Hello and Welcome!

1st February 2017

Hello everybody!



Well here goes on a new blog for the My Parrot Shop website.

That's the NEW My Parrot Shop website! Coming to you, uh, well... if things go as they should - in a couple of weeks, if things go as they usually do - then its probably still a couple of months away.

But, in a flurry of optimism, I'm starting this blog today.

My Parrot Shop is far from rolling in money, so I've (that's me, Caroline, the owner and manager) been building the new website all on my lonesome. I really can't say that I've been enjoying myself, but it is very necessary because, as I'm sure many of our long-time faithful customers have noticed, our current website is a tad broken. The use of the modifier "tad" is a conscious choice to mitigate the feelings of horror the more accurate modifiers like "completely" or "irrevocably" induce. We have certainly noticed some of our less faithful customers running away screaming! We totally understand this response, because we in fact spend a lot of our time screaming too!

So right now I would estimate I am about half way through transferring the products. This is taking a lot longer than I wanted it to, however, despite the product descriptions likely being left in a terrible state formatting wise, the products themselves will be much easier to find, navigate through and understand. Hopefully.

When I'm finished uploading the products then I get to move onto sorting out how to get orders from the website into our database (our main port of call for the business). Right now I don't foresee this being difficult, but I'm sure I'll feel differently about it next week.

And after that I only have the shipping, payment systems, customers, information pages and general look and feel to go! Ah ha. Ha. Ha. Cry.

Still, the pain will be worth it, because at the end of all the effort we will have a website that you guys and gals will enjoy, and be able to use without having it kick you off just as you're paying, without your cart being emptied inexplicably, and without a product mysteriously disappearing when you swear it was there just a moment ago!

On top of that we'll finally be able to instigate customer reviews, quick and easy coupons and specials and other such things to improve the user experience and our ability to communicate with you through blogging, live chat, facebook and newsletters! Don't worry, we don't intend to bombard you with twice daily emails like amazon or ebay, but with all the new systems in place we'll likely be able to get a newsletter out more than twice a year!

I'm particularly looking forward to getting all my informative articles up on the blog. They've been sitting around in the depths of my computer just itching for a platform that I can get them onto without the 2 weeks programming penance each article would require on our old website. And the second most exciting thing about the new website will be the customer reviews. Admittedly that requires a lot more from you than it does from us however I suspect strongly that this won't be a problem! Bird people are the coolest!

So that sums up the basics of what's heading your way when we launch our new website. I'm not sure how relevant it is to say this, considering this blog post is being written at least a couple of weeks before the platform it'll be placed on is running, but feel free to leave comments or questions below!

That is, if you CAN leave comments... I really must check on that...