Thursday 20 September 2012

Trials of a new website

You may have thought Inner Fyre had gone quiet recently.  You'd be right.

Earlier this year, we lost the code for the Inner Fyre website due to a computer malfunction, and then 3 days later our backup drive (where we kept a backup of the code) also died.

Unfortunate timing that both stores of code disappeared together, yes.  But I like to believe that things happen for a reason.   So my husband and I made the decision to rebuild the whole website, from scratch.  (And back it up to a server this time!)

Why not just use a website template, of which there seem to be many out there?   Well, mainly because I wanted to ensure that my customers had as much choice as possible.   And the majority of templates out there were not as flexible as I needed them to be in order to do that.  Starting with that basic concept in mind, I wrote down what I wanted my customers to be able to do.




While the concept is pretty simple, creating the code to give this functionality is not quite as simple, as we discovered.   On top of that, we wanted to make sure that I had easy administrative control over the content of the site once it was up and running.  In other words, we wanted to ensure that every time I came up with a new design, I could upload it (along with the pricing) easily onto the website.

I also wanted some information pages, so that people who were interested in my jewellery could quickly find out the difference between gemstones, or crystals and pearls.  I wanted to have a page dedicated to information about the different types of commonly requested gemstones.  I wanted to have a permanent offer on one design, which would get rotated randomly every month.  I wanted to have a permanent competition running, with winners drawn monthly.  I wanted people to be able to request gift vouchers for loved ones.   I wanted to be able to display any testimonials.

In other words, I wanted the world!

Luckily for me, my husband is extremely good at writing code for the back-end of websites!  And all these dreams came true.

And this morning, that website went live.   Hooray!

2 comments:

  1. I really like it and especially the concept of selecting the materials and colours to be used, great stuff! The only thing I found is that the white text was a bit hard to read but that is probably just me!!

    Well done to you and your husband!

    Mick

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  2. Thank you so much for your feedback Mick, really appreciated. We did because we wanted to be a bit different, but if it's hard to read maybe we need to rethink :-)

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