Tibetan Dawn

The Tibetan Dawn Blog

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• 6.09.06: Reflection on the development of the Tibetan Dawn Website
  

  We have been really pleased with our Tibetan Dawn website, which was designed by Ruben Whitehouse of Rocketfuelled. It uses a system called Textpattern, with a standard layout for each page. This makes it easy to learn and user friendly. It includes a very simple stock control & product description.

  Reuben produced an eCommerce website shell for us, with simple access via a password to upload both our own images and text content. This is our first web site and with hands on experience, the site has been developed from our original simple ideas. With hindsight, it has proved crucial that we had this user maintain site. We are thankful that we didn’t get ourselves locked into a static website design, which required the developer to make every single change on our behalf.

  There have been very few running costs with this site. Just hosting & a little further development to add some key functions. Mainly, it should be noted that any eCommerce site is labour intensive for the owner, this one just requires the added uploading of data by the client.

  Looking to purchase a website
  Before embarking on any website, it would be useful to have access to a number of skills:

  •Good communication & written skills.
  •Good computer user capabilities.
  •Basic photographic ability.
  •A simple understanding of digital photography software manipulation.
  •The use of a digital camera – a great time and cost saver.
  •An understanding of business contracts & business law.

  Process we used to set up the website
  •Decide on who you’re marketing to.
  •Whether to go for a formal or informal approach.
  •Write up terms and conditions.
  •Write up an “about you” page.
  •Write up a contact page.
  •Write up your product descriptions.
  •Price your products.
  •Keep your postage & packaging to a minimum to encourage purchasing.
  •Take your photographs.
  •Manipulate your photos to the required formats.
  •Upload to Textpattern.

  Note.
  We found it useful to set up a system for uploading photos. There are 3 different sizes of photographs for each product. Using the letters A-F as a suffix to the .jpg file proved essential. It allowed us to upload the .jpg files in a particular order and to quickly workout where to place each of the picture files in the individual product layouts.

  If you are unhappy with your final webpage, then with Textpattern it is so easy to go back and change or correct mistakes. You have the ability to set pages up in a draft format, before setting an article live. It is also possible to hide items that have previously been on the website. You can even change the layout of products within a menu by manipulating the date stamp. This allows you to move products or articles up and down within the menu page.

  We use PayPal as our secure shopping basket. It allows safe collection & manual transfer of sales cash to the business bank account. It can prove to be expensive on an individual item basis, but is far cheaper than using a merchant bank account with monthly charges whilst building up the turnover of the business. It provides documentation for the purchase, but lets you down by not providing a date on the order printout.

  PayPals’ postage & packing system has also let us down a little as its calculations are based on product price. We have managed to get around this by including an “excess” postage and packing charge in the purchase price of our goods. This is mainly where we use Royal Mails Special Delivery for despatch of certain goods.

  Benefits
  •The website has had the ability to develop alongside new ideas.
  •It has grown in size without problem.
  •It is simple to use and navigate.
  •Purchasing from the shop is easy and straight forward.
  •The simple stock control is easy to use and maintain.
  •Loading data onto the site is simple.
  •It is easy and cheap to maintain.
  •We have had great feedback on the shop
  •There has been excellent advice and back up from Reuben Whitehouse.
  •The integrated PayPal shopping basket has proved itself worthwhile. We never have the concern of keeping debit/credit card details secure.

  All in all, we have been extremely happy with our website development and depending on Textpatterns’ capacity to grow with us; we expect to be using it for a long time into the future.

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