Recently, WooCommerce (our e-commerce platform) rolled out an extremely large update. It was so large that a lot of our plugins we use ended up conflicting and causing our customers problems. Not to mention, our theme was out of date by about three years. So, surprise, we now have a new website!
Our New Website Vision
Fall For Design started originally as a way for us to offer design services, then it transferred into a personal blog, then it transferred into a small amateur business, then it grew into a more professional business, and now it’s bustling with three employees.
That’s right, three. We hired our sister-in-law part-time to help us with our Customer Service. Here’s her new work station.
Actually, this isn’t her work station, she works from home. Yes she uses this iPad and pink iPad Case/Keyboard. But the background is actually my office. #behindthescenes #ffdhomestudio
Since this business has turned more professional as the months went on, we needed our website to reflect our ever-changing business approach and customer needs. We wanted a website that was clean, simple, less cluttered, and doesn’t require a lot of web maintenance over time. We’ve actually been keep an eye out on a new website for the past year.
Time to Launch
With our old website failing, it was time for us to seriously consider pulling the string and upgrading our website. We ended up finding a brand new e-commerce theme that matched our vision. It took us longer then expected (a week nearly) to roll out the new theme. We lost all our data (thankfully our website is backed up twice a day). It took about 48 hours to re-store all that lost data (we’re still finding bugs). We ended up hiring a web developer to help us complete our website (it needed some changes from the original theme). So, here we are, a week later. It’s done. We’re waiting on the rest of the bugs to be worked out with our plug-in’s developers.
We’ll continue to make small non-noticeable changes through out time just like we did with our old website. Also, as an added bonus, our website runs twice as fast as it did before. Our new website has a lot of fancy features that it never had before. To name a few; a better gallery/view of our products, wish lists, a mini-shopping cart fly-out (which is really sleek, btw) and better menu navigation.
Overall, we’re really satisfied with our new look. What do you think?
Oh, one more thing.
We consolidated our manufacturing this past January. We now make all our rubber stamps (both wood mounted and self inking) in our home studio using the best quality stamp making equipment in the world.
We are one Graphic Designer with 16 years of experience, one manufacturing guy with 18 years of manufacturing experience, and one customer service gal. Combined with our customers, we make quiet a team using our God given gifts and talents!
