Tag: Lee Lee’s Valise

New Site Design Project Launched Today

I’ve been in a mad rush to build and complete an entire website and online store for leeleesvalise.com.
The Today Show aired this morning with Stacy London of What Not To Wear talking about shopping online. Leeleesvalise.com was given airtime along with revolveclothing.com.Now, Revolve Clothing is a big, big online store, more like a big big online department store. Lee Lee’s Valise was a small website built in static html pages.It didn’t have a shopping cart and it didn’t have any ability to interact with visitors. My job(I went down to Lee Lee’s Valise in person and kind of demanded that she let me redo her website) was to rebuild the website and implement a shopping cart and do it all by today so that folks who watched the show could shop at the website… I had 2 weeks.

Issues.
Not being set up for such a large volume of visitors, 60,000 in 10 hours, the site crashed during the acid test;shoppers using the cart out of testmode could not have their cards accepted by the payment gateway.Turned out to be maybe the payment gateway’s fault, maybe my fault for not unchecking a radio button or two in the shop admin config….Oops. Never fear, the missed orders were eventually processed, the payment gateway was handled and the radio buttons got unchecked.The orders are now coming in just fine.

I am happy that both the owner (Lisa Dolan) and I can now get some sleep. We were both up for 2 days straight trying to get that inventory online and I was still designing the website the night before the Today Show aired!
There are still many things to tweak.

Have any of you been brave enough to view your websites in MSIE 4.0? Oh my freakin God.
I saw in the webalizer stats that more than 300 folks using MSIE4 come to the website.
Horrorshow. It’s a complete mess in IE4. I know I won’t be able to rest until I can approximate the website’s look in IE4 that we get in Firefox and IE7 and 6.0.
How can people still be using MSIE 4? How is that possible? Are they in a time capsule? Are they just using the same computer they got 10 years ago? Don’t their sons and daughters tell them to upgrade?
People! Forget about trying to get folks to use FireFox how about we start trying to get folks to stop using browsers have absolutely no way to handle CSS? To make myself feel better I am going to go look at some big fancy CSS people’s websites in IE4.

Note
Veerle’s Blog,Wired.com, CssPlay and A List Apart all look crap in IE4. This makes me feel slightly better. But I am still going to make a separate stylesheet for IE4.

Carroll Gardens Shopping Trip!

I love Brooklyn
I first stopped at Lee Lee’s Valise (on the corner of Court and President) because I wanted to buy cotton tunics and I had an overwhelming desire to talk to the owner of this unique clothing store, for women size 10 to 28, about her website. I want to do a redesign of the store’s website and I offered to do it for free not a lot of money. I hope she takes me up on my offer… Anyway, I purchased a light-weight cotton print tunic and a cinnabar necklace. Personal agenda aside this is a must go to place for any woman who isn’t a stick figure. I am probably still 32 cheesecakes away from being their target customer,fat acceptance aside, if you are a size 12 you probably do not yearn to be a size 18. If you are a size 1-2-3 X, good on you for not wanting to wear shapeless tents and finding a store that shares your sensibilities.

The owner of Lee Lee’s Valise, Lisa Dolan can be found behind the shop counter. This is not a store where one is ignored or where the sales people deign to ring up one’s purchases, sighing like it’s a Chinese martyrdom to have sell you your stuff. And the sale people don’t over-hover. It’s a relaxed place. But you must get there fast or suffer the disappointment of not finding what you want in your size because the clothes literally fly out the door. If you need 2X or 3X however, there’s loads. I’m still shy of those sizes but you never know, my inner Babushka Bomb may yet go off. Remember:1X is quite a lot bigger than X-Large.

The last store I went into was LF, home of the various and numerous cotton dress and top. You can expect to drop over 100 bucks for a little cotton cami. I spent 78 on a “Popsicle” colored tank dress with racerback straps.This isn’t a discount store and they hold sales only twice a year.
I asked the sales girl with really great hair if the merchandise was exclusive to LF because I hadn’t seen the same clothes in other stores. The steepish prices might be worth it if you care about not wearing the same thing as everyone else.