“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.”― Stewart Brand

Oh our heroic glasses website! Forged in the red hot but naive heat of 2000s optimism, it grew, developed character, and grew a lot more. Then really grew and ‘character’ became ‘issues’ that needed whatever the web equivalent of sticking plasters and superglue is. ( I just googled it and surprisingly the web glue equivalent is ‘Content Management Systems’ - who knew?).

The internet asked it for data and our website replied it would send a fax. Google started to tell us our website was a bit slow, which seemed rude. Our website lost friends along the way - systems stopped talking to it because it was too old. We had betamax and a C5 when the internet demanded an iPhone 15 and SSDs (look it up).

Finally, Google dealt the decisive blow - it metaphorically threatened to stop telling the world about us.

We couldn’t put it off any longer - we had to upgrade The Old Glasses Shop website.
 
How do you prepare for a website upgrade so that you don’t end up playing error message Pictionary? Well in our case, quite badly it seems. You don’t know what you don’t know, and it turns out there was a trap waiting for us…

Intrigued? We’ve decided that we can only tell you what happens next if you buy some glasses…
Only kidding.

And so November 7th - the big day - was upon us. Reluctant hand hovering over The Big Red Button, Christina and Fiona's jobs flashed before them, our developer in Thailand (long story) poised to leap into action and Prosecco (it’s Italian so I prefer it to champagne) chilled for celebration.

Button pressed…deed done…

In order for this story to make sense I need to explain - many of you will know - that we had a ‘step by step’ system for you to add your choice of prescription lenses. It’s a critical part of the 'add to cart' process and has worked beautifully for years. Well, it worked beautifully until November 7th.

So now instead of a step by step checkout, the prescription options were simply all dumped on the product page in their entirety, making every product page illogical and confusing. Not to worry, we thought, our developer (who wrote the original step by step system) leapt into action and set about tracking down the problem. We believed that Pete (real name unchanged as he is actually reasonably innocent) would sort it.
But he couldn’t. Despite pulling an “all nighter” ( I remember those!) Pete could not get his code to work. Finally, the news hit - it transpires that the web platform our system is based on had ‘retired’ the very feature that he was trying to fix. It had only still worked for ‘legacy’ i.e. ancient set ups that had historically still used it.

Prosecco is not - unlike Champagne - difficult to get the stopper back in (yet another plus point) as celebrations went on hold.

Over the following days, the scramble to get the product pages into some non confusing state proved fruitless. Sales were down almost as much as our apprehension was up.  On the plus side, Google had now decided that our website was new and shiny and proceeded to send a lot of people to The Old Glasses Shop…oh the irony, oh how we laughed…

After a week, we managed to remove all of the confusing stuff and put in place a very limited, simple ‘add these lenses to your cart’ system. It’s primitive and only a fraction of a solution, but it does at least sort of work and the page no longer looks like an accident with scrabble tiles.

And so, many days later, here we are. Alternative solutions have been infuriatingly slow to reveal themselves. The ‘better’ replacement being pushed by our web platform who retired the perfectly usable step by step system, is ‘better’ in the same way that a 6 menu deep touchscreen is a ‘better’ solution in your car than the previously easily accessible physical buttons and knobs it has replaced. ( I read that some of the latest new cars require you to use the touchscreen menus to open the glovebox…is this progress? I’m definitely getting old).

And then there are the ‘we can fix that no problem’ brigade who have picked up the scent of a wounded website and are circling with credit card machines poised. Years ago there was a great set of guys who used to ‘scam the scammers’. They would pretend to fall for a scam and even arrange to meet the scammers at distant airports to hand over money (obviously they never showed, but satisfyingly the scammers incurred costs to get there). To add to the realism, the guys would state that they were keen birdwatchers and would only travel to xxxx airport if they could be assured of seeing the rare bird they had attached a photo of. The scammers invariably insisted that the rare bird could definitely definitely be seen near xxxx airport. No problem. Except the attached photo was usually Big Bird from Sesame Street or a Pterodactyl. And so it has been with us - companies that can definitely definitely fix our problems for a substantial fee, even though they clearly haven’t even taken the time to understand the problems.

And so here we are. We love our new website and the many improvements it has afforded to serve you better. But the customer experience is currently less than ideal. As you might guess, we are frantically working to bring the usability back.

I will keep you updated…



Thank you for reading this. We are a very small business and the truth is that when your livelihood depends on your website, any major change is very scary. We really love what we do and particularly love what we sell. We genuinely value every sale, every email, every telephone call that you give us.  We are incredibly, indescribably frustrated that currently technology is getting in our way.
Technology wise I think we are also defined by what we don’t do - we don’t have a telephone answering menu system, we don’t answer emails using Artificial Intelligence, and we don’t try and blindly upsell to boost our bottom line. We think to do these would display a lack of respect for the most important thing in our business - you, our customer. Accordingly, we wrote this blog to let you know what’s happening.
All singing, all dancing website or not, thank you so much for sticking with us.

“It’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people.” Steve Jobs