With Writing Show host, Paula B.

Welcome to the original Writing Show series, How Not to Run an Online Bookstore, Episode 2. I’m your host, Paula B., and this is my story. Do not follow in my footsteps. Such a journey will only lead to misery and humiliation.

We left our intrepid pair of budding merchants in the process of designing their own Web-based store.

Sometimes I think if I ever have to lay out another Web site design again I’m going to scream. On the other hand, I’ve done it so many times that all I have to do is tweak a little, and it’s done.

We defined all the screens we were going to need. Then I laid them out on graph paper. I know, I know. I could have used Visio or some other software, but I’m much faster doing artwork manually, or I was then anyway. I’m better with that stuff now.

I designed a site with tabs across the top and detailed navigation down the left-hand side. This scheme served us well, and I am proud of it. It took me a while to come up with colors. I experimented in Microsoft Paint, which I actually do know how to use. I came up with a combination of blue, green, dark orange, and purple, which didn’t completely translate on the Web, but came close enough.

Logos are not my thing. I’m great with slogans because they’re words, but logos—I wish there weren’t such things. I’ve designed my own before. I’ve also had artists do them for me. I came up with one, and the first person I showed it to, an artsy fartsy guy, said it looked amateurish and people wouldn’t take us seriously. Fair enough. I didn’t have the budget to pay an artist to do it right, so I opted for a font-based logo: The Compulsive Creative in a font called damned architect. It looks like the kind of handwriting a lot of artistic people have. Gorgeous it isn’t, but it was better than my drawing, which you will never, ever see.

It was up to Alan to implement my design. He hates HTML, but he’s gotten really good at it. He had a bear of a time making the design come out right in all the various browsers. Thank you so much, Microsoft and all you others for your standardized browsers. Just another instance of the opposite of productivity brought to you by myopic and power-hungry software companies. And that means you too, open source developers.

But of course, the HTML is only the beginning. You have to build all kinds of functionality into the site, and we had a database behind it for storing product and customer information. Most of this was up to Alan. I can design relational databases, but I wasn’t much good in this case, as I didn’t know how he was going to design the overall system.
So Alan started the programming. This must have been in August or September of 2003. The site opened on Valentine’s Day of 2004, to no particular fanfare, but to my great relief.

I wish we hadn’t bothered with all that programming, and here’s why. We ordered inventory in September, and then it sat around for 5 months gathering dust because we had no way to sell it. Or so we thought. We could have been up and running immediately if we’d known that most of our sales would come from Amazon’s third-party marketplace. You don’t need a Web site for that. Of course, you can’t offer special features that way either, but you do sell things. Which is more than we did from our site most of the time.

Back in Episode 1, I mentioned that we had originally thought of renting a storefront and rejected the idea. That was smart. But we still needed a base of operation, and it couldn’t be our home for one very arbitrary reason: we have a homeowners association. A power-hungry, stifling, rule-constricted, homeowners association run by people who get upset if there’s one dead leaf on the ground. And this lovely homeowners association says you cannot operate a business out of your house. Never mind that we had no employees to come and go. No customers coming to the house—ever. But if they found out, we’d be fined, and we’d have to stop trading immediately. I wish we’d done it anyway. In the end, this little rule cost us a huge amount of money because we very stupidly went out and rented an office with a three-year lease. An office that is now sublet, thank goodness. A nice office, actually, with a view of the mountains. But an office we shouldn’t have needed.

Continues....

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