As I’ve hinted previouly, my wife and I opened up a new shoe store last month: Lillifoot. A major reason why I haven’t been blogging as much lately is because I’ve been so busy with Lillfoot. We’ve effectively set up a complete retail business from scratch. It’s been an incredible learning experience, as we’ve had to grapple with real estate agents, builders, suppliers, staff, computer systems and processes. This has been all the more stressful because neither Annie or I had any previous experience retail, not to mention we’re both still working in our day jobs. Given the nature of this blog, I’ll eventually get around to covering some of the technical issues surrounding getting a new shoe store up and running.
This main point I’ll mention today is the website. It’s taken me quite a few evenings, but I’ve finally got a design that I’m fairly happy with – though a professional graphic designer might have a different opinion (hi Sol! Any comments?).
As is usual with me, the site is fully standards based, using semantic markup with cascading stylesheets. Clicking on “view source” shows a very sparse html markup, which enormously simplies the maintenance of the site. Even with that, I think that there is a certain attractive look to the site (though I might change my mind about the hot pink in a month or two!). Stylesheets give you the freedom to change you mind without too much work, though.
Still to do on the site: install WordPress or Joomla! to enable people other than me to update the site (and the news); get more pictures in the brand pages, and get a webstore up and running. Plenty to do!
Renaissance Developer 