Flashy!

If you visit the website today, and you should, you'll find that everything's different. I've spent the last few days re-vamping the whole darn thing. I think you'll find this version is a little easier to navigate, a little prettier, and chock full of pictures (which is one request I hear quite often). There are still a few kinks - some of the words run off the page in places, but they'll be fixed soon enough.

The shopping experience hasn't changed, you'll still find the familiar checkout and have the option of PayPal or Google Checkout. Chocolate of the Month has changed - it's now a subscription service instead of a big purchase. So, for $19.95/month, you can have a new and exciting box of chocolate delivered every month, for as long as you like!

If you find anything that needs adjusting, or if you're missing something from the old site that didn't find its way over, send me an email or leave it as a comment.

You'll also find a new flavor - just for Valentine's - Strawberries and Champagne. It's a milk chocolate ganache studded with strawberries and spiked with champagne, in a dark chocolate shell with a little popping surprise inside. (don't worry, they're just Pop Rocks).

Adventures in HTML

You'll find that the website has a slightly different look this morning. I know that there are much more sophisticated ways to bring about changes to web pages, and one of these days, I'll be sure to figure that out - or pay someone else to do it for me. Since I'm much more adept at chocolate, I just do the best I can with my rudimentary skills. So, after an hour of careful hunting, choosing and replacing color codes on my source page, I give you the new front page:



I like it. I hope you do, too.

In other news...

The deadline for an on-time Christmas delivery is December 15 (for Priority Mail) or December 20 (for Express or Next Day). If you're ordering Chocolate of the Month (a fantastic gift idea, hint, hint), the gifts will begin in January, and you have until December 19 to place an order and have the card arrive on time for Christmas. Hanukkah begins next Tuesday, so if you need a gift in a flash, I'd suggest you place an order today or tomorrow!

There's another holiday flavor coming - cranberry cordial. Pictures and descriptions to come. In the meantime, if you'd like to add some cranberry cordials to your order, just add it in the comments section, and I'll set you up.

Up and Running!

First, just a little reminder. I am a pastry chef. My broadest base of knowledge involves working with butter, sugar, flour, eggs, and chocolate (of course). While I feel like I'm more than the sum of my cooking skills, that is where a lot of my experience lies. So you can imagine how well I do with HTML. I think there are probably single celled organisms who know more about HTML tags than I do. But, there was a website to be made and I wasn't going to let that stand in my way!

Our website is hosted by the lovely people over at www.fatcow.com. They have this dandy little program called "ShopSite" which helps you create a store with the help of a wizard. It was relatively quick, painless, and yielded good results. And if I wanted good results, I would never have had to wander down the HTML road. I wanted great, impressive, very professional results. That meant I had to master a few tags in order to avoid having one big run-on sentence of an online store.

Once that was mastered, I had to find a way to link my newly made store with our already existing website. Hilarity ensued. I'm sure lots of you in the blogosphere have plenty of experience with code and the inner workings of a website. But just in case you don't know what I'm talking about, let me give you an example of what it all looks like:

" !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-type" title Blogger: Eat. Løve. Chocolate. - Create Post /titlelink href="/css/app.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" script src="https://ssl.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"!--"

What the hell is that? (I've taken out all the little < symbols because it is technically coding, and I don't want to code the blog, I want to show the code.) I could pick out the words in the code, and so I started from there. This is the point in the story where I could take full credit for the loveliness that is our home page, and go on about how, with the help of a little book about code, I created that in a few short hours. But that would be untrue, and unfair. My dear friend and former partner, David, is responsible for cleaning up my mess. He very patiently went back through it all, with the help of Dreamweaver, and got everything sorted out. I'm not saying he did it all. I did manage to link the store to the home page by myself. But he made it look good. And that's why we're friends.

Now! Go order chocolate!