About Me

  About me - Who am I? well, I am Graeme Foster, born in 1957. The picture on the right is of me climbing the highest mountain in the U.K. which is Ben Nevis in Scotland. Over the last 27 years I have been a window cleaner in the north west of England. Over this time the window cleaning business grew and I had to train window cleaners to manage the window cleaning rounds.

As a part of developing these cleaning rounds, we also stepped into the cleaning of Conservatory rooves and all UPVC surfaces, including gutter clearing and cleaning.

 A time came when I began to get enquiries about carpet cleaning, so I stepped into this side of the cleaning industry. The window cleaning side of the business was taken care of by a number of guys that I employed and I became a full-time carpet and upholstery cleaner. This carried on for a number of years, during which time we also added the pressure washing of drives and paths to the list of services that we provided.

 

Another aspect of my life that changed during this time was that I had an encounter with God and became a Christian. This led to a dramatic change in lifestyle as I left behind the hard drinking, swearing and everything else that was involved with my life at that time.
As I became more involved with church and helping others I began to have opportunities to speak to groups of people. So this was the begining of a whole new passion in my life, which has led me to plant a number of new churches in our area. I now lead 2 of these churches in Stoke on Trent and we have plans to plant many more in the future.

Some years ago, I felt the need of a website for my business and also for our first church, so I began a search for a website designer. I was astounded to be quoted several thousand pounds for a basic 5 page website with an extra £100 a month for maintenance. This was way out of my reach, so I started to look around for a simple enough system that I would be able to use to design these websites.
I bought Microsoft Frontpage and played around with that for a while, but it was beyond my understanding at that time. I also bought another website designing package, but couldn't even get it to load properly. I was about to give up when I cane across a guy that had provided a system for a church fairly close to us, so I investigated this and invested in it.I spent the next few months slowly putting together my business website, thankfully it was a WYSIWYG system (what you see is what you get)and so I didn't need to learn any HTML coding. I have since learnt a little bit of HTML code but not a lot.
Once I had cut my teeth on the business website, I then turned my attention to the church website, which was some what more complicated as I wanted to put Audio and Video files on to it. After a good deal of trial and error I managed to find out how to get these to work.

I have been self employed for the last 27 years and have not made any provision for retirement and over the last few years, I have had a desire to be able to devote the majority of my time to the churches that I am involved with. So my mind was searching for a method that would provide a decent income from shorter working hours. That was when I came across the concept of "residual income" - being paid continually for work that you do once. Such as writing a book,producing a CD or developing a website that creates a regular income.

As I was searching the internet for the information I needed to put together these first websites, I kept coming across the concept of internet marketing and various "gurus" and their systems of wealth production. I resisted being drawn into any of these investments but there was one system that I looked at quite seriously and that was one called SBI.
I didn't go for SBI at that time as I was engrossed in getting the business and church websites developed to a decent level. But I returned to take another look towards the begining of 2010, after some umming and arring I took the plunge. At the time of writing this page I am 6 months into the building of this website, close on 50 pages written, even though I really only have a couple of hours a week available. The website has been in the top 1 million sites for over a month, that is in the top 1% of sites in the whole world.
When I reach the 50th page, then I will start the monetizing of the site and hopefully I will begin to reap rewards from all the work put in.


So that gives you a fairly quick over-view of who I am, and my journey so far into the realm of website design.


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