It looks like it may finally be happening, we are getting the paperwork today/tomorrow to move into our new office space. Ultimately we opted to stay in the same building and finish out our lease in larger space than we are currently in. This will buy us some time for our steady growth and allow us to make a better decision on the next location in 2008. I will post some pics when we are finally moved in.

I just finished a 2 1/2 hour training call for Hot Banana as we are implementing our new content management system. So far my expectations have far been exceeded. Each place that I look for a hitch or a shortcoming I am pleasantly surprised with the flexibility and control that I find. Our new design has been cut up for CSS and added as templates for content. Right now we have reached a preliminary launch date of mid-June and that hinges on my adoption of the system and the creation of the content. I will spend the next week looking under the hood and seeing what areas are going to take a lot of practice.

I am adding some more analytics packages to the system that should bombard me with more user information. We are also increasing our paid search campaigns in an attempt to move past the majors and start diversifying our marketing efforts. It looks we are leaving the crawling stage into our first steps….

You Design It just received its first cancellation because the event the merchandise was ordered for was canceled. This was tough for us because we want to produce every order we receive. Here was our response in an email:

“Hey Richard,

It is not too late. We will be glad to credit your card back today and cancel the order. Thanks again and please keep us in mind in the future.

Blake Poutra
You Design It “

Here was his reply in an email:

“Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I will definitely use you in the future. Your website is great!

Thanks,
Rich”

All in all it wasn’t so bad. We want the process to be easy and it seemed easy enough.

Within an hour of adding the colored shirts in the “Digital Studio” we had our first order. This was around midnight too. Feast your eyes:

Things are going great at You Design It so we decided to go for it even more. We just added colored products on the Digital Printing side. We stayed with the same offerings of the Affordable and Premium T Shirts, Long Sleeve, Ladies T, and more. The only hitch is that we are only doing light colored shirts as we continue to get better with the digital printer. Check them out here in the Digital Studio.

At You Design It we have been increasing our spending on pay-per-clicks heavily even without tracking our users into the “Design Studio“. This may sound like a stupid plan but we have been more than covering our cost with profit throughout every increase of ad spend. We knew this would hurt us in the long run so our last round of development consisted of creating some custom javascript to work with our actionscript inside the Flash of the Design Studio. We dropped the javascript inside the main pages of the site as people navigate into the Studio catch the entry point and delivery of each user (what search engine, keyphrase, landing page, etc.).

The results have been great because we can track each step of a successful conversion. We are watching some key tracking points of each user with the knowledge of which search engine and keyphrase brought them there. This just changed the game for us. Smarter spending = less spending + more return. Who said math was my weakness?

We have made our final decision and are already working to implement the system. The content management system of choice is Hot Banana. Other than the name, this cms is pretty slick. They pride themselves on search engine friendliness, marketing automation, flexibility, and of course - content control. Hot Banana is based on Coldfusion and should play very well with my current set-up. It remains to be seen but I am very excited about the prospects and potential that I have with You Design It by pairing up with Hot Banana.

I have completed the mock-ups for a total redesign of the system that effects the look and architecture. I am looking forward to seeing the response. Content is king and we are about to capitalize.