A Significant Update to Look Just the Same

As part of the growing Stitch & Pull brand, we’ve been wanting to set up an occasional blog that’ll describe how things work under the hood of this little business. And we thought now was as good a time as any to make our first post, because a few days ago we had the largest update to the website since its initial launch (which we’ll get to shortly).

First off, introductions. You’ll be familiar, of course, with Mollie, the owner, designer, embroiderer, knitter, accountant, social media manager, and photographer of Stitch & Pull. Then there’s Martha, who kindly models much of the knitwear, owns even more, and was the inspiration for Mollie to begin creating children’s knitwear. And finally, me, Oliver, Mollie’s husband, and general ‘behind the scenes’ IT guy. That’s a role that includes running this blog, and also making sure the website’s working well. The author of this blog post says it’s actually Mollie, but that’s more of a Shopify limitation.

I like feeling like I can support Mollie’s business by doing something I’m actually good at. That’s why, when Mollie came to me in February and asked me to help make her website, I leapt at the opportunity. Without wishing to sound too much like a paid promotion, Shopify allows a lot of customisation, particularly because I can edit the code directly. This was a double-edged sword, though, as Shopify code uses the Liquid template language, and I had no idea how it worked. After some experimenting with different themes as a starting point, I got things up and running for the big launch, and since then I’ve only gotten more comfortable editing the code.

Unfortunately, it did have a few bugs. Most notably, when choosing different options for cardigans (like sizes or colour), they didn’t actually… work, and that’s led to a few sales where the customer has ordered the wrong thing without realising it.

I’ve tried a few times to fix it, and thought I’d finally routed out the problem until Mollie launched the hand-knit cardigans, and the options weren’t working at all. After some more investigating, I confirmed my worst fears. The issues originating from customising the theme itself. If o had any hope of things working, I’d want to switch to the default theme.

Lo and behold, that worked. But… it then didn’t look like stitchandpull.co.uk. So I had to go through the entire code base editing things to make it look exactly like it did before, only this time without the bugs. So everything on the surface is the same, but the workings underneath are entirely different. But the massive upheaval worked, and it’s still working, and I never want to do that again.

I do, however, want to continue blogging. I’ve got a lot of ideas for things to post here, like what it’s like being married to someone surrounded by wool at all times, or explaining the Stitch & Pull gadgets, so stay tuned.