TulipTools Internet Business Owners and Online Sellers Community

Quote:Hi Everyone,

Hope you are all well. Thought I'd drop a line with some good and a bit of not so good news.. Whats first the good or the bad?

Let's go with the not so good.... We're not gonna be live with our new design in February. I was planning on putting up a nearly finished version of the site, but time has caught up with us now and I'm not willing to put up something I'm not completely happy with. As with everything that we seem to undertake we underestimate the amount of work that needs to be put into getting things through to the end, the smallest of things can take half a day to get to the bottom of sometimes, so... sorry about that folks but as with most things, first impressions are important and the speed that the internet has brought to people lives means judgments are made very quickly nowadays, so we will be holding back.

Now for the better news... The main reason for the change of plans is that we have 6 new servers winging their way over the Atlantic as we speak that we will be adding to our current 5 server setup to create a healthy little bundle of computing prowess that will take us to the next level of capacity allowing for larger bursts of new users that we have experienced recently.

We've decided to make the changeover to the new site at the same time as the new servers are put live to make only one period of downtime instead of two. The magic date I am pencilling in is the 15th March.

OK, a couple of other bits of news..

Today we should be passing the 400,000 auction mark for the first time, thanks to everyone who takes the time to list their auctions, it really is appreciated.

I'd also like to say thanks to all our regular buyers on the site and to all our new buyers who are finding their feet on eBid, you've all managed to increase sales on eBid by 50% in the last 2 months alone. Seems our advertising efforts are working and the magic word of mouth is getting a little louder by the day.. Seems the snowball is starting to roll that little bit faster..

Thanks again. Back to my perl scripts!

Gazza

Quote:Bad news everyone, was planning to set off to Docklands to oversee the upgrade and I've been told we have a malfunction in a piece of hardware (a refurbished LAN Switch) that we bought recently.

We can get a new one delivered tomorrow and do the update then but to save a couple of grand we are going to replace the faulty one with a brand new one being with us Monday, which means the update will now take place on 20th at 2am.

Sorry for the anti-climax everyone, these things never go to plan...

Gazza

Quote:Morning everyone,

We have just put live the first tentative version of our new site, after weeks of grafting we realised it would be another month at least before it was finished so we have put up a version we are happy to let you loose on. There are more tweeks and additions to come that we are still working on and will be for weeks to come, please let us know of any glitches you find.

We were hoping do a large hardware upgrade at the same time as putting the first version of the site up but time has prevailed again and no hardware upgrade has happened as of yet. We hope to have this done within the next 2 weeks. We will be doubling our number of servers overnight and most importantly will be tripling our database power which has always stopped us from being fast enough to catch the eye.

Have fun exploring, and try not to judge until you've bought and sold to see the changes we've made so far.

Thanks.
Gazza

Quote:We've been cracking on since we updated the site to the new design. As I mentioned before we invested in more servers to help speed up and give more capacity to the website allowing many thousands more visitors to use eBid without anyone noticing a decrease in site performance. We've started using some of the new servers to run our database in replication now so that will increase capacity straight away, they went live about 30 minutes ago we will be adding the other new servers very soon to spread the load some more.

We've been fixing some of the bugs that people have been pointing out to us over the past few weeks as well. these have just been uploaded also, some more fixes are still being worked on.

We've been working on the re-design of the forums also, that should be ready pretty soon.

I mentioned elsewhere that we are starting to work with a London based PR agency to raise the profile of eBid via UK television, radio, newspaper, magazine and online media. PR is something we have tried on a small level with freelance PR consultants before but it has always been way beyond our budget but we now hope to run a professional PR campaign alongside our online advertising not instead of which would have been the case a year ago. Again everything depends on income, the more we take in the more we can spend.

Another change will be a change in the methodology of our auction listing process, we will be allowing Silver (non-subscribers) to use some of the facilities that have been reserver for our platinum members, this will not be free, but after listening to many sellers there is a definite need for full auction selling facilities for users without a subscription.