Nov
18
4

And… Webtogs is Live!

Author Gareth    Category Planning     Tags

Well, we’ve done it. I still can’t quite believe that webtogs.co.uk is live. The last 6 weeks was a blur of frenzied activity, with a million things to do, never enough time and certainly not enough sleep!

Now, I’ve worked on some fairly big rollouts in my time (far bigger than this, to be honest), but ultimate responsibility for everything has never rested on my shoulders before. Needless to say, i have a new found respect for the project owners I’ve worked for in the past.

launch_home.jpg

So what did we learn from the launch? Well, for one thing, you can’t be over prepared. There were so many little things that got left to the last minute, mainly surrounding content for the site, product entry and tagging for on site search and SEO. Looking back, these things should have been done weeks before launch, in parallel with the hundreds of bug fixes and design issues that were dealt with in the run up to launch.

The human side to all this is a different, but equally interesting, angle to consider. We’re all professionals, after all, so things must have gone smoothly? The reality is far from this. Even though we’ve worked together and been friends for over 10 years, the Webtogs team got very frayed towards the end. Tempers were short, with arguments breaking out over silly little things. However, the site going live had an immediate calming effect. I’ve never seen us all so happy!

In terms of features, the launch version is not even half way there. There is much left to do and we are determined to remain focused on providing the best user experience we can to our customers (as I write this, we do actually now have customers, which surprised me, for a 4 day old site!). So many issues are left to tackle, including customer and editor reviews, product videos, enhanced image display, product comparison, the list goes on…

So what are we happy with? Well, the short answer is not much! I really like the multi angle photography we’ve done, especially for sleeping bags and jackets. I think the basket / checkout process is a nice foundation for us to build on. I notice that Amazon recently lost the patent for 1-click, so that’s something of interest for us…

And the blog? Well, we’ve been slack on posting over the last few weeks, in the rush to get the site ready for launch. We will correct this moving forwards. You’ll also start to see the odd product related post appear, as we try out new gear we’re interested in.

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  • http://www.zencudo.co.uk James Penman

    Congratulations on the launch and all the best for Webtogs! Site’s great.

  • http://www.webtogs.co.uk Philip Wilkinson

    I can testify to frayed tempers and massive SEO session workshops to try and get things right – but I think James actually managed to stay the most calm of all of us to be honest! I’ve launched sites before too but never an actual ecommerce store that physically sells products – so seeing how the guys handled everything from checkout to order stock and site design – is actually quite enlightening.

    As James says, the launch version is definitely a phase 1 and we’re working on how we take the big list of 100 very important and useful features and narrow them down to the most important. Not easy.

    So – we hope you like the site so far and find it easy to use and purchase. Definitely interested in any feedback you have – good or bad, just post it up on this blog or contact us directly.

  • http://www.zencudo.co.uk James Penman

    Hi James/Phil,

    For usability and visuals, it’s the best in the market for me. Have used countless sites over the years from biggies to weird little ones and yours is the best but was expecting that from backgrounds. Scroll is very cool (possibly slow it down?). My gripe with many outdoor clothing sites is that they’re awful at showing you what the goods look like so WebTogs is great. The ability to browse has already got me interested in a couple of items from Montane so the site does its job admirably.

    I think more brands/products are always a plus but not sure if you’re concentrating on specific brands as a strategy.

    It’s bloody annoying when people talk about the future when you’re pulling the present together so look forward to the updates. There’s a huge gap for little people’s outdoor clothing and video (qv Trail on YouTube).

    Again, good luck with it and hope Christmas period goes well and I think it’s a great space to be working in at the mo. in terms of general market growth.

  • http://blog.webtogs.co.uk James Balmain

    Hi James,

    Firstly, thanks for the great comments. It’s been a really tiring but fun ride so far..

    As for video, watch this space. We’ve just bought a big new shiny mac with final cut installed, to speed up the editing process, so we should be putting about 5 or 6 product vids on the site shortly, I’d love to hear what you (and others) think of these when they go live.

    On the brands front, it’s a definate strategy to represent the brands we stock well. Consumers build relationships with brands, so it’s frustrating for them to see a brand is stocked and then find out it’s just 1 or 2 items. For us, we see each brand as a major asset to Webtogs, we want to show their products well and stock a decent range of their gear. We will be signing new brands all the time, we have Buff going live soon (next day or so) as an example, with a small section of Brasher boots following swiftly after that.

    As for the future, well, we have 1000 things to do. But i completly agree, it’s very pants to here people talk about new versions and great “new features” when the current feature set sucks.. hopefully webtogs.co.uk is a good base, for us to expand on, but time will tell if we’ve got it right…

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