This week we made big changes. We built a job board that works in Spanish. You can now edit your own job listings. We made it easy to share repair price estimates with customers before they call. We added email alerts for new jobs. We're checking every job posting for scams. And we started a local question-and-answer section where people ask about South Texas life and get real answers. The biggest thing is the job board itself. It's now easy to find on our website, and it's working. We changed what we focus on: helping local businesses and workers find each other. Everything else is just noise.
Post a job in English. Spanish speakers see it in Spanish. They search, filter, and apply in Spanish.
NPCLocal is our local-services site that connects Coastal Bend folks with local pros, plus a jobs board.
By The Shop · Dispatch from Alice
You post a job in English on our website. A Spanish-speaking person in Corpus Christi visits the job board and sees everything translated to Spanish. They search for jobs, narrow down by city and type of work, and apply. The form they fill out is in Spanish. Your original job post stays exactly as you wrote it.
This matters because a lot of people in the Coastal Bend read Spanish faster and more comfortably than English online. Now they can understand your job opening without struggling. You get more people applying. They get a clear picture of what you need.
When you post a job on our website, you get a private link just for you. Click that link anytime to change the title, description, hours, pay, or anything else. When you fill the job, you can take it down. If you want to post it again later, you can. No emails back and forth. No waiting for someone to make the change for you.
A customer texts you a photo of their broken laptop. You go to our website, use our repair calculator, type in what you see, and get a price. The calculator gives you a link. You text that link back to the customer. They click it, see the price and what it covers, and decide whether to call you.
Someone tries to post a job that looks like a scam. Our system catches it and we review it before it goes live on the website. If it looks sketchy, we keep it hidden. If it looks real, we publish it. If the same person keeps trying to post bad listings, we ban them.
You find a job you like and check the box to get emails about similar jobs. We send you a confirmation email. Click the link in it. Now we know it's really you, and we start sending emails when new jobs match what you're looking for.
We built the job board quietly over the past few weeks. It was live on our website, but nobody knew where to find it. Now it's in the main menu at the top so people visiting the site can spot it. You can search for jobs in your town, see what's hiring nearby, and apply without creating an account.
You go to our website, type a question about life in South Texas, and get an answer written by someone who actually knows the area. We check the answer for accuracy and remove spam. If something looks wrong, we hold it until we verify it.
When someone calls you from our website, we log which listing they came from. Over time, you can see which listings and which types of work bring in real calls.
For the past year, we've been building tools to help local businesses stay in business and to help people find honest work and honest pros. That's what we do. We run a computer shop in South Texas, and we build a lot of stuff. The job board, the repair guides, the price calculators, the local question section, the safety checks. All of it comes from what we've learned running our own shop and helping other shops stay afloat.
We like this one because it comes straight from the FTC and covers all three threats in plain language, from spotting phishing emails to backing up files and what to do right after an attack hits. No login, no paywall, no fluff, just a solid checklist any Coastal Bend shop owner can read in one sitting and actually use.
We found a full free course, 59 step-by-step lessons with videos, written by certified QuickBooks ProAdvisors, that walks you through setup, invoicing, expenses, bank reconciliation, and reporting from scratch. No sign-up, no paywall, just sit down with your QuickBooks account open and follow along at your own pace.
We like this one because it tells you to run a quick walk test first so you know whether your problem is weak coverage or a bad hop between nodes, and that keeps you from buying gear you do not need. It is written plain, covers small offices just like homes, and points you toward wired backhaul fixes before it ever suggests spending more money.
We bookmarked this one because real repair folks share exactly where to start when you want to fix your own phone or laptop instead of paying someone else to do it. Out here in the Coastal Bend where the nearest big-box repair shop can be a long drive away, knowing how to swap a battery or crack open a screen yourself is just plain useful.
This is the free, no-sales-pitch playbook straight from the federal agency whose whole job is keeping businesses safe from ransomware, phishing, and hackers. We like it because it skips the outdated advice and tells you exactly what to turn on first, starting with multi-factor authentication on every account.
We like this one because it skips the jargon and walks you straight through what the 3-2-1 rule actually means for a small shop, including real tool picks and a cost example you can steal right now. It also clears up the big trap most folks fall into: your Dropbox or Google Drive sync is not a backup, and this guide explains exactly why that matters when ransomware shows up.
