NEW OLYMPIC ORCHIDS PERFUME WEBSITE COMING

July marks the seventh anniversary of Olympic Orchids perfumes, and it is only fitting that there should be an update of the online store that has been essentially the same since 2010. A couple of years ago I did make a halfhearted attempt to design a new website on Shopify, but it never really took off, partly because I never put all of my products on it, and partly because Shopify is not the best platform to use. No need to go into its shortcomings. Website design and implementation has been taking most of my time for the past week. Such is the life of a perfumer who doesn't outsource anything. 

It turned out that I was able stay with my primary web hosting company and design an entirely new website using a Wordpress front end and a Woocommerce infrastructure. The URL will stay the same. It’s a nice combination, and extremely easy to use. I have re-photographed almost all of my products, put them up on the e-store with pull-down menus for sizes, shipping options, and other attributes, added a few new products, and added some cool new features. For example, there’s now a system for customers to receive points for their purchases and redeem them for discounts or free products. If this website works well, I will discontinue the Shopify site and consolidate everything on one e-store. This will be a lot less confusing for everyone. For continuity, I've tried to keep some of the original graphics, but everything is cleaned up. 

The hardest part has been completed, but I know there will be lots of ongoing tweaks and corrections as people use the website. I'll also continue to add new features and graphics. Right now it's pretty bare-bones. 

I am tentatively planning on the new website going live this Wednesday, July 5, and will need some people to test it. I added an almost-free test product for the first 10 people who are willing to go through the entire cart, checkout, and ordering procedure on an untested website, so look for this to appear next week. There will also be a seventh anniversary discount via a “coupon” that can be added at checkout. I’ll give people the coupon code in my July newsletter, on this blog, and on Facebook.

I hope people will like the remodel. 

[All photos are mine]

HOW I’M SPENDING MY SUMMER

Finally summer has come to Seattle, with perfect blue skies that make me think about all the places in the world that are so polluted that the sky is obscured even on a “clear” day. I fear that it’s only a matter of time until this problem becomes worldwide, affecting even our little corner of the West Coast. Pollution knows no city, county, state, or national boundaries, so even if we do our part, that doesn’t guarantee that we won’t get second-hand smog from those who don’t.

I really didn’t mean to write about this issue, it just came out because it had was on my mind as I was walking outside today. What I’ve actually been doing this week is working on upgrading my websites. The old orchidscents(original boutique) website is so ugly that I hate looking at it, and the olympicorchids nursery website isn’t much better. I am in the process of switching to a new e-commerce platform that will look better and work better, but it’s a lot of work.

This week I put together a simple practice website for myjewelry-making activities. It's not finished yet, but it looks pretty good. The perfume website will be similar, or at least on the same e-commerce platform, but I need all-new photos of the bottles so that I can standardize the look of the store. Yesterday I photographed all of the 30 ml bottles, and today I sized, cropped, and Photoshopped the images. I found the perfect place to photograph bottles, a stair rail that has bright indirect side/back lighting from a big window in the stair well. It’s like being in a walk-in light tent. 

The new photos need minimal processing and look a lot better than the old ones, even though they were taken with my phone. I kind of like the two-tone background instead of the bottle floating in a sea of white. One of these days I need to go to the Apple store and get them to figure out how to download photos from my old camera, which is incompatible with the new Apple photo management software. I still have to photograph other fragrance items for the website: samples, discovery sets, soaps, oils, etc, but will probably do that on Monday. Sunday is shipping day for everything, so I’ll be busy overseeing that.

I’m really looking forward to having an attractive and functional perfume website with all of my products on it. Once that’s done, the orchid plant website is next. There goes my summer vacation! But it’s all going to be worth it in the end.

[All photos are mine]