Patio Umbrella Land – the blog

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.

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….