What’s new on the site?

Hi Everyone!

I wanted to take a break from … well, breaking things on the web page to tell you about what’s new. We’ve finally gotten things going pretty smoothly now, so we can start adding cool features, which is really nice. But all of this craziness has given me a real appreciation for the kinds of torment you guys deal with on a daily basis. When you’re creating something that other people are going to see, use, appreciate, etc., you always want to do your best. Sometimes, on the way to doing your best, you take a few wrong turns (like deleting ALL of your webpages like I did 2 Fridays ago). For you, maybe you realize you accidentally bought the wrong flowers, used the wrong colors, or just misunderstood what your client asked for. Your stomach drops, your heart sinks, and you generally feel pretty lousy. As bad as that feels, it feels just as good when you work hard and make it right. So if you see me around the store and want to commiserate about projects gone wrong, I’d love to hear.

Back to the real reason for this post. I just wanted to talk about some of the new features on the site. I’d like to make this a regular feature so you can make the most of our new page. If you have any suggestions for features you’d like to see, please leave a comment!

• James spent a few afternoons transferring all of our picture galleries over. I can’t explain to you how mind-numbingly difficult that was. A few times I looked over at him just to make sure he hadn’t fallen asleep. For each picture you see up there, James looked at it, wrote a description, wrote a title, and gave it a nice name. Not bad when you do one picture, and it’s OK if you just do one gallery. He was doing about 3-4 a day for a few days, with a total of 15 galleries. You can see all of his hard work at our Shinoda Design Center Gallery page. Thanks James!


Thanks, James!

• I just have to say, ‘my bad’ about the first week or so of registrations. I thought one thing, and the website clearly thought another. After receiving a ton of e-mails expressing confusion about the registration process, I realized that I must not have explained things very well, and also I had assumed something about the login process that wasn’t true. We’ve now added a couple sections to the FAQ that better explain the registration and activation process. If you have questions about getting your account activated, check the FAQ first, and if you can’t find a satisfactory answer, contact us and we’ll help you out.


Sorry!

• Our search feature has been greatly improved. Results should be sorted by relevance now, along with the matching categories that were displayed before. In addition, you can search for any result by entering http://www.shinodadesigncenter.net/search/your-item/. If you have a multi-word search, use a – to separate the words like I just did. So if you want to see anything that matches the word, ‘vase’, http://www.shinodadesigncenter.net/search/vase. White vases? http://www.shinodadesigncenter.net/search/white-vase/. Of course you can always use the search bar on any page as well. If you’re having trouble finding your item in search, you can try a couple things. Always search for singular search words instead of plurals, like white vase instead of white vases. If you know a UPC number for your product, you can enter that in the search bar as well and you should be taken right to what you’re looking for. The last tip is to be less specific if you’re having trouble. So if ‘white vase’ isn’t working, try ‘vase’ and see if you can find any white ones (by the way, I keep using ‘vase’ as an example because it’s the most searched for term on the site).


Search: Now with working magnifying glass!

We have a couple other smaller upgrades, like the return of our product zoom, a link to our weekly promo at the top, and some controls on the front page rotating image. You can also see all of our new products on the new product page.

Phew. Hope you’re enjoying the page, and like I said before, let us know if you have a suggestion for a feature you’d like to see added (or in the very highly unlikely situation that you find something that doesn’t work, you can let us know about that too). We want this to be a resource for you, so we’d like to hear from you on how to make it better.

See you around the store,
Chris