Lockdown

Flashback to Early 2007

We took the decision to change web companies, I think basically because I was suspicious of how our previous developer could reduce their price to a quarter of their original quote in an instant. Our new developer could also provide reasonably priced hosting as well, although not as cheap as doteasy.com, which are basically free. In fact, if you’re just starting out and need a basic information only site and cheap domain purchasing I don’t think you can beat the Canadian doteasy.

Fluid took the existing site as a basic structure and went to working adding ‘their’ shopping cart. Once again, in retrospect I should have asked which shopping cart they would be using and took more time understanding the implication of how the payment processing process would work. More of why I should have taken an interest in all this later.

Anyways, once we’d got the basics of what the site was roughly going to consist of i.e. home page, about page, contact us etc Fluid quickly came up with the same list of question the Dr Aitch had. Unfortunately, I can’t find that list of questions, but the long and the short of it was “what are you going to be selling then and how would like it presented?”. Now you’d think that would be a pretty simple question and perhaps if we just sold a few pair of espadrille shoes it would have been. But we didn’t and it wasn’t. Our little shop actually sold quite a range of products from tablecloths and napkins, to tea towels, oven gloves, quilts, cushions, deckchairs, seat pads, bread baskets, fabrics, designer jewellery and a whole bunch of espadrilles. Now cramming all that into half a dozen categories and coming up with short & long descriptions that didn’t sound too crass was far harder that it sounded. In fact it took months simply because it was a task that seemed too daunting to even begin. I even remember taking the laptop on holiday and working on it (in South West France, of course). The whole project was now on hold while I struggled to decide what was going to be listed.

So what were we going to put on the site? Well, everything of course, it was our online market stall. And this is when I started to think the whole idea was crazy and we would never get it off the ground. Not only did we have something like 20 different types of product to list, we had 10 different ranges of design in each. Even with my basic mathematical skills I could see we were going to need 200+ good quality photographs to stop the site saying mostly “Under Construction”.

The project remained on hold……

Cabin Fever

And so things ran along quite smoothly for the next few months. I didn’t really have any way of monitoring the website so I had no idea if anyone was visiting it. We seemed to have inherited a good organic ranking in Google but for what keywords I had no idea, as I wasn’t sure what keywords, meta-tags or indeed what an organic ranking was back then. I submitted the site to as many search engines as I could find, but never tried to get any back links, or tried to put our products on any third party sites.

The Christmas season was pretty good, but again and again we kept getting asked if it was possible to buy online and inevitably we came to the conclusion after about 9 months that what we needed was an online store.

It was time to go back to Dr Aitch and get an idea of how much this was going to cost. Surely it couldn’t be that expensive, after all it was just a matter of adding a shopping cart on the side of the current site, wasn’t it? But… didn’t someone saying something about that not being possible a year ago?

Bolting on the shopping cart of course wasn’t possible, being something to do with an incompatibility between metric and imperial thread sizes I believe and that meant a fresh start, more money, and plenty of it.

Dr Aitch gave us a very comprehensive run down of what was going to be needed and that list seemed to be extremely long, in fact it didn’t make much sense at the time, but as we progressed in trying to build the online shop I began to realise why the list was so extensive. However, that price still seemed extremely high, even after negotiations and especially considering what we had shelled out for the original site a few months ago. Then one evening at a less than sober birthday party we were recommended to Fluid Studios by someone whose name I now can’t seem to remember. Time for some competitive bidding I think.

Orientation

Flashback to July 2006

So where to start? I seem to recall it all seemed so simple back in the day. Mrs G had found some products she wanted sell and had located some stock in the UK. She established relationships with suppliers in France and sent out proformas’s spending a significant amount of money, although back then of course Sterling was king. She’d found a little shop, brought some fittings and got me to spend many evenings painting our newly fitted custom built shelves.

So what was the next logical step in our planned espadrille & tablecloth empire? Why a logo and a website of course.

As part of the deal when we took on the stock I was also given the espadrille.co.uk domain. I thought this was quite a steal at the time and surely e-success was only just around the corner.

We engaged a local website design company called aitch creative. They lived up to their name and were indeed very creative, coming up with our logo which I still love. Unfortunately, I didn’t really heed their advice regarding creating a website, which ended up costing me hundreds. But I’ll save that story for next time.

Anyway, with our new logo freshly applied to the front of the shop Mrs G opened in July 2006, in what I remember was the last nice summer we had. Everyone loved the shop, loved the product lines and loved her. Life was good back then.