I’m planning to carry out the upgrade on the news section tomorrow. I’ve been planning to do it for a while now. The Climbing Frames Etc. news section may be all over the place for a short while tomorrow, so I apologise in advance to anyone who happens to be reading it at the time.
If you are on the Climbing Frames Etc. site and you happen to see any links or comments to sites which are obviously nothing to do with garden play equipment then please my apologies. The site is getting hit by ‘trackback spammers’ on an occasional basis. I’m deleting these as soon as they appear, and the site is currently free of any of this.
Some changes have been made to the site to prevent this happening in the future, but it is too early to say whether these measures will be 100% effective. Trackback spam is extremely new, so there is not much around in the way of preventative advice or solutions.
Nothing to get excited about. I was having a check through the site and I noticed that I had fogotten the link to the shopping basket from the ‘View Basket’ option on Climbing Frames Etc. navigation bar. I also had forgotten to put on the menu the link to Climbing Frames Etc. news pages (what your reading !). These have now been fixed.
Climbing Frames Etc. has now been handed over to Barclays Merchant Services to check over. All going well, I have been told that I will get a letter from them in around 7 working days with my merchant number. At that point I can then pass the merchant number to Protx. I then get a userid and password to access their system. A bit of testing on Protx’s test system and then I switch over to live. If everything goes smoothly (somehow it never seems to though !) then Climbing Frames Etc. is still on track for a ‘go live’ date of the 1st March.
I’ve spent the day tying up loose ends, double checking things, and making sure my prices were correct across the shopping cart and what was getting displayed. At the end of it all I sat back and thought … No. Something just wasn’t right. The problem is that the different play equipment manufacturers have different policies when it comes to charging for delivery, for example. It’s not a problem, as I just charge the customer exactly what they charge me. I don’t believe on profiting from delivery charges.
The problem as I saw it was that it made the site difficult for the customer to compare products. And at the end of the day, the site is all about the customer. How can people compare product prices when one manufacturer is charging nothing for delivery and another is charging £71. That makes a big difference in the final price that someone pays !
So, I’m revising all the prices to put them on a level playing field. More about this tomorrow.
I’m happy to receive feedback and comments on anything related to Climbing Frames Etc., particularly at this stage before it goes live. If you want to leave a comment then just click on the ‘comment’ link and let me know what you think.
I’ve implemented a plug-in to prevent comment spam. It should not affect ‘real’ people, but it should stop the spambots that plaster comment spam all over other peoples sites. Let me know if you have any problems leaving comments. You can email me at chris.drilled32039@zoemail.net (a temp address to keep the spammers at bay).
This is the main page for the swing sets products. Please remember the site is not live until 1st March 2005. Orders will not be accepted until then.
I’ve now uploaded the overview page for the climbing frames products. Same rules apply. The site is not live yet so please do not try to buy anything until the 1st March.
I still haven’t finished the Climbing Frames Etc. site. A few CSS problems have held things back today. I’ve got about 3 more pages to do. Then all that remains is to create consistent navigation across all the pages, tidy things up, then hand it over for testing. I’m hoping that my planned ‘go live’ date of 1st March is still achievable for Climbing Frames Etc.
Here is another page with some of the kids forts. Note - like all the other pages this is NOT live. Do not try and buy anything from this page as your card will not be debited. The site is NOT YET live.
I’ve been working on Climbing Frames Etc. pretty much solidly and was hoping to get the site finished today, but there is just that little bit too much to do, and to be honest I’m exhausted and brain dead at this point. I really don’t want to do anymore, mess it up, and then have to spend the whole day re-doing it tomorrow. I’ve already lost time by deleting all the product descriptions that I’d spent 2 days typing in ! And I don’t want a repeat of that.
Climbing Frames Etc. needed a logo and it’s something that I’ve been dragging my feet on. Well it’s finally sorted out. I always find it very difficult trying to choose which is the best and most appropriate design. Particularly for a site such as this. It might be called Climbing Frames Etc., but a large part of the products fall into the ‘Etc.’ category, rather than ‘climbing frames’. So, what I needed was something that was going to represent the spectrum of play equipment products that I would be selling. Hopefully I’ve achieved it.
This is a slightly smaller version of the Climbing Frames Etc. logo that I will be using.
Play equipment products are gradually being added to the site. Climbing Frames Etc. is still a couple of days away from being passed over to be checked for credit card merchant suitability. Some time has been lost after a whole load of html containing all the product descriptions went awol.
Here is a taster of some one of the products. The page is clearly not complete but it show the sort of play equipment that will be getting sold on Climbing Frames Etc.
The first draft of Climbing Frames Etc. ’s contact page has been published. This page is subject to change over the next couple of days and not intended at this stage for end customers.