Searching for my spec's

It's been a busy week behind the scenes of the J&S website. I've been collecting product pictures, translating specifications from foreign manufacturers, and learning as much as I can about firearms to create informative and interesting product descriptions.

I've created templates of features and specs that buyers will want to know when deciding which gun to buy, then I've searched everywhere and read review after review after youtube video to fill in the gaps, so that each product has an entry for every spec, and every important feature is mentioned.

So far, I've added all the 4.5mm BB pistols and air pistols from just one of J&S' suppliers. These can now be seen on the live site. Product descriptions still need some work, but the product spec's for BB Guns are done. It's much harder to find good product information than I expected, which explains why all our competitors websites are incomplete and inaccurate. I'll keep making the required effort, and we'll be better. The whole thing is time consuming though, so I decided to get the products on to the site first, then worry about the prose later.

The pages for Air Pistols and 4.5mm BB guns now have brand icons which will soon be clickable to show just the products of the chosen brand. All the collections and pages neccessary to do this have already been created in the background, and all the products that have been added are categorised as required. (Try clicking the SMK logo on the Air Pistols page.) I've made the icons as small as possible; they're just big enough to click on a small tablet screen.

I've also been spending a lot of time trying to make the products look good, but the automated system that we have is extremely limiting. I've created a page called Alternate Product Gallery (located under the Home menu button) (EDIT These are no longer visible. Tony.) which shows some of the ways that I'd like to display the products, but I have to trick the system to do those things. All that the automated shop system provides is the grid style galleries that are shown on the live BB Pistol and Air Pistol pages. Anything else will be very time consuming to create, and much harder for J&S to maintain when I move on, but I'll consider it.

I'm not a big fan of having to click a product picture and load up a full seperate page to learn anything about the product, but that's the way that the automated shop system works. I did have a couple of ideas though; try hovering the mouse over the ISSC M22 pistol on the 4.5mm BB Guns page.

I've implemented a simple stock code system that uses the supplier's stock codes prefixed by the supplier's initials. This should minimise any possibility of errors when dealing with special orders.

I've implemented a calibre selection tool on the product pages of guns with multiple options, and forced those options to use seperate stock codes.

I put the new, smaller header in place and added a small phone icon. (I also created a new shield logo with reflections, but I forgot the shadows, so I'll have to start that again.)