Patio Umbrella Land - the blog

Ok, the hold up.

patioumbrellaland — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 01:08:37 +0000

Why are we being held up in opening Patio Umbrella Land? Well, for one, there are a few vendors that are a little late in getting us some needed information. For another, the HTML time has taken up a little more time than we wanted. However, some things that you should expect when Patio Umbrella Land finally opens.

Awesome choices – we have gone the extra mile to make sure that each of our umbrellas has features that are just not available online anywhere.
Great customer service – it’s not just answering the phone, but knowing what our customers need as well.
Easy site navigation – this has been one of the largest concerns we’ve had over the past few months, making sure that you and our website will be able to interact with each other. We don’t want you searching for patio umbrellas, we want to FIND the perfect umbrella.
Last minute fabrics – Go figure, we want to give you 80 outdoor fabrics to choose from, instead of 50.
Community – Yes, we are building a great community for decor and outdoor decor enthusiasts.

So patience please, it’s all coming together.

Posted in Business, Design, Website Progress Tagged: choices, community, customer service, customers, delays, design delays, patience, patio, patio umbrellas, patioumbrellaland, site navigation

It HTML Time!

patioumbrellaland — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:01:11 +0000

I know, I know. I haven’t blogged in months about the status of our site. I haven’t done a lot of things, but I just got really, reallly happy when I realized that we where finally started our HTML markup. For those that don’t know, html is HyperText Markup Language.

What?

It’s the language that describes how to render a web page in a browser.

And it’s time that we started the work. This project has been a real long process, but now that we have all of our Sunbrella and Outdurda fabric, as well as some polyester prints, and some olefins, we’ve got what is going to be the Largest Patio Umbrella program in history put together, and it’s going to be alot of fun putting together.

Now, we’re not ready to rollout the site, we’re just putting the HTML together, the building blocks of how the website will actually layout on your computer screen, and we are trying to make it as cross-browser compatible as possible. We are using alot of CSS, but, and we don’t wan’t to dissappoint a lot of xhtml/css junkies out there, we’re using a base table design as the most basic, basic, basic outline. We’re forced to because of our e-commerce engine, so please don’t picket us. It’s one of the tenets of do it wrong quickly. It’s high time we get out there, and as soon as possible.

But ooohh, it’s getting fun now.

Posted in Business, Design, Website Progress Tagged: blogged, blogging, cross-browser, css, Design, e-commerce, html, html markup, layout, our site, outdura, pul, site, sunbrella, w3c

Product Choices – The right patio umbrellas

patioumbrellaland — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:51:55 +0000

One of the more exciting things about developing a website like ours is considering all the patio umbrella choices that are available. We recently went to a patio product conference where the greatest and newest products where being shown off, and we really found it hard to resist ordering everything in sight. From the very economical to the very deluxe, we found wonderful patio umbrellas of every size and and every material that would be awesome additions to our program, but more importantly, awesome CHOICES for our customers.

We found fantastic selections of different sizes of outdoor umbrella, from bistro size 6 and 7 foot umbrellas, to fantastic large patio umbrellas like 11′, 12′, and big ol 13′ foot umbrellas that would be awesome for large shade areas or commercial needs like restaurants and clubs.

We found materials galore like fantastic aluminum, wood, and fiberglass that combined with the right outdoor fabrics can literally make any look a patio shopper can desire. We particularly like the fiberglass as they are wind and break resistant, eliminating a lot of home owner worries.

And OFFSETS! Offset umbrellas, also called cantilevered umbrellas have become incredibly diverse! Not only are sizes much more varied, but functions and styles as well!

As we prepare for our opening, we are incredibly excited at the possibilities ahead of us, and the patio umbrella products we’ll be offering to our customers.

Posted in Business, Materials, Products, Shopping Tagged: aluminum, bistro, cantilevered umbrellas, clubs, commercial, customers, fiberglass, grand opening, large patio umbrellas, outdoor umbrellas, patio umbrellas, pul, restaurants, shade areas, wood

Much Bigger Than We Thought

patioumbrellaland — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 23:46:07 +0000

When we started this project, we had a plan to create the largest patio umbrella store online, with the most products, the most choices, and the largest selection of Sunbrella fabrics available on the net. Well, I’m happy to say we’re doing just that, and then some.

100% solution dyed acrylic is hands down the best fabric for outdoor umbrellas of all kinds. The have a great feel, what in the industry is called “hand”, have exceptional UV protection properties (Sunbrella Acrylics are recommended by the Skin Cancer Foundation) and are exceptionally mildew and stain resistant. However, we realized that we really need to expand on our fabric selection even more to enhance our offerings.

There is a fantastic, top tier line of acrylic fabrics that performs on the same level as Sunbrella. We are really glad to be able to bring in the Outdura line of acrylic fabrics on some of our patio umbrellas. Outdura has been in the fabric industry for a decade, and have produced a beautiful line of acrylic fabrics that provided a lot of value and a lot of quality.

There are other GREAT fabrics out there, such as outdoor olefins and polyester and polyprints, but we’ve decided to only bring the best fabrics to match with the best frames in the industry.

So as of right now, we will have a fantastic line of both Sunbrella and Outdoor outdoor fabrics.

Building a navigation.

patioumbrellaland — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 06:00:18 +0000

Website navigation, I feel, is pretty crucial. Although there are great search technologies available, I think that it’s best for a shopper to find what they are looking for within a click or two from the home page. That’s why we’re building what we hope to be a very precise and easy to use navigation system into our framework.

Using both text and images, pretty much our whole offering should be readily available from the front page. It’s taken us a while to really work out the details, but we feel that we’ve created a navigational system that is both easy to understand and easy to follow.

I don’t think that a lot of e-commerce sites really put a lot of thought into their navigation system. After looking through some heat map testing, we see a lot of web user’s going straight for the search. This is really a double edged blade, in my opinion. On the one hand, the good news is that the average web user is well versed in internet technology and uses, they know what a search is. However, on the other hand, it also means that they didn’t see what they where looking for when they got to the page. This is probably a good indication that a site’s bounce rate (how many users bounce off the page) might be high, and really could be avoided.

So far, I’m pretty happy with the nav system we are working on. In essence, it’s a project unto itself, and we’re finding really exciting ways of changing an old system of looking for something, into a new system of finding something.

The flow. Building a Superstore.

patioumbrellaland — Sat, 31 May 2008 06:54:19 +0000

Starting a new business is like riding a roller coaster, you’re excited and terrified at the same time. On some days, news is great! Everything is moving along at a great pace. On other days, the news is horrific. Something just went wrong that’s going to put you back another month. But for the most part, it’s one of the most exciting times in our lives.

Right now, we’re going through fabric choices. We decided from the beginning of this project that we will have the largest choice of fabrics for all of our umbrellas in the industry. Not a small task. Day in and day out is another round of outdoor fabrics coming in swatches, and trying to fit them into our color groupings gets a bit interesting at times. For internal purposes, we’ve grouped by the 4 seasons as well as basic colors. So we have a:

Spring Group
Summer Group
Fall Group
Winter Group

And for the primaries, we’ve started with:

Greens
Blues
Yellows
Reds
Blacks
Neutrals.

This second group of primary colors is a little subjective. We’re considering adding a brown group because their have been a plethora of great browns and rusts to come out lately, that we’ve had to move them out of the red grouping. Neutrals is pretty much a catch all right now, and we hope to start eliminating those we don’t feel will be the best choices for our customers.

On the design front, we’re incredibly happy with our logo and brand culture. Fine work from the marketing team. We’ve begun the basic layout of our site, and are currently working on the navigation. We believe in a very basic principal in web design, to keep all the major pages within one click. However, that’s proving to be a little difficult in the process. How can you effectively create hundreds of links that will not confuse our customer and cause a problem with the search engines. We’re working on it though, and hope to have a solution this week. Until next time….