Wednesday 16 July 2014

Where's the website Dean?

Still no website! The problems behind this reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend a few years ago. I was watching the news when the terrible tsunami laid waste to Fukashima. My friend kept telling me I shouldn't be so concerned with things on the other side of the world, that I was "buying into the global panic".  I didn't feel like I was panicking, I was concerned for the people affected and also aware that the impact of this disaster would be far reaching.  Three months later the same friends was complaining that his new hard drive cost much more than it would have a year ago. I explained  the hard drive factories in Fukashima were destroyed, causing a drop in supply hence an increase in cost.  A global event on the other side of the world had affected his bank account, take about a butterfly effect.

Such is the problem with our new website. Our old site just worked on pay pal. The new site is built and ready to go, but needs a merchant e-commerce back account for payments. These accounts have been used by terrorists and criminals in the past, and so they are now strictly regulated. A global issue is slowing us up. However we have now been given the green light, it's just a matter  of getting our account number sorted out and transferring our domain! Much like the old British Rail, we're getting there, and like any great journey  the destination will be worth the travel.

Tuesday 1 July 2014

So where is the website, and where have we been?

Okay so there's no website yet, why? We've had people panicking (including us at one point) but it's all being sorted. In an exercise of radical honesty, I thought I would share exactly and honesty what's been going on behind the scenes.

The big huge plus of our new website is that it's linked directly to the database of stock. This means if we only have 3 metres of something it will warn the customer that there may be a delay in ordering if they try to order more than 3 metres.

To use this new sight we need to have a new payment gateway as the system will not allow us to just use PayPal like our old site did. Here lays the problem. A new payment system means a new merchant account. In the post 9-11 world there are a LOT of hoops to jump through to set up one of these accounts.

This is almost sorted, so the website will go live about 48 hours after the payment system is sorted.

So where have the blogs and the tweets been?
ALMOST all of the social media is done by one person, the same person is sorting out the web.  And here we hit another snag. The current database is about a year old. A lot of products were imported from an old data base. This worked fine, that is until we started putting things on the website. There is no structure to how the yarns are arranged on the database. This in itself causes no problems in the shop, the wool is scanned the bar-code brings up the correct product. However if you were to look through the database you would find it very hard to find something as there is no real organization, at least for yarn.  So every single yarn had to be duplicated, photographed, new product info imputed, and then the bar-code transferred from the old one. A long laborious processes and there just wasn't enough time to sort out the  social side, esp as I like to link the webshop to the blogs, and there was no webshop.

We're through the worst of  it now though, so we're back!