The New Site, and Where Everything Lives
Lana handed me her phone and asked me to find something on our own website for her. I sat there on the sofa prodding at it for a good long minute. Wrong page. Back. Wrong page again. Pinch to zoom, miss the button, back again. She took the phone off me in the end and just gave up on the whole thing, which, fair enough.
That’s our shop, and that’s not a great look. So we rebuilt it.
I’m not going to make this into a bigger moment than it deserves, because a website isn’t the interesting part of any of this. The interesting part is the training, and the food, and the boring repeated days that quietly add up to something. Nobody has ever got stronger because a page loaded nicely. But if you can’t find what you came for, none of the rest of it matters, and for a long stretch you couldn’t, and that one’s on us.
What was wrong with the old one
It was slow. Not slow in a way I could put a number on, and I’m not going to invent one. Just slow in that way where you tap a thing and then sit there wondering whether you actually tapped it or whether you need to tap it again.
It was fiddly on a phone. Buttons too small for a thumb. Menus that opened on top of the thing you were trying to read. A search box you had to go looking for, which rather defeats the point of a search box.
And things were hard to find. Products sat in odd places. Categories didn’t match the words a normal human would actually type. There was stuff on there you could actually buy and would never once stumble across unless you already knew it was there and went hunting. Lana gave up on it, and she’s on my side.
What’s better
It’s quicker. Pages turn up when you ask for them instead of a bit after.
It works properly on a phone. You can get from the front page to a product to the checkout without doing the pinch and zoom dance, and the buttons are where your thumb already is.
There’s less faffing about generally. Fewer clicks between you and the thing you came for, and the menu says what it means.
And everything you can buy right now is on there, grouped the way you’d go looking for it rather than the way a spreadsheet would want to sort it. That last one’s the bit I actually care about. Nothing tucked away, nothing that needs a special link, nothing you only find by accident.
I’m not claiming it’s the finest website ever built, haha. It’s a shop. But it’s a shop you can get round now, and the old one wasn’t.
A walk round, so you don’t have to hunt
Here’s where things live.
Energy. El Chapo, on its own.
Fat Loss. Ripped AF and Fyre AF, sat next to each other, so have a read of both and take your pick.
Muscle Building. IMMORTAL AF is here.
Recovery. AMINO AF BCAA + EAA, CREATINE MONO and Organ Support. This is the corner of the shop for the things that just live in your cupboard and get used without you thinking about it much.
Immune Health & Wellness. Crystalized Egg Whites, ESSENTIAL AF and Organ Support. Organ Support turns up in two places, which is deliberate, because I’d rather you found it twice than not at all.
Apparel & Gear. The gym bag, on its own. Not a powder, obviously, but on the old site it was buried somewhere nobody was ever able to explain to me.
That’s ten things, and every one of them you can put in a basket and buy. Which sounds like a low bar right up until you’ve had someone email you about something they saw somewhere once and you’ve had to write back and say no, sorry, not that one, not at the moment.
Prices are on the cards where they always were. I’m not typing any into a blog post, because the site is the thing that knows and I’m the bloke who forgets.
Why any of this got done
My boy’s started training and he’s full of questions about it at the minute. Where do you go, what do you do when you get there, why. One of them was what I do all day, and the short version is that I sell things to people who train. Which means the shop working is most of the job, not a side quest I get to when there’s time. His sister is far too small to care about any of it and would rather be doing almost anything else.
The other reason is simpler. You lot have been patient with a website that made you work for it, and that isn’t a way to treat people who keep coming back. It’s fixed now, and thanks for putting up with it while it wasn’t.
Go and have a look
So that’s the tour. Have a wander round it and see what you make of it. If something’s in a daft place, it’ll be because I put it there, and it can be moved.
Stay Swole,
Justin