If you have been to recently you'll have noticed a huge change has occurred...and if you have been a long time reader of the blog you'll notice that the blog url has changed...again. You may have expected to see a new layout over at , but I don't think anyone realized how much change was going to actually happen...least of all me!
I set out to add a new shopping cart system to make shopping easier for my beloved customers and less stressful to process orders for me and my growing staff. I however did not quite realize the mammoth task I was taking on.
First I realized that my merchant account (how I process credit cards) could not handle the technicality of what I needed it to do. So I had to research and find a new merchant account, apply for it and get that all set up.
Then came the design aspect, I had to redo the entire site...all 600 or so pages and we are talking a very complex amount of coding, designing and selecting options and details that I needed to accomplish to make all of the cool new options function, as well as custom naming every page so that they matched the old site and I would not mess up links from other websites. The minutiae of it is still not fully complete, I am slowly filling in all the gaps while I try to get back to work on everything I had to drop in haste when I started the redesign. The amount of details that were needed fro this redesign were so intense that when I think back on the last month its a bit of a blur of hours and hours and hours on the computer with a stack of notes scattered around me on my desk.
Once the new site was ready to go, I naively assumed that I just had to forward manictrout.com over to 3d cart from godaddy and I was ready to go...um, no. I called godaddy and decided that as having the blog at www.manictrout.com/Blog could make the whole shebang crash if I forwarded , and would make google hate me, and who wants that??? I had no choice...I bought a new domain name for the blog moved everything from over to manictroutblog.com.
Ok, that was easy I stupidly giggled as I called 3dcart to redirect manictrout.com to the new site...um, no. I knew that I had also changed the address of every single image that I have on the server, but I had 48 for the first address redirect to occur, so I can take my time updating the site links.
But wait, what happens when you change tech dns address of your domain name? Your email accounts go missing...this created a half hour of calling back in forth between the two server companies, gradually starting to hyperventilate as during the last call to 3d I was told (at 4pm) that if I were lucky I would have email again tomorrow afternoon. At this point I started begging, it was not pretty...but you know what...I had my email working again within 20 minutes.
After the email situation ended and I calmed down I was excited to notice that the redirection already occurred, and it had only been an hour...eek...great as I didn't have to wait and was live and ready to go, but bad as I had only updated the broken links on manictrout.com, but I assumed that the blog would be simple and quick to fix...um, no.
First I had to switch the blog over to be the index at manictroutblog.com and quickly as the link from would not work until I did it and then I had to redo the 301 redirect I had set up over at the first blog I had on blogger to this new one...not that bad, until I realized that I cannot redirect the blog address I have had for 8 months to the new url. crap. Then I realized that even though I found a way to update all of the url links, the broken image links had to be done manually...571 posts of links that I had to manually change. But I did it!
So that is what I have been up too...it is an amazing feeling to be done, let me tell you!
Lat night I added 38 new pretties to the site and I realized the that whole process of adding new items and creating the newsletter has changed, so that will take some getting used to, but I believe in change. The only downside is that when I add new products its live, to avoid this, I would have to shut down the shop...but I work well under pressure, so I think I'll survive...
Please go check out the new site, try it on for size and let me know what you think!
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