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The Road To The New Penguin Place
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| This whole process of creating a new web site for Penguin Place has been quite a stressful, but interesting learning experience. The original website which was first created during the next stop South Pole days in 1996-97 was such a revelation and novelty at the time. Although not too many people were on-line back then, and most of those weren't comfortable with shopping on-line, eventually between our print catalog (no longer in print) and our fledgling webbed sales we were able to leave our Seaport and Harborplace brick and igloo stores behind and go to an exclusive penguin catalog and internet sales operation. But, here in 2007 with the old website 10 years old, which according to some people in the know is the equivalent of 100 years old in the ever technological changing on-line retail world, Penguin-Place.com needed some serious updating real bad and real soon.
How bad? Well some people didn't even know how to place an order in the old fashioned, simple 1997 way the website was constructed. Folks had become use to surfing and shopping 21st century style, and penguin-place.com was an internet dinosaur.
Ironically, not unlike having a car, apartment or old baseball glove for a decade, saying goodbye to your old friend (in this case penguin-place.com) was quite traumatic. After all this is the baby that turned NSSP into Penguin Place and got me out of South St. Seaport and working in a mall on weekends, holidays, etc. The new website would not and could not look like the old one, from the home page, to the shopping pages, to the way the penguins are listed. My old original web designer from the nineties was long gone.
My new web designer was fine in getting the snow ball rolling, but he seemed to lack some of the "penguin vision" I had (who does), plus certain key parts of the site did not (and still do not) work, like the product search and the sale page before and after price list. But, I've since brought on board a new web designer , who happens to be my next door neighbor Rob, so I can bug him with stuff whenever I want, and I now have some "experts" trying to fix the not working parts mentioned above. All in all, it's been a long, frustrating, interesting few months, but I'm starting to get use to the new site and it's enabled me to finally get new Penguin Post articles on-line after a 5 year hiatus, and I can blog. Who knew I'd ever blog? But, then again who knew 20 odd years ago that my passion for penguins would lead me in this direction.
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