and sites for Overflow's own clients. I built around a hundred and fifty of them over close to seven years, starting in Joomla and moving to WordPress as the industry did.

A hundred and fifty sites teaches you something no course will. You stop being precious. You learn what can be reused, what always breaks, what a client will actually maintain once you hand it over, and how to get something live and working when it needs to be live and working.

I was retrenched on 1 March 2020, at sixty-one. Overflow went from roughly two hundred people — mostly call centre agents — to five. Two hundred jobs, in a country where a job feeds a household and often several. I had been through a retrenchment myself and I still was not ready to watch one at that scale.

Twenty-five days later the country went into lockdown.

CRM Solutions, and no intention of stopping

I started working for myself the day I was retrenched, and I have been CRM Solutions ever since. Three weeks later every business in the country closed its doors, and I was a brand-new freelancer with no employer and no pipeline. I do not recommend the timing. I do not regret it either. The work has changed shape: less "build me a website" and more "work out why the money is leaking out of this business and then build the thing that stops it" — the site, the enquiry path, the follow-up, the customer data and the measurement, as one connected system.

I am sixty-eight. That is not a disclaimer, it is the qualification. I have watched the web go from hand-written HTML to Joomla to WordPress to whatever we are calling this now, and the thing that decides whether a business does well online has not changed once in twenty-four years. It was never the technology.