Solacity's Shiny New Web Site!

[Rob Beckers]

After years of cringing at our outdated Web site, we finally have a awesome new one! Take a look at http://www.solacity.com/

We made this in-house, with countless hours put in over the past 4 months. The rule seems to be that the simpler and easier it looks for the visitors, the more work it is to make it. The emphasis is on easy navigation for our customers, so that it's quick to find the products they are looking for. The 'learning' section with articles has been overhauled and preserved as well, with hopefully more to come.

For now only the 300-some products that we had on our regular price list are in the system. The plan is to add another 1000+ that we also sell (but since it was impossible to keep track of that many they were never on the price list, since that involved lots of manual labour to keep prices up-to-date). It will take time to add products, we have to write in essence a Web page for each one of them.

I'm sure there are a few bugs left in the system! Please let me know if you find anything that's not right.

For the techies: The new site was build on top of Wordpress and Woocommerce, with a heck of a lot of customization. I'm not all that impressed with those two platforms, it's a house-of-cards that's very fragile and hard to diagnose when things go wrong, it also comes with rather severe limitations that shouldn't exist for a CMS/shop in today's world, but it's about the only way to relatively quickly get a Web shop set up that looks good. Programming it all from scratch would have taken very much more time.

The Solacity site has a link in the main menu to Green Power Talk. Hopefully that will breath a little more life into this forum as well.

Hope you like it!

-RoB-

[Joe Blake]

Nice one, Rob. :bigsmile:

Pity I don't live closer or I'd drop in and say g'day.

Joe

PS Maybe one day we can get together for a virtual tour via Skype. I'm getting into winter here (though yesterday it was 30 degrees C!) so I'll be indoors a bit more.

[Rob Beckers]

Joe, how's Saturday 11pm for you?
I'm doing two tours for people interested in the building that day, one is at 11am our time, one at 12:30pm, our time. If my math is right you're exactly 12 hours ahead, so this would get a bit late for you.

I could have one of the visitors carry an iPad around with Skype so you participate as well. We have about 18 people signed up so far, with a few more days to go. I'll be making hot-dogs, but other than a virtual sniff it'd be hard to get to you.

-RoB-

[Joe Blake]

Hi Rob,

I think I could prop my eyelids with matchsticks for that. I'll see if I can get a hot-dog cook up going. I won't be able to show you much hear that you haven't already seen in my various posts, but if you have any questions about those piccies, I can probably answer them for you.

I'll set my skype onto the loudspeakers rather than the headset so if you give me a ring I should hear it.

Will look forward to meeting you on Saturday.


Ciao,

Joe

[Joe Blake]

Hi Rob,

I think I could probably prop my eyelids open for 11 pm. I'll try and cook up a hot dog here.

My neighbour Don is interested so he might be able to crawl over and join us.

That late at night I probably can't show you much of my place that you haven't already seen in my various posts, but if you have any questions about my piccies I'll be glad to answer.

Look forward to a mid night snack.

:laugh:

Joe

[Rob Beckers]

Joe, great!
I'll see if I can find someone to carry my iPad-mini around and follow along with the tour. We should have a good crowd (I've not heard the latest numbers, it was filling up nicely last time I talked to the organizers).

-RoB-

[Rob Beckers]

Joe, I just received the final agenda (I'm not organizing the tour, just hosting it): The start time is set of 11am for the morning tour, local time here. There are currently 16 people signed up for the morning, 14 for the afternoon, so it's pretty busy!

I have enlisted my daughter to carry the iPad around with Skype, so you can follow along, and in fact participate, we should be able to hear your audio.

Should be fun!

-RoB-

[Rob Beckers]

Joe, just to give a final heads-up: I'll be leaving here in 10 minutes to go to the building. We'll take a couple Skype capable devices along, just to be on the safe side. I'll call you up close to 11am here (11pm your side I gather).

-RoB-

[Joe Blake]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the very interesting and informative tour. A special thanks to your daughter for her excellent work with the camera. It was like she was reading my mind as you pointed things out.

My neighbour Don was also impressed.

You've done an excellent job may I say.

Regards,

Joe

[Rob Beckers]

Good to have you, and I'm glad to hear you enjoyed it Joe!
I think the other people were mighty impressed that there was a (virtual) participant from Australia present.

How was the video quality? Could you see enough of the details to make sense of it? I find that with Skype it's a bit hit-or-miss. Sometimes great, sometimes grainy, even though the bandwidth and camera resolution are good.

It was fun to do these tours. Of course, it's not entirely selfless, as many of these people are also potential customers and a way for me to get the word out about the business. By the way, on average I get about 1 or 2 people a week that want to see the building (just walk-ins), so I've been giving quite a few of these tours.

Enjoy what's left of your Sunday!

-RoB-

[Joe Blake]

Have to say Rob that apart from the initial logging in difficulties, the Skype video was excellent, with good sound, went well from start to finish.

Once again, thanks for the tour.

Maybe you could get one of those robots that will carry the camera and automatically follow you round the shop next time you have visitors:idea:

I'm sitting at the computer getting ready for our ANZAC Day parade. I missed the dawn service, having stayed up far too late last night to watch the Liege-Baston-Liege bicycle race in Belgium. The Aussie Team, Orica Green Edge managed to score a very close (about half a bicycle length) second after 250 or so cruel kilometres.

It's pretty dark and grey outside, with some rain already falling. :amazed:

Joe

[Rob Beckers]

Enjoy ANZAC day Joe!

I saw a little of the bicycle race Liege-Bastogne-Liege; that was ugly! Snow, hail, ice-cold rain. A Dutchman won, in fact, just like me he grew up not far from where that race was held (I'm from Maastricht, a stone's throw north of Liege, or Luik as it's callled in Flemish and Dutch). Gotta have respect for the people that rode that race.

Back to cleaning the place today after last Saturday's event...

-RoB-