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!