If you are new around here, I’m Jo, the founder of Oops a Daisy. You’ve found us at a time when big changes have been happening behind the scenes so I wanted to drop in with a little message explaining what’s been going on.
I also have news of some changes to our planned launch for later this month, and updates to how our subscribers will access information about there subscriptions.
Before all of that… Here’s what happened this week that has meant a lot of stress and sleepless nights!
A little bit of background:
This year Oops a Daisy turns 9 years old and, during that time, our relatively straight forward website has become more and more complex. We don’t have any fancy web developers, everything has been built by myself and Kate (our designer), which is pretty damn impressive even if I do say so myself!
While in theory the website was working fine, the meatiness of it’s content (subscriptions, memberships, over 1000 products and 10,000 images), combined with the increased traffic that a larger customer base brings, meant that we were having more and more issues with site speed.
This resulted in a slow website day-to-day, and a website that crashed during any sort of product launch or high traffic time.
After trying everything we could to optimise the site within the existing frame work, I made the decision that we would have to move website hosting to something capable of dealing with all of the above.
The Theory:
Here’s how it should have gone:
- We close the site to new orders (we also add a banner to the homepage).
- We hit the button on the migration.
- A duplicate of the current site is created at a temporary site.
- We check functionality and when we are happy we redirect our domain (the address that you use to access the site) to the new version at the new hosting.
- We open the site up to new orders.
This should all take 24-48 hours max. Straightforward right?
What actually happened:
It’s fair to say this did not go to plan, there have been far too many ups and downs, too many to mention. Some we could have prevented if we had known more, some were completely out of our control.
Moving the hosting broke our emails, it broke the newsletter connection, it completely broke the website. We had to reset a lot of external connections, things like Meta ads, Pinterest, Royal Mail click and drop that we could predict, other things that we didn’t even realise were connected.
We launched our pocket journal range to the VIPs on Monday, and little did we know we were being attacked by bots, which slowed down our site even at the new hosting. We then blocked these bots to be further attacked by different ones.
We then routed through a service called Cloudflare (that we previously had with the old hosting) that helps to protect us from bots and other internet nasties, this process is what took down the site last night.
Over the last 10 days I learnt more about websites, hosting, email integration and newsletters than I ever wanted to know. I *think* we should now be good and future proofed for a little while… but only time will tell!
Adding insult to injury:
In amongst all of the website/email stress, our fancy new laser printer died this week. We had a long call with the manufacturer and a visit from service engineer, and the outcome was that it will cost more to fix than replace. So on top of all of the expense with the website (and being closed to orders a fair few days last week) I then had to order a new printer.
Harold, our current printer was only 17 months old. 5 months out of warranty.
The new printer arrived in just two days, in which time the original printer began working again (you couldn’t write it). SO NOW WE HAVE TWO…
Meet Harold Printers new life partner… Harriet!
Any who, back to the important stuff…
What does it all mean for you?
CHANGE TO LAUNCH:
As the past 10 days have mostly been taken up with tech drama, and as (thankfully) I have next week booked as annual leave, I have made the decision to make a few changes to the launch at the end of month.
Our launch planned for 31st March will now be exclusively for our Pocket Journals and Pocket Journal Stencils, which went on VIP priority sale last Monday.
The planned Stationery Sticker range and co-ordinating font stencils/stickers will be moved to the end of April (find out more about these products here).
CHANGES TO THE BLOG:
We no longer have automated emails that go out with every new blog post published (this was a function of the old hosting provider). This is actually a good thing as will simplify everything going forward.
If the blog post is specific to a membership or subscription we will drop you an email to let you know there is something to read.
You can also check the Blog Homepage or Subscriber Zone if you are looking for specific information.
SUBSCRIBER INFORMATION:
If you are a subscriber of either our monthly or quarterly boxes, you will have early access to the new quarterly concept and quarterly theme from inside the Subscriber Zone! Go check it out now if you haven’t already!
Other news:
- Sticker Restock – We had a cheeky little restock of our Bee/Coffee stickers, go check them out here.
- Newsletter Glow Up – I have been working with the incredible Katie Farrell to sort out our entire newsletter setup. New newsletter subscribers you will be the first to see these changes, but we have a lot more planned! – Small businesses, if you need any help with your email, Katie AKA Katiyo is your girl!
- Wholesale – In amongst everything else I am also doing a lot of work on our wholesale offering, so if you are an independant retailer who wants to stock cute stationery, go check our wholesale page.
Thank you from Jo!
So… That was the last 10 days at Oops a Daisy, it’s been stressful, I’ve learnt a lot, but now I am very ready for a few days R&R with tiny dog!
Thank you to you all for being so patient with all the tech issues. I can imagine it’s been frustrating for you all too. If you’re new, I promise that it’s not always like this here!
Have a fab weekend.
Jo x
