Ta-Daaaaa!
Drum roll please! And now for the moment you have all been anxiously awaiting.... Simply fibers has joined the world of ecommerce. That's right, our web site went live at 9:17 last night. The long awaited moment was a little anticlimactic. A push of the button, holding of the breath, nervously opening the browser and then there it is in all its glory.... the same boring web site I've been staring at for the last few months. Only now, everyone in the world gets to see how boring it really is..:-)
There were a few gotchas. My mission this weekend was to load product into the online catalog. This was more than a little frustrating. Click, reload, wait, page cannot be displayed... repeat. I worked 10 hours Saturday and at least 10 on Sunday and only had about 80 items for sale in the catalog. I tried again from work Monday at lunch and had the same sad experience. It was kind of like a trip to that world famous billion served fast food restaurant, a blur of activity, beeping and buzzing behind the counter but we're all still waiting on our "fast" food. I'll never figure that one out but thankfully, GoDaddy is working to help me figure out why the loading is so slow in my "Quick" Shopping Cart. I know I've got my photo sizes in order, checked that. The most curious thing I notice is that with each click of the mouse button, the site seems to be reloading every last item again... every time. It seems to be a very obsessive compulsive little program..??
The second gotcha came when I sat down last night to upload my Frontpage web site to GoDaddy's hosting service. I was easily able to transfer all of my files following GoDaddy's well written instructions. Of course, I skipped the example web site exercise since I had a real web site to play with. After loading the files, I was instructed to open the browser and type in my web address. And so I did. What I saw made my heart stop momentarily and my breathing slow as I read the equivalent of "if you don't see your web site, you really messed something up". With what I'm sure was a look of horror on my face, unable to speak, I moved slowly to the troubleshooting section of the instructions and began to read. It's talking about a file named "index.htm". I don't have one of those.... hmmm. I go to my Dummies book... nothing there. I go back to the troubleshooting text and it tells me in so many words that my home page needs to be named "index.htm"... literally. That answered the question burning in my brain... "so how does the host know which one of those pages I loaded is my "home" page". I renamed my home page file to "index.htm", uploaded the file again and went back to my browser. Holding my breath again, I typed www.simplyfibers.com and it came up without a hiccup... it was amazing!
Now, exactly where did I miss the whole index.htm thing? I built the entire web site and catalog and missed that? Isn't that like marrying someone without knowing their last name??? Turns out that had I gone along with the example exercise, I probably would have picked up this detail. Sometimes I wonder about myself. I'm going to stick with the old saying, "All's well that ends well".
For now I will continue to load new product into my catalog and tweak the web site. Keep your fingers crossed that the experts at GoDaddy can help me figure out why the process is so slow.
Till next time, Sandy
