As you might have noticed Dawn has redesigned the front page lay-out of the website to incorporate Album & Artist of the week, which I’ll be alternating every seven days. She’s been using AI to do this because if you ask the right questions it’ll produce all the code you need. So much so that she says it’s making her forget how to code which of course she taught herself 26 years ago.
On top of that, we’ve started using Shopify messaging instead of the much more expensive Mailchimp. It's quite basic but does everything we need it to and seems much more efficient and effective.
One thing no one tells you about after being in business online for 26 years, is that you get outdated and stop keeping up with developments technologically. Admittedly, a lot of these are superfluous to our needs. I remembered being told in 2004 that we needed a Flash into page to ‘brand’ the site but it just seemed pointless to us. Just another layer to get through between customers and checkout. There’s probably an equivalent now.
The important thing is keeping a grip on your own style and what you’re trying to achieve and just use whatever helps you achieve that. For example, I’m just getting my head around effective segmentation of our subscribers with the aim of sending less irrelevant emails to them. I know I should have done this years ago but doing nothing is my preferred way of living!
Since we decided we couldn’t hand over the business to Andy at this time as we’d planned, this is all a bit of a reboot to reengage with people who we had slipped into the back of their minds.
As you know, it’s been quite an important life period, the last year, so the business has taken a bit of a back seat whilst we renovated and sold the old house and bought and moved into the new. Dawn has done so much from landscaping the garden, painting and building a shed, painting the studio, laying flooring and painting inside the house. And a thousand other things. But things have settled a bit, even though she has plans to carpet upstairs and build downstairs cupboards, so we can at least focus a bit better as we head into autumn.
Costs are spiralling. Royal Mail has just imposed a levy on all packages during November and December. We’ve had to pit prices to America up because of the tariffs and import duties and probably will have to do to Europe soon. We don’t benefit at all, we just pass on increased costs.
This week we’re concentrating on our jazz designs which, because of my rock obsessions, don’t get enough attention but which are graphically very interesting. Jazz got there first with interesting album design, often using distinctive deconstructions and abstractions.
Going forward, we’ve started a new regime to take us up to xmas. Every Sunday there’ll be four new themed designs, a new quiz and artist of the week. Each Wednesday there’ll be four themed designs from the collection, quiz answers and album of the week. And every other Thursday there’ll be a 7pm email of our new feature ‘It’s Back!’ where we revive one old design out of our vault from the last 26 years for just 48 hours. All the usual discounts for reward points which you can earn through getting 9 or 10 right and through buying shirts at a point for every pound spent, or by signing up for the newsletter at the bottom of the front page, are all applicable.
We're trying to give you and us a reliable routine to stick to, rather than the more random affair of the last few months. I finish writing for football365 this week, so that should give me more time to commit to DJTees and more time to waffle on about the bands we have known and loved
