Lyttles of Dunchurch

How time flies!

I have suddenly realised that I have neglected the blog for a month.  That will serve as a useful lesson that we must keep adding news to the blog to keep all our friends and customers up to date as to what we are up to.  And we are up to plenty.

Work on the website continues.  What we initially thought could be a fairly quick process revealed itself to be more involved and drawn out than anticipated, but is coming together more easily than anticipated.  I don't expect that we will rule the world over night, but I really feel that we will make a success of this venture now.  There have been a few days of doubt and anguish, but the thing that we have invested most is time, time looking into how to get this as right as we can at the launch.  We hope we are close, but as has been mentioned before, this will be a work in progress, and there will be developments, tweaks and improvements as we go. 

Apart from putting the online shop together Paul has been busy instructing, guiding and fishing mostly locally on Draycote, and is shortly heading north to the Deveron with a group from our associated company, Heart of England Fly Fishing School.  Conditions have been difficult on the Deveron (and on many of the rivers in Scotland) this year, and it is unlikely to improve next week, but if your line isn't in the water and all that!  Paul will be at the CLA Game Fair on Saturday visiting friends and contacts in the fishing and tying world.  Be sure to keep a look out for the Heart Of England Fly Fishing School Facebook page and twitter feed (@HoEFFS), and instagram (HOEFFS) page for news of the leviathan salmon that Paul and the team dredge from the depths of the Deveron!

We have had a pretty busy and intense day at Lyttles HQ in Dunchurch.  We closed the shop for the day and for anyone hoping to visit us today we apologise profusely, but it was really necessary, and very productive.  We try not to close too often, and to use the opportunity to conduct staff training and business development so that when we do open again we are better than before.  Today's staff training was around the subject of our new online shopping package which we think we are getting closer to launching.  There are a lot of aspects to consider, and while it can be an on-going and live project that develops as we go there several aspects that we want to get right from the beginning: it was those that we were working on today.  In particular we want to know that we are handling the orders correctly, and hope that we have anticipated all the conceivable combinations of circumstances that may arise when we receive an order and process it.  We know from our own experiences of online shopping that there is nothing more frustrating than placing an order and then waiting and waiting, and then having to pick up the phone to find out where the order (and the money) has gone.  I think we have got all that weighed off and squared away.  Now I have just got make the website look nice and neat, and easily understandable and navigable.  There is nothing worse when you are online shopping...  You know what I mean!

And that isn't all together a bad thing!

As work continues towards launching the new Lyttles of Dunchurch online shopping enterprise I keep learning new features and actions of the shopify website.  Steadily I am learning how to make it do what I want it to do, or at least to I am learning it's language, and getting the result that I want, and most importantly, remembering how to do the same things again.  I am making lots of mistakes, although as time goes by I am making fewer, and not repeating them quite so often.  It is quite a satisfying feeling, and we are all getting a bit more excited as we get towards a point where we can go live with the whole venture.