The New Website

The new website is launched! It has been unwieldy. We’ve been receiving lots of feedback from “I love it! Great work guys!” to vague ambivalence to grave disappointment at font sizes and other missing things, phantom functionality giving us all stabbing pains.

For a few of you, the website is still not working (although I hope by now it is). The new blog is on the new website so you’ll only really be reading this if it is working for you. Supposedly it takes a few hours or a day or two depending on where you live for things to update on the internet, especially if you live in a rural area. The developer gave Jon an explanation with a lot of technological terms, and Jon gave me a watered down version of it, of which I absorbed basically nothing. It was as though I purposely absorbed as little as possible. 

Thank you all for your patience as we all get to know the new ropes, which, I understand, do indeed look strikingly, if disappointingly similar to the old ropes. I perhaps may have overhyped the new website as though it was all of a sudden going to be very exciting and flashy, but alas, it is the same old us.  Trust me when I say the back end, which is where all the magic happens, is a lot different. It is exactly like when you move a physical shop, and you’ve now got inks in a different place and a better way to display this but a not-quite-as-good way to display that and there’s now a basement with more spiders and possibly leaking plumbing but who’s going in there. 

The upside is that things are only going to get better from here! We have the website launched, and from here we can begin to tweak things and work on things that we put off in order to launch.

To no one’s surprise, I’m not great at change, and having to change the way I now put things on the blog has been something I’ve accepted grimly, loudly complaining all the way. This doesn’t auto-save?? What are we, back in university? Why is this text box so small? Why don’t these images fit into here? What happened to all my drafts?? I had hundreds of spam comments languishing in my pending-approval folder for a while, because there are occasionally comments from real people that I need to approve somewhere in there, and there has been a sinking suspicion that the whole thing has been lost, so if you ever wrote a comment on the blog and it never appeared, I’m sorry to say it probably never will. Supposedly Shopify works with a lot of apps so there is a chance I will find one to help me with the blog, although I am not optimistic, as I had a lot of semi-non-functioning plugins on my old Wordpress. Not sure if that’s the same thing. Just that word alone gives me the heebie-jeebies. Plugin. 

In any case, it’s been raining for the last ten thousand years here, and I’m just waiting for Jon to start construction on the ark. The pathetic fallacy, for us here in our cave, waiting for things to update and upload and sending frantic emails, would be less ironic if it wasn’t looming to be grey for the next ten thousand years, until spring returns again here in Canada. 

But, really, despite the rain, it has been an enormous thing to finally cross off the list, to get this website up and off the ground and floating around in the ether for at least some of you to browse through. It has been many, many, many hours and emails and millions of tiny decisions. And so we are indeed feeling optimistic and grateful. Grateful for customers that have stuck around to reload pages that aren’t working until they do and developers who work late hours. The holly jolly holiday season looms ahead, and we are here for it.