Wearing the white hat

Today is the first day of the rest of our seo campaign.

A flurry of recent adwords mining by ww has inspired an analysis of our natural search to further understand Googles nuances. Whilst we have enjoyed sales from natural search these sales have declined slightly, penalised, we think by our outbound links. This is not something an ecommerce site can ignore and a cull has been issued.

Google owns so much of the marketplace that we trade in so it is imperative that we understand every method it uses to asses us. We know we make a good product and people who have used us will gladly tell you this. However, it's not as simple as being good at what you do. You have to also understand Google.

I have decided that this is like having faith in God. You have to give yourself over to a deity that you can read about but not meet face to face. The worse part is that what you read is written by someone else and the rules are murky at best, guessed at by those with a position of power. In the old testament it was Emperor Constantine, today (and in this context) it is anyone with decent PR who will be first to describe these rules.

Rightly or wrongly we are forced to use Google to search for possible answers to our problem knowing that we can't simply ask the governor. Our god provides a seemly limitless number of tools to further worship at its alter, sitemaps, trends, analytics, link: etc the list goes on. But there is no Google bible, no ten commandments, no 0800 number. Just a collection of rules guessed at by those who Google moves to the top of the list.

We will cull our links we will optimise our pages and improve our site in the best we know how. But ultimately, we will have to wear the white hat until the storm is over.

Arena - perfecting the message

It is always exciting releasing new development on to the site. But today's addition was special. The new toy has been in Mantis (our development ticket system) for some time, since launch really and only just realised. It allows the customer to upload a digital photo from their desktop or url and then crop & preview the image before adding it to their basket.

We get a lot of people from abroad sending flowers to family in the UK, the ability to include an image with their message makes for quite an improvement on the overall experience for everyone.

The best part about a new feature like this is waiting for the first order - not one placed by the MD 1min after launch to claim the prize - but a real order, where someone has stumbled upon are new gadget and decide it is for them. Oh how I wish I could post the first real image - such a corker :)

If you want to try it out visit www.arenaflowers.com and enter greetings into the discount code box on the checkout to get a free greetings card and photo upload. The code ends 30th April.

Usability testing went on into the wee hours - see what Sevitz had to say

The one million pound email

It just happened! Not six months in and we hit the one million pound mark! Below is a shot of the automated email that got sent out to all of us. Amazon had a bell, we hired Dr Evil :)

More mothers than lovers

It is the day before 'M' Day and we are all set to take more orders than we did for Valentine's Day just a month ago. It is a simple fact I suppose, there are more mothers than lovers and so of course we should be busier.

In hindsight it is easy to see that we shouldn't be surprised, its just that in the six months that the site has been live our attention has been focused on Valentine's Day as the benchmark. I remember Steve casually saying in the dying hours of Feb 14th that it was just 30 days until Mother's Day and that it would be the same. A little hard to imagine when sleep had become optional for most of the florists!

Mother's Day presented another fact, that a majority of mothers live outside of London. Meaning that we would not require the same 30 vans to deliver across London on the day in question. We would have to instead ensure we have enough boxes to send our flowers across all over the UK.


Mass of pink roses


Getting ready to be packed


Steve taking boxes to the Parcel Force lorry


Steve stretching his legs inside the lorry



Alina chosing to join Steve in the lorry ;)

Arena - Valentines Day

So, this is a little late. My only excuse is that I didn't have a blog before now and so could not post during the most important day for an online florist.

I joined Arena as a full time employee in the beginning of January 2007 (the site went live in September 2006 but that is another story) and from day one we were gearing up for V day. Valentine's day is always a busy day for anyone with flowers, but we had exploded onto the market place and were expecting a busy week :)

The night before we worked until 2am packing and organising - we had over 3000 orders to deliver, an awesome responsibility when you consider you are assisting someones relationship.

The day was a complete sucess and even included an interview with the BBC!

Below are relevant links to photos and youtube!

Photos: Click here

Video (BBC Clip) : Click Here