Out with the old, in with the new – MSQC is getting a facelift

Happy New Year everyone!!  2012 was an amazing year and we had lot of excitement at MSQC.  One of the things we’ve been focusing a lot of our time on has been a new version of our website.  When I say new version, I don’t just mean a new “look”, I mean we actually started over from scratch and made fundamental improvements   We started by asking ourselves “if we could build the perfect shopping experience for fabric online, what would be different?”  So we put a lot of thought into it and came up with something that we’re really excited about!  Now, it’s not perfect, and we’ll probably have a bunch of bugs for the first week or two, but it is a huge stepping stone to better integration with our community (forums and social media) and better shopping experiences.  So stay tuned over the next several weeks/months and we’ll show you a bunch of features we love (and hope you will too).  And, by all means, if you have any ideas for us, leave a comment or send an email to info@missouriquiltco.com … we’d love to hear from you!

In honor of the big upgrade, I thought we’d take a minute to look back at the road that has led us here

So, in February of 2009 we launched the first version of our site.  We had been open for 4 months in our tiny shop and were looking for ways to reach into the internet world.  Believe it or not, here was our version 1 -

The site we launched with

Can you believe it – that was all we had in the beginning!  Then we worked on it for a few weeks and went through a few more revisions.  Take a peek…

That version of the site lasted us for almost a year and a half; it’s so crazy to look back!!

So after a while, we had a few more ideas to make the shopping experience better, and we upgraded to what we are now, which has served us well for over a year -

Current Front Page

Current Daily Deal

And that leads us to today!  Here’s what we’ve been working on.  The front page is a bit cleaner, and hopefully a bit more personal -

New Site – Front Page

The categories that currently are on the front page are in the carousel now, but we also have them in a list view so if you know where you’re going, we can get you there fast -

When you hover over cateogries

And then on the browse page, we like what we currently have, but fabric by the yard is a unique challenge.  For example, let’s say you are looking for a very specific fabric print and our site has 5,000 different bolts of yardage to choose from; how can we help you find that “one” as quickly as possible?  Well, first, we built an awesome search bar (yes, we know the one on our site now is absolutely terrible), and if that doesn’t get you right there, you have categories to narrow down your results on the left, but even after narrowing your search down with those, you may still have several hundred results to browse through.  That would mean dozens of pages to click through, so we added infinite scroll (when you scroll to the bottom of the page more fabric will automatically keep on loading till the very end!).  We also hid most of the text and extra info.  It’s there if you hover over any product, but with info visible, we tripled the amount of fabric you can see on your screen at one time.  We’ve been using it for a while to test it, and we love it!  Hope you will too -

New Browse Page

And then when you actually click on a product, you will get some neat features that were direct requests from users like you.  For example, we show you coordinating solids right there, we pick them in the shop (it will take us a little while to get them chosen for everything, but we’re working on it).  Also, the collection collages below the products let you easily see what else we have in the collections, related products, products that are commonly bought together, and so on (hopefully a lot of helpful suggestions while you shop).

New Product Detail Page

So, we hope you’re excited, cause we sure are!!  If you see things changing over the next few days, don’t be surprised, just know good things are coming.

As a help, if you have items saved in your cart, make sure you make a note of them, because those won’t be saved in the transition, but all of your customer data (including Quilter’s Cash points) and so on will follow you right into the new site, no problem!

Thanks again for such a fun ride, we love building things for people who care, so thank you so much for the emails, the cards (you sent us Christmas cards!), and the calls.  They mean the world to us!

Happy Quilting!  :)