The pain of relaunching my website

When I started My Wedding Décor in April 2015 on the Shopify platform, I picked the Retina Austin motif by New Zealand-based programmer from the Sandbox.

The subject was — and is — highly rated by retailers. It seemed clean and functional. I could easily add my initial 80 products without much aid. Furthermore, I pulled my first purchase 21 days after launch.

Within a year, however, I met a designer who said I’d make more sales with a redesigned site.

His redesign — with another Shopify motif, Testament, with a U.S. programmer — comprised a home page with drop-down menus featuring photographs to showcase my décor classes, amongst other features. In July 2016, I relaunched My Wedding Décor with this new look.

With the growth in demand from corporate customers, I launched My Event Décor in January 2017, copying the new layout. This time there was a delay of 37 days before my first sale.

Before I merged it into My Event Décor in late April 2018, some apps and components on My Wedding Décor had begun to break. Our changes had affected the initial theme code.

Developer absent

A couple of weeks ago, it became hard to confirm appointments with my designer and to receive emails and telephone calls returned. His quoted hours doubled. My previous rate of $80 per hour grew to $100 an hour without so much as an email to let me know.

Further, his Time Doctor hour logging system disappeared from my bills. My site and his client care were failing. Therefore it was time to begin once more with a new theme that would hopefully require minimal improvement.

Despite looking through heaps of possible Shopify topics, I returned to the first Retina theme.

However, my designer had extensively reworked the first motif. It had so many changes that a smooth relaunch with the new variant was impossible as existing apps installed on a single theme did not work with other. Nonetheless, I relaunched the website myself using the Retina Melbourne motif on September 12, 2018.

Remaining apps

I deleted at least seven paid and free Shopify apps prior to the September launch. I kept only the following apps, which are vital to conducting my site:

• Novel That App (a rental booking app),
• Lucky Orange (live chat and live client monitoring ),
• Minifier (picture minifying),
• Shopping Feeder (Google Shopping),
• Traffic Guard (to block undesirable ISPs),
• Calculator Builder (which computes event hire costs in real time),
• Xero (accounting).

Upon relaunching, I needed to repair headline padding, text-wrapping around photographs on my blog posts and Contact Us page, and the spacing on the testimonials page.

This relaunch was a helpful time to cull non-performing apps and to seek ones with lower monthly charges. I’ve since reduced my monthly app costs from approximately AUD$80 to AUD$53.

I deleted the Shop My Instagram app because I had never received a direct sale in its six months of operation. It was better to allow Instagram users explore my site as opposed to get a URL to a showcased item.

I was sorry to discover that the Product Questions Answers app, which enabled shoppers to ask quick questions, is incompatible with my new theme. Product Questions Answers had proved quite useful at final sales.

The prior coding had allowed me to get emails that listed the customer’s name and event date in the topic title, which makes it effortless to triage inquiries. But, I had forgotten it was the coding rather than the apps that could make this work.

In 10 days I tried three different apps to produce the Contact Us page with none of them able to provide me readily identifiable subject lines.

It appears surprising that no apps offer you an option to determine email queries via the topic line. I needed to use two”Shopify Pros” (Shopify’s directory of third party service providers) to solve this situation.

Previous coding had provided shoppers with a dynamic date calculator on the goods for buy (not lease ), which would reveal the amount of days to delivery. The first Shopify Expert incorrectly copied the default sample code of nine days, applying it to all products; the next expert solved this problem.

In actuality, the next expert has proved so fast and efficient I have already given her a third job.

It’s cost approximately AUD$1,275 to relaunch my site with three-quarters of the to correct mistakes from the new theme not linking properly with old coding.

Hopefully, I’ve now solved all hiccups with the relaunch.