Monday
It’s a Bank Holiday, but I quite enjoy working them as my phone and inbox stay quiet! I got on with developing a new prescription dispensing tool for Herbal Apothecary.
It’s built into their Shopify theme, but the data is stored as part of the Nature’s Laboratory factory management system, so even if they move platform the data is safe. I quite enjoy building stuff in Shopify, Liquid is nice to use, but has some annoying limits. For example, you’ll get a maximum of 50 products, if you try and output them all like this:
{% for product in collection.products %}
{{ product.title }}
{% endfor %}The solution is to get creative with paginate, like this:
{% paginate collections['COLLECTION_SLUG'].products by 1000 %}
{% assign products = collections['COLLECTION_SLUG'].products %}
{% endpaginate %}
{% for product in products %}
{{ product.title }}
{% endfor %}This creates a new object, called ‘products’ which contains all (or 1000) products. Then you can use this new object to output more products into the page. Nice!
Also visited a client to try and sort out their SONOS…
Tuesday
- Tidied up the remaining tasks for the dispensing tool for Herbal Apothecary. Sent to the client to test.
- Development of the Crosslands Connect app I’m working on
Wednesday
Had a meeting with a client to discuss future-proofing their website. Here’s some of what we’ve got planned:
- Optimise the existing site, improve UX to increase conversions
- Shift from MailChimp to Brevo, implement some email automation
- Improve SEO by adding some structured data
- Further developments to back-office systems to automate document production (PDFs) and communication
- Improve payment options for their customers
- Explore use of AI customer service chatbots
Thursday
- Meeting with the Crosslands team to discuss progress. They’re delighted. Nice.
- SEO work for a client in the natural health space
Friday
- Catching up with various odd jobs
- Production of a video and blog post about Bing Webmaster Tools and optimising backlinks
- Submitted a talk proposal for FFConf
- Meeting with the Whitby Lit Fest team to go through next steps