Welcome to our new website, we’ve been developing it over the past few weeks and we’re ready to go! We hope our customers will find everything they are looking for here, we’ve tried to make the site as easy to use and navigate as possible.
Although this is a brand new website we’ve actually been on-line now for 18 years. We thought for our first blog entry it might be interesting to look back at our on-line history.
Initially back in 1995 we launched our first site on some free webspace provided by our ISP. Back in those seemingly more innocent days customers would actually place their orders via e-mail, sending all their payment details to us openly and unencrpyted!
For a while we could be found at www.cgfs.co.uk, then in 2001 we moved to the more eye friendly and memorable www.netflora.co.uk. We were one of the founder members of the Which Webtrader Scheme, an early kitemark for on-line businesses. A few years later, as members of Interflora we were offered a website as part of our membership.
By this time our Netflora site had morphed into a website that was competing with the national players rather than your typical local florist’s website. It’s hard to believe now, but those were the days when many businesses were still to be convinced that they needed a website.
We therefore launched our Interflora site at www.net-flora.com with the intention of it being more of a destination for our local customers. However as the years have passed its lack of available customisation and development has become a hindrance.
After much research we decided to launch a new ‘local’ site for our customers in Dunstable and the surrounding areas. Having blogged with WordPress for some time we felt its familiarity and increasingly mature on-line commerce options would make it an ideal platform for our new site.
We looked at a number of e-commerce plugins and in the end opted for Woocommerce coupled with the Icarostore theme from Themeforest. Payment for now will be handled by PayPal.
Although customers will have to leave our site to complete payment on the PayPal servers we feel this will be a considerably more secure method for all concerned.
With a number of plug-ins we have been able to customise the site to our needs and we hope we’ve designed a responsive, easy to navigate site with a simple, fuss free ordering process.
Customers will also be able to set up accounts to keep track of their previous orders and we hope to provide personal areas for our existing account customers in due course.
If there is anything else you would like to see included, please leave a comment below.