E-commerce site is rockin' n' rollin'!

Whew! It's been a long and winding road on this path to e-commerceville,  and I can finally say it is now up and the OPEN sign is on the door! BIG hooray!

But in all seriousness, we've learned a lot along the way to getting the site redone. I thought I'd take a moment to share some of our lessons learned. This is the story of the trials and tribulations of moving from a marketing website to an (easy to use!) e-commerce website, and how I learned to appreciate Sunday mornings, with or without coffee.

1) Interview Your Website Designer

We've been really, really lucky to have worked with two great development teams. First, with Nick Damoulakis at Orases, from the time he was starting out and as he's grown to service clients such as Adventure Park USA (an award-winning site) and the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. Unfortunately for us, our web budget did not grow as rapidly as Nick's success and his prices (despite the deep discounts he gave along the way) have put him out of our budget.

For this project, we turned to GreenFerret, another startup, who had worked with me to develop a great website presence for the inaugural Fashion Week San Antonio 2009. Having worked closely with them on that project, we already knew their capabilities and appreciated their patience and understanding of the "artist personality."

I had been approached by a number of design firms offering to redo our website. After speaking with most of them, however, I felt they were trying to sell me a "one-size-fits-all" product that I would need to adapt to, possibly by changing some of my already established (effective) processes around inventory, billing, etc. What we liked about GreenFerret was their emphasis on getting to know me, my business, my customers, and what really mattered.

Lesson learned: Make sure your website provider can understand your business, and don't be afraid to change designers as business dictates.

2) Pay As You Go

Both our designers have been extremely flexible to payment plans and incremental changes to the website as my business grows and changes. Just like other parts of my business, I increase capacity as my cash flow increases and I can afford to. When I get short on cash, I cut back on expenses.

My marketing site was great to help me establish my brand and to work with wholesale buyers. Unfortunately, many of my wholesale buyers wer not adopting technologies as quickly as my direct retail customers. So the e-commerce aspect will help me service my retail customers who lack a local outlet and allow me to focus more of my daily phone call time to managing the relationships with my wholesale customers.

With GreenFerret, as with Orases, we implemented the website in stages as funds and time allowed. First getting the website content management part, using Drupal, up and running on the development site, then bringing the e-commerce portion online. We did take a wrong turn down a path for one technology that was a little overly complex for what we needed. Things sped up when we switched over to Ubercart which integrated easily into Drupal.

I want to be clear that the project took some time not because of my website team but because I was on such a tight budget that we had to do everything in short bursts separated by periods of inactivity. Had I had the funds upfront, the site would have been completed quite quickly. I know this because I saw GreenFerret launching quite a few sites during the time they worked with us.

Lesson Learned: Don't be afraid to negotiate creative payment and scheduling solutions.

3) Keep Pushing Through

This is the part where the Sunday morning coffee comes in.

There were definitely times when I felt like giving up and even closing my business. Talking to the GreenFerret folks was like business therapy for me. They helped keep me going and even introduced me to other clients of theirs (Baas Framing Studio and Madison Art Collective) where I was able to place my jewelry and have since held several successful trunk shows.

GreenFerret set up a task tracking system for the site so we could keep up with where we left off. I was assigned tasks to complete just like their designer and developer. Doing lots of the work helped keep costs down and also gave me a huge appreciation for everything it take to develop a website well. We also set up priorities on what absolutely had to work in order to go live. This is a great exercise in project management, and a great lesson in letting go of things that just aren't that important--nice, but not really required.

Sunday mornings became a ritual for me to take a quiet time of the week, go into the workshop, and work on my list of assigned tasks. I knew that finishing each one got me closer to the goal. It also made me feel good to know that, instead of spinning on unimportant details that may or may not help my customers, that I was working on the most important things that would help make my website a success.

Lesson Learned: Sometimes the only way out is through.

4) Planning Prevents Errors

One thing I found so impressive was the attention to detail that GreenFerret showed for the process. As an artist, I always notice those little things that don't quite line up or that may not quite match. But often the process can be overwhelming. GreenFerret helped convert each process into manageable steps.

I also loved how they did updates. For example, the site was live, and we found we needed to do an upgrade to some of the underlying software. They did the entire process on the development server first and fixed the problems there before trying to update the live site.

Lesson Learned: Measure twice. Cut once.

5) Celebrate Success

I could have spent a lot of time focusing on how far away I was from having a working site. Or I could have been disappointed every time something wasn't working or I hadn't talked through all the business issues in order to make sure things would work as I expected. Instead, everything was focused on the successes along the way, from the festive colors we used to mark completed items on the task list, to the pep talks at the end of meeting about what was going well, to the occassional project reviews where we always looked at where we started and how far we had come.

We didn't ignore what we needed to do or that there may still be quite a bit of work left. We just didn't let any disappointments we experienced diminsh our successes thus far.

Lesson Learned: Address the negative. Celebrate the positive.

Next on our list: more updates to the website! But first, maybe a little champagne to celebrate our success.