I have an on-again-off-again relationship with social networking sites in general, and Facebook in particular. I’ve had a Facebook since 2005, which I realize does not make me an early adopter of that service. However, I’m not a newbie either. I’ve had a Twitter account since sometime in 2006, which actually may make me more of an edge-guy there. But I find that the more I ‘plug in’ to these and other social services the more they demand. Not explicitly — not usually. But conversations beget conversations and friends beget friends and before you know it you’re checking your iPhone every 5 minutes for email, text messages, friend requests, notifications, comments on your status, replies to your tweets… it’s madness.

So I went ahead and created a fan page on Facebook for Dufur.com. Of course you may have noticed that by now since the “Become a fan” button has been on the home page now for about a week. The good thing is that in just over a week we have 130+ fans of Dufur and the traffic to the site has increased as a result of people passing us on to their friends. Very, very cool — and a thank you to all of you who’ve “fan’d” us so far.

Of course the challenging thing now is what the heck to say? How often to say it? Can’t be too salesy… gotta be funny… must keep it fresh, but don’t post too often so you annoy people. Should I run contests? Award fantastic prizes? Let people know what cool new shirts are coming up? Or just released? Interesting facts about goofy places? I’m sure I’ll cover all of these and hopefully more. But if you have anything in particular that you’d like to hear about, or things you’ve seen on other fan pages that you like, please comment here and let me know. Or send me email at mike@dufur.com. Thanks!

In my last post I mentioned I’d recently been in South Dakota. I was born in Sioux Falls and still have family in the general area. It was great to see them a few weeks ago.  On the last day of my trip I had a few hours to kill and had Dufur on my mind… so I decided to take the long way back to Sioux Falls via the local roads. Along the way I came across this gem, posted at the main road into Crooks.

Someone here MUST have a good sense of humor.

This is perfect - I saw this article recently and you know I added Winner, South Dakota to the list of towns to feature on dufur.com.  You can’t make this stuff up. Here’s a link to the article.

From an Associated Press article published on May 28th, “The town of Winner has produced a winner… the winning ticket for Wednesday night’s $232 million Powerball jackpot was sold in this ranching and farming town of 2,800 people.”

And to top it off, the guy who won it is named Neal Wanless - which is surprising close to “winless…” For more on the winner named Wanless from Winner, read this.

I’m happy for Neal and the Wanless’es… I’m actually from South Dakota myself. And in a future post I’ll share some pictures I took from a recent trip I made to SD… now there’s a state full of some great town names. And great road signs.

After a few weeks of working with the local development team to improve performance, I’m happy to report that things are now snappy. These guys have really done a great job of optimizing the site and significantly improving the responsiveness of the Dufur.com site. The home page now loads quickly and the catalog and product pages are much, much faster. Nice!

I’d certainly recommend this firm to anyone in a similar situation and definitely if you’re using Magento you should check these guys out. In addition to site development and hosting help, they have provided expertise in payment gateways, sales tax issues and shipping integration. They have expertise in marketing and SEO as well, which I look forward to working with them on next.  The company is called CloudQuarry and you’ll find more information at www.cloudquarry.com.

Acting on the premise that it’s hard to build a good ecommerce business without a good “e,” I decided I needed more help getting the Dufur.com site performing well. I found a Seattle area firm that specializes in Magento development to help me put the finishing touches on the site and get its performance into the acceptable range. When I first asked them to take a look at the site, it was a bit painful to hear the initial analysis - “You’ve got a fun and creative concept. But the performance is definitely intolerable; regrettably it’s the slowest Magento site we’ve ever come across.”  Ouch.  I’ve always tried to be the “est” at whatever I do, but in this case it wasn’t a good thing.

I’m going to have these guys do some work and see how much improvement is possible. It will be great to get the site to a point where I can spend more of my time on the other parts of the business.

Well, I thought we were almost live.  We were kind of live, but more like the living dead.  The site was rockin’ on the development servers and then we moved it to the live production servers. Just supposed to be a couple clicks, wait for a few things to copy over, and bingo.

Ahem.

The home page now takes 47 seconds to load, and I won’t even tell you how long it takes for the shopping cart to come up. But yes, if you are reading this, you’ve suffered through the ridiculous wait time to bring up the blog and you are in fact reading this live on Dufur.com. Of course I’m speaking to the 4 people that know about this little project of mine and whom I’ve told to go check out www.dufur.com.

So now we need to sort through the issues and figure out what’s going on and how to speed things up. I suspect part of the problem is my incredible “cheapness” of buying the lowest end hosting service I could find, without fully taking into account the kind of performance requirements needed for Magento. But I’m also sure there are a number of things that my UK/India development team can do to optimize the performance of the site. So, we may be a bit further out than I’d hoped. Sigh.

Things are moving along - fixing bugs and getting all the product information pulled together. There’s a lot to do!

Turns out that posting one shirt in the Shop actually means posting 6 shirts to the catalog, for each color I want to offer. It makes sense, but it’s just another example of how something that looks small & simple at first, turns out to be a bigger job… The Royal Blue Talent, Oregon shirt, for example, is actually (1) Talent, Royal Blue, Small, (2) Talent, Royal Blue, Medium, (3) Talent, Royal Blue, Large… you get the idea.  So when I thought I’d do 10 entries for Oregon, it quickly turned into 60, and I wanted to do a couple of colors per shirt, so now we’re at 120…

This is certainly taking a lot of time, but I’m enjoying learning the admin capabilities of Magento and working through all the design and production issues for the shirts themselves.

While I think the developers I’m working with are capable folks, I was somewhat surprised when I realized that my UK-based developer was really sub-contracting the actual coding to a team in India. This isn’t a big deal, but it does complicate the time zone issues even further. In fact, I ended up finding and relying upon a great little Firefox add-in called FoxClocks, which creates a little icon in my browser status bar that lets me see at a glance that it’s 5:39AM tomorrow in the UK right now, and 10:09AM in India. So now I know that the latest round of feedback on the site progress that I just sent in email will be read by the folks in India pretty soon, but the UK guys won’t get it for a few hours. But often I’m working on Dufur before I go to my real job in the morning, and I’m able to catch the UK guys before they leave for the day but before the India team gets to work in the morning.  Crazy.

In my previous post I mentioned that I was doing some research into tee shirt printing options for Dufur. After weeks of reading, talking to people and analyzing how I was planning to operate this venture, I made the decision to purchase a direct-to-garment (DTG) printer. Why?  The biggest reason for me was the ability to print very short runs — one or two shirts at a time, with great quality, low labor requirements and a reasonable variable cost.  And those were really my top criteria.  Oh yeah, and the added criteria that I don’t want and can’t afford to hold a large inventory of printed shirts. Instead, I want to have a lot of towns available and be able to print any one on demand.

When I evaluated screen printing, it scores really high on quality but lower on time & cost when the production quantity is super low. Given that this is an internet business where the most common order will be 1 shirt, that’s a problem. For me, the choices really came down to some kind of heat transfer approach and DTG. In terms of up-front investment, the heat transfer approach would be more attractive and I connected with several vendors who could supply me with quality transfers in the colors and designs I wanted. The 2 negatives for me were (1) production labor to print each shirt, and (2) managing an inventory of transfers in order to ensure short turnaround times for orders. Because most of my designs feature a town name in letters, there are many spaces that need “weeding.” In the parlance of the transfer process, this means removing the areas in the middle of the letters or design where you want the shirt fabric to show through. So, for example, the “Boring” shirt would need weeding to take out the inside spaces of the “B” and the “o” and the “g” before the transfer is adhered to the shirt. Not a huge deal, but an extra step that would get tedious if you were doing dozens of shirts a day. And for shirts like “Bonanza” with the wagon-wheel “o,” it’s a lot of little weeds to pull.

So, I bought a lightly used Anajet DTG printer that prints using 8 CMYK print cartridges. There are many brands of DTG printers and maybe in a future post I will walk through the 2nd half of this decision process, which was “which printer to pick.” So far I’ve been pleased with the printer and very happy with the output. I’ve wash-tested many shirts through dozens of washes and the shirts hold the colors really well. I even printed a bunch of shirts with the white ink option and after 20+ washes they still look good. (I’m printing mostly on American Apparel 100% cotton shirts). The folks at Anajet have been easy to deal with and the on-site training course I attended at their headquarters in LA was useful, but the best learning has come from printing a lot of shirts. Now my friends are all walking around wearing my test shirts…