Please take another look
Well hello all. I have some good news and bad news to report. Hurray for Miva : ) that’s for sure. I’m now very confident in the consistency of our server. I must give kudos again for the ease of transition and am now hitting myself over the head… WHY DID I WAIT SO LONG???? Ahhh hindsight, always so crystal clear. Now, I’ll tell you more good news. I know you’re on the edge of your seat.. we’ve paid most of our bills this month from the business and not our household accounts! Well, all but one small one. But we’ve had enough cash flow to almost break even this month, and I can breathe again. I can sleep again. And I can even hear a little bit of calm in Lee Ann’s voice, which although you don’t know her, is all but a miracle as a result of our last year. I’m still cautiously optimistic, and here’s the bad news. I’ve blogged about the mailing list being virtually obselete. I don’t have the same percentage of people coming in off of our direct mail campaign as I used to. In fact right before we moved over to Miva we were at an all time low for visits, period. Our traffic was down about 60% from our average. The good news is that we are getting some folks back in. Most of them from the engines, but it’s obviously our hope that the list revives itself a bit as customer confidence improves. We sent out an initial email once we were set up with Miva that just explained in simple terms that we’d moved on to a new server. I had to be REALLLY careful to maintain their confidence in shopping the site. I didn’t want them to misinterpret and assume their previous shopping experience wasn’t safe. But I wanted them to take another look.. which is exactly what I asked of them... Please take another look, and I might have been a little pitiful, there may have been begging.. No, not really. I can’t tell you if it's the engines that are carrying the business now or the mailing list. I’m not sophisticated enough to track that, other than using Google Analytics which is telling me that my traffic is mostly coming off of the engines. I need to set up the conversions on Analytics. Can I do that?.. track who converts based on what source they came in on? I’m not sure. I’d love to have that number. Things have been really bad up until this past month. I find that so hard to type because I never thought we’d be in this pitiful place, and we’re clearly not out of the woods. We’ve been so caught up with this failing website and server that we haven’t had the time or money to find product that will pull us up and out of this depressing hole. So I’m happy to say we are taking on some of the other challenges that feel sort of fresh. I’m ready to take on something very different and so sick of hearing that my site is down and my customers are gone. I can confidently say my site is UP and RUNNING! I don’t doubt that anymore. I used to be fearful when I clicked on the bookmark for my homepage.. would hold my breath even. OR I’d get the call from Lee Ann.. site is down. Ohhh how I dreaded answering that phone. So we gladly move onwards and upwards as my mom would say. Our new challenge…. finding purple clothes. If there’s anyone out there who can sell me purple plus sized clothing I’ll give you the keys to the cadillac. Odd request? Maybe, but I’m so grateful to be back here where I have to ask it. Hopefully next month’s post will be “back in the swing of things” Keep your fingers crossed and your red hat ready!
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