FiddyP

Some of you may know that I run a Chinese takeaway and delivery shop in Lancaster, UK with my partner and her brother. My role is strictly ‘front-of-house’, customer service, chief geekster and go-and-get-stuff-from-Preston’er (among other things like doing the weekly books and tracking the cost of goods sold etc)

I can’t for the life of me go in the kitchen where it’s all fire and wok but, I can do all the other great things like come up with great marketing ideas, develop online solutions for advertising, answer the phone and understand the myriad of different accents you get when you run a delivery orientated business in a two University town.

Pretty Vs Useful

One of the things that was inevitable for me to do was, The Website.

Now, I class myself as a developer not a designer. The difference? (continue reading…)

I am supposed to have a new website up for my Chinese takeaway ready for when all the university students start/return to school. I made a great start and nearly published it when I had an idea (oh dear).

My idea was to use an existing template available on the ComLuv network and add widgets and custom code to turn it into the takeaway website so I can put the relevant details about the business up and later add an interactive menu so customers can browse the whole menu online and add their own reviews and comments about the items.

This seems to be a pretty elemental project, not too much needs changing on a template and adding the extra bits of code that do the fancy bits wont take too much head scratching. Unless…. I decide to do it in a way so that I can write an email course about it with links to videos I make showing anyone with a takeaway how they can take a normal ComLuv blog and turn the template into an online menu and advertising board for their business.

Couple that with some regular tips and tricks I have used to get my takeaway to the top of Google for free when anyone searches for “chinese takeaway Lancaster” and I think I have a decent system and email course to help promote ComLuv.

Here’s where I’ve got to so far with one of ComLuv’s premium themes using a couple of fancy widgets and a bit of imagination..

I know it’s simple, but, it’s supposed to be! My whole idea is to have everything that is needed on one page. The location, the phone number, downloadable menu and a newsletter subscription for keeping in touch with customers.

I can use the rest of the wordpress goodies to keep a blog so the content stays fresh and I can surely find a way to add a shopping cart so people can make orders online and even perhaps integrate that with twitter so I can notify the kitchen an order has been made and also the customer can get a tweet (if they have a twitter account) when the order is on the way.

Awesome project!

Now, where did I put that bag of spare time ? lol

Support Tickets

I did some pretty fancy tweaking of code today to see if I can replace the support tickets system on ComLuv, the system at the moment isn’t bad but the last support ticket management software I used was far superior and allowed me to reply to closed tickets and create canned responses.

It will need some more work to integrate it into the dashboard of the site but I’m pretty confident I can do it.

Theme

I feel the need to tweak themes too, I found an old mockup image on my hard drive that I had for a client that never took up the job and I contacted someone about converting it to a WP theme. I love how it looks and I’d really like to have the format for ComLuv so I can start on tutorials and other features.

That’s not to say the current one isn’t great, it’s just that I’m all for “get it done” then “make it work” and then “make it pretty” and then “do it all again until I have what I want.

Newsletter

I had a bit of a nightmare with my newsletter software taking up too much resources while being on the same server as ComLuv so I took steps to transfer it to another server and use the ComLuv SMTP connection to do all the sending. Hopefully this will fix any issues I was seeing..

Tutorials & Videos

I have the new pc set up with a screen recorder and I have a list of videos that I’d like to produce for tutorials on the ComLuv site. I tested it out and my quad core monster can handle the capture on a widescreen so I can do HD videos and host them on Vimeo

Remote Images & Scripts

I have done some serious optimization on the blogger version of CommentLuv so that now there are very few calls to the ComLuv server for images and scripts. This one thing should dramatically decrease the server load during busy times.

Work

And now I have to tweak the system in the shop.  The tweaking never ends!

quick vidblog from the Fired Wok Chinese Takeaway.