4Blinds2U.com
Daft Name?
Possibly! A later incarnation went under blindsandmore.co.uk, which in hindsight would have been a better opening gambit! In partnership with someone from the window dressing industry (and some other useless tag-along woman who brough absolutely nothing to the team), I created a massive ASP-based, Access database-driven website with thousands of combinations of products available. Way before WordPress and Woocommerce, this beast was hand-coded utilising Webassist’s wonderful eCart Dreamweaver extension. Never made me a penny (probably lost me some) and took hundreds of man hours. Most complex and worthless project I’ve ever tackled!
What Was It all About?
Look at it! Clickable colour wheel, such a selection of products, table-based price calculations based on entered widths and drops, beautiful trimming and braid options – how did it not succeed!?! Being pre-Wordpress and Yoast, SEO was a lot more of a dark art and getting on that first page of Google was hit and miss. Perhaps we should have paid for some sponsored search results? I don’t know; the results weren’t earth-shattering and the relief from actually getting the thing finished and working (on top of my regular IT work) probably left me burnt-out to the whole enterprise. I still maintain it was a superb effort for the time.
I resurrected it on IIS on an old machine just so I could grab some screenshots. I’m shocked even now at how good it looked and worked for it’s time. 1024 * 768 would have been the cutting edge CRT monitor resolution back then, so the layout was compact but not too busy. Hundreds of images created, tinted and masked with numerous information pages to assist with measurement and fitting. It was ahead of its time, but without the necessary attention to order handling and payment timeliness, it didn’t turn any profit over the couple of years we ran it. We dumped off the useless partner, but my associate’s heart was no longer in it and the whole thing was closed down.
I’m still proud of it though. At any interview when asked about my biggest project, I always used this as an example. It’d still work today – prices would need updating mind!
