Elaine’s Space

I’ve been promising various Merchants and Networks a brand new, all singing and dancing, much improved Allkids website since the middle of summer. 

I had been working furiously away for weeks on transferring all the products and deep links over to their new home, with it’s lovely new interface and delightfully easy back-end, not to mention the smooth way it has been trained to take relevant discount codes and special offers and drop them invitingly into their respective deep links and cascade them throughout the site - courtesy of the lovely Becky, DaveN (SEO guru & Leeds United Supporter) and their team at Bronco .

Alas circumstances were to dictate otherwise - and Allkids has had to be put on the backburner, to the extent that although I’ve managed to create a page ready for the announcement of the Dream Dozen Top Christmas Toys 2008  (which is doing very nicely in the listings :)) I’m  way behind on updating all the Christmas toys pages - thank heavens that organically listed content sites can chugg along nicely with little or no input - as it could  be December, or even later, before we see the launch. 

The reason is that all our energies, mine, Dave’s and OurKev’s, have had to be poured into Children’s Rooms. 

In August, after several weeks of negotiations, we parted company with Andrew and Julie.  Dave and I now have complete control of the company.

This coincided with having to move lock, stock and barrel to larger premises, which needed a complete overhaul and refitt - walls knocked down, new shelving put up, new computer systems installed and new staff trained - and then a major restock. (not to mention our home extension, garden landscaped and granddaughter to play with)

The above although time consuming and labour intensive proved to be quite simple compared to the PHP and Mysqul I found lurking behind the front of the Children’s Rooms website - I don’t do PHP and Mysqul - (I struggle with Dreamweaver and html)  so it’s all quite a mystery, gobbledegook and unfathomable.  Thank heavens that Andrew ensured that the day-to-day running of the website is quite straightforward and as long as no-one clicks anything unfamiliar we should be OK.

Unfortunately one victim of the takeover has been the Children’s Rooms Product Feed - many items appear to be out of stock and it’s not showing any of the new products - I can only apologise for this and ask that all affiliates be patient and assure them that having a successful Affiliate Programme is high on our list of priorities.

We have had several offers of help from our friends in the Affiliate community, but have asked  Bronco to investigate with the emphasis on ‘mending’ the product feed as soon as possible.

So the last couple of months have been something of a roller-coaster ride, it’s been very emotional and draining, tempers have been frayed, voices raised (me and Dave) and many sleepless nights - but we’re both convinced that Children’s Rooms and Allkids will be worth all this effort and look forward to 2009.