I have spent the day...

... researching techy kind of things.

Firstly, I want to change our website. There are two things on my mind and both will be big things to do so I'll do one and then the other.

On the main website, I want to change the menu across the top so that it's vertical. It'll allow me to add more stuff. This idea came about because I had a bloody marvellous thought on the bus about a dress for a little girl that I'd like to write and offer as a pattern and then I was thinking about how we market patterns and it's mainly here, on rav and on facebook but wouldn't it be great if we could get a direct link from the website? (I think we also need to put a little menu on the blog - deffo need to sort out the side bar here and change some of the colours so you can actually tell what are links and what aren't etc. I also want to change the header thing.) In order to get the patterns in a space on the main website there will need to be another option in the menu but we just can't fit any more along the top so vertical it has to be. I'm getting there - I've found out that < u l >means 'unordered list'. That's a step in the right direction... But if I'm to get serious about that then the whole order of the website will have to change to shunt the information up and about to make space for the vertical menu and I'm not sure I'm up to that. Then, I think, I'll have to update every single on of the ancillary pages: 'about us', 'location', 'workshops', 'events' and 'contact us' (the 'online shop' and the 'blog' tabs are just links to other websites so I won't have to do anything about those). And for each of those ancillary pages I'll have to think about and design a page that fits around a vertical list.

To put this in perspective - I was MAJORLY impressed with myself when I worked out how to make bullet points in html... like LET'S HAVE A PARTY I'VE LEARNED HOW TO WRITE < li > AND < / l i >!!!!!!!

The other idea that really needs doing is to make the webshop more 'us'. At the minute it's so blue and I want a whole lot more of green! But the problem, as I understand it, is that all of the blue stuff is actually a picture so to change it I'd have to get the same or similar pictures in green and upload them to every single bloody page. I can't even begin to think of how many pages there are on our webshop... It's a daunting task that's going to take a lot of time (and patience for somebody who's such a luddite...). I assume there's some sort of 'template' page for each of the offerings - so I'd set that up and then all of my products would automatically have green based pages. It helps that I realised a couple of months ago that our webshop is actually part of our website! I don't know why I thought it was separate, especially since we don't pay separately... Nothing in this life is free! So anything that needs changing on the webshop we have to find out the website - it caused a lot of grief and frantic mouse clicking on the back of the webshop to work that out...

So I guess that's three thoughts: get a vertical menu, sort out the blog properly and green-up the webshop.

No idea when they'll be done.

Then I had my lunch and read one of the Federation of Small Business magazines and saw a QR Code which got me thinking that I'd said the other day that we would use them. So I looked up how to get them and found this website and bloody made one didn't I!?!? Look:





Have you got one of them there smartphones?!!? Can you use it!?!? Does it work!?!?!?! Do let us know!!!


I was wondering how on earth we might use them and I think the first thing I'm going to do is when we do our next chunk of lessons - I'll print out a copy and put it in the window with a link directly to the webshop where the lessons are!!! What a thought! And then when I do a press release I can send along a picture file with it in and if they use it in their magazines we might look like we're technologically advanced (mwahahahaha - how little they know!). 


What do you think!?


What other techy thing can I think of to look up?


Love Eleanor. :)

Edited To Add: Some spaces in the html so that they show up rather than actually work... Not that brilliantly technical, obviously...