Years ago, families would have a “family cow” to put food on the table. Today’s cow munches on the digital fields of the Internet converting hits and traffic into moo-la!

In 2003, my wife started an online company, selling Homeschool curriculum. She had a passion to help other families to Homeschool. We started on a very small show string of about $200. Our friend, Tom (aka techtom) helped us register our domain name for around $18 and he set us up on a with a hosting account for $9.95 a month. We used an inexpensive software program called Actual Drawing which was quite ahead of its time in WYSIWYG web editing and the Paypal shopping cart.

This was shortly after Google had launched the Adwords program. In those days the minimum per click bid was $0.05. I remember thinking I was getting ripped off when we actually had to pay $0.25 for one of our top keywords.

Her first year, she sold $250,000 in textbooks and the business took off from there…it soon became our family’s full time occupation. In 2010, we were doing almost $2 million annually in gross sales and when the opportunity to sell that business came, we took it.

Of course, what do we do with techtom now that our never ending web projects had ended so suddenly? What do we do with all of the knowledge we had acquired over the years of building our online business? Once again, Tom and I have combined forces with FamilyCow.com to help educate, encourage, and empower others to get online, easily and afford-ably with their own family cow.

Originally when we purchased FamilyCow.com from a competitor in 2010, we did a site makeover and had a professionally crafted logo done. We like “betsy” so much we’ve decided to keep her.

Welcome to the familycow.com website. My name is Thomas Foy aka techtom.

I have worked with computer and web based technologies for around 24 years now. I owned my own computer service business for 18+ years and more recently worked with two friends ( Randy & Kristen ) who started a very successful Christian Homeschooling supply business (Pennywiselearning.com).

Recently they sold their business to focus on rebuilding a church. It did not take long to realize that we soon missed working with the web and helping others and the idea for familycow.com was born. We are very excited to be able to once again bring our talents of the business and tech world together and be able to help others who really would like to have an online presence for themselves, their church, a organization or a business but have felt it was an overwhelming process.

Alright, so my name is Randy. I am a pastor, a business person, and a father of nine, ages 21-1. I know all their names and approximate ages but I couldn’t begin to tell you their birthdays or other pertinent data.

I have been in sales and project management most of my adult life. In 2003, my wife Kristen (kristenstwocents.com) started PennywiseLearning.com. In 2005, it became our families full time occupation. We grew it to almost $2 million in sales annually. Recently, we sold PWL to Christian Book Distributors in order to focus our energies on a church turn around (see GowandaAssembly.com).

But…after having built an online business, its hard to just walk away. FamilyCow.com was a business we purchased with PWL. Tom, my friend and techy decided we needed a creative outlet and a way to help others get online. So we made over the “cow” to give us a place to discuss some of the things we’ve learned over the last 8 years growing an online brand and the WordPress platform.

Aint it funny that spell check refuses to acknowledge the word aint?

Beginnings…in 1985, in a private school in western NY, two guys sat next to each other passing an TI handheld computer back and forth. The thing would only allow basic programming which today seems prehistoric but then it offered us the world. Our teachers had no idea what was going on as we experimented and created scripts. Eventually we crashed the handheld. But so begin our career together.

As life progressed, we went our separate ways for a few years…but ended up back together, first developing .ppt presentations and websites. Then went our separate ways…but have ended up hacking it up together again, and again.

Over the next few posts I’ll introduce us and tell about our story.