Our new web site has gone live today – just!

I do the technical side of our business myself. I’ve got a history of programming and web production so it’s part of my “job” to do it and I’m glad I do – most of the time! When it goes well, it’s great to be able to quickly make changes to our site. It gives us a cutting edge over other web sites who have to get another company in to do the work for them which is slower and costs more.

Of course, I have to take the rough with the smooth and the last 24 hours or so have been pretty rough.

We’ve been working on our new site for a long time and last night decided to make it live. This is a pretty big, all-or-nothing sort of thing. Although in the absolute worst case, we could roll back to the old site, it would mean a lot of hard work to do so. Basically once the new site is live, it’s live and if anything goes wrong it has to be fixed, quickly.

Well, it went live last night and I went to bed at 2am this morning thinking everything was fine. I woke up to find no orders. Something was wrong.

The problem was customers couldn’t add products to their basket. Which, obviously, meant no sales.

I spent all morning trying to find the problem. Eventually I had to re-upload all the code from our development server and, for no obvious reason, it worked… Phew…

Then, about an hour or so ago, I found it had gone again! I really couldn’t work out why. Nothing, I thought, had changed. It just seemed to stop.

So, two more frustrating hours and eventually the problem was traced to an upgrade of Wordpress – this blog – which I had done just before I went to bed last night, and just before the problem started again this evening…

Something was causing a conflict and it meant customers couldn’t shop. It was really simple to fix. Once I found out what it was! Such is life…

Anyway, the site is now live and we hope you like it. We’re really proud of it. We think it looks great and is easier to use than the old site.

There may well be the odd bug (hopefully not as serious as the one that caused us to lose a day’s sales today!) and if you do find anything not quite right, please do contact us and let us know.

And if you have any feedback on the new site – good OR bad – please get in touch and tell us what you think.

Thanks!