Pre-launch Rant

Fair warning: this blog post is only very indirectly related to parrots. Its a rant, and we all know where most rants should go...



So you think it should be relatively straightforward to transfer products from one website to another. Copy and paste. Copy and paste. Oh I wish.

First issue. Our original website has all the products listed individually. By which I mean we have 5 listings for the 5 sizes of safety perches. On the original website this was not by choice; we simply didn't have the underlying structure that allowed us to have one safety perch product with 5 size options. On our new website we do have this ability and we seriously want to take advantage of it because it reduces the confusion and hassles of finding, comparing and choosing the right products for your bird. So that's a thousand of copy and pasting followed by a whole pile of combining and editing.

Next issue. Formatting. There's simply no fast way to do this. Even if we stuck with the same font and original bold and italics the first website had. You either cut and paste, stripping all the formatting as you go and later go back in and add all the carriage returns, font sizing and what have you, or you copy and paste with all the formatting intact and then go back through them to remove all the crazy junk that suddenly shows up in all your descriptions. It doesn't matter what you choose to do it's a complete mess that requires a product by product edit.

More issues: The new website has several very useful features for sorting, finding and displaying the various bits of information related to a product, like weight, dimensions and brand. Data we have (mostly), but not in a way that can be pulled and deposited in any manner that doesn't take FOREVER.

Even more issues: Everything we do for the new website also needs to get matched up to our database or the whole house of cards gets blown away.

And don't forget the images, of which there are thousands, nor the little but frequent irritations when you notice a description or image that's out of date and needs to be redone.

I could go on for pages about all the nitty gritty details but I believe I've managed to illustrate the point that I am NOT having fun. So not having fun. I just want it to be over.