Our Manchester shop in the snow

We’ve been snowed in since yesterday in Manchester where we’ve had at least 8″. We haven’t been able to ship online orders and we’ve had to shut our Manchester shop too.

Conditions have worsened overnight and the roads are treacherous.

There’s nothing worse for a shop than not being able to sell, so we thought we’d have a bit of fun and hopefully encourage you to do a bit of shopping.

We want you to get outside with a rule or tape measure and take a picture of yourself showing us just how deep your snow is. Then we’ll give you a discount on the cost of an order you place this week based on the depth of the snow in your area.

We’ll give you the number of inches you can measure as a percentage of your order – up to a total of 10%!

For instance, send us a snap showing 3 inches of snow, and we’ll send you a voucher for 3% off your order, send us one of 8 inches, and we’ll send you a voucher worth 8% off! To keep it simple, there’s no minimum spend required. All we ask is you use the voucher this week.

We’ll put the photos up on our blog and our facebook page and we’ll throw in a few random prizes too for the most imaginative and fun photos!

Then we hope to have lots of orders to pack when the snow starts to clear and we can get back into the warehouse – hopefully tomorrow.

To get things going, here’s a photograph of me measuring the snow here in Manchester. It was 7 inches deep!

John measuring the snow in Manchester

So, what are you waiting for? Get your hat and gloves on, get a rule or tape measure, and get snapping! Send your photos to info@alcoholfree.co.uk with the subject line How Deep Is Your Snow.

If you haven’t got a digital camera, or don’t know how to email photos, don’t worry, you won’t be left out. Just send us an email telling us how we can improve The Alcohol-Free Shop and we’ll send you a voucher worth 5% off your next order placed this week.

Stay safe, keep warm and have fun!

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!