If you have not taken a peek at the catalog section of our site in some time, you may have missed the addition of an extensive amount of product. We have just added our ten thousandth product!
I began our cataloging efforts in the middle of 2009. Everything was done in house including researching our e-commerce platform, designing the pages, customizing the pages, starting the accumulation of pictures, and a brief introduction into the world of open source programming and computer code. At the time, I thought it wouldn’t take long to get the site up and product shipped out. Little did I realize or appreciate the amount of knowledge, skill, and patience it would take to move the project along.
For those of you that have been watching the website evolve, I did not realize how problematic the picture gathering would be. Almost every vendor picture was formatted for print catalog publication. This meant that we had different sized pictures and oftentimes many products in a single picture that could not be Photoshopped out. This required us to take almost every single image ourselves. With the amount of resources we have devoted to this, you will have a better understanding of why we lock our pictures down so that they cannot be scraped off of our site and the delay in us getting to our ultimate goal of a fully functional and shipping website.
You may have noticed some significant changes to the site in the last couple of months. Along the way, I went from being a solo act on web development to a department of three. I am completely self trained. As the project evolved and expanded, I found that I lacked the technical expertise required and needed help to finish. That is when Chris took over the helm as Chief Web Architect and he is behind all the wonderful changes that have occurred.
From here, we will continue to add new product. We are working towards that final step of full e-commerce functionality as we speak. It is not easy to coordinate and set this up. We have to understand how to bill for shipping and teach ourselves to become a shipping company as well as continue to operate the warehouses most of you have shopped. I would like to thank every one of our web users for being patient with us as we continue to finalize our web project.
As a final note, if you have ideas about features you would like the website to include, feel free to email the web team at webmaster@shinodasales.com, use the site contact form, or comment on this blog.