Unfurl the flags, roll out the red carpet, put your hands together, give a warm welcome to and other celebratory idioms of a similar nature ….

At long last, we can finally and officially welcome to the world: Gates of Praise Bookshop.

Those of you that have been here a while will know we’ve had some problems along the way and some of them I’ve documented but most have been left where they belong, in the trash. All I can say is thankfully we have now officially launched the online bookshop … some 6 months later than planned.

The battle I face now is in ensuring the Church continues to take the responsibility of the site seriously. One of those is in stock management and already it’s been pushed to the back burner. In the Church they use Sage for everything from controlling the stock to salaries, etc., and one of the first things I did was to sit down with the developer and discuss how we could integrate the shopping cart with Sage. In the end we settled upon using a third party tool supplied by DatalinkUK which has varying levels of integration. However, I’ve been told this will now have to wait until some time next year! Arggh!

The other aspect that needs serious consideration is the creation and rotation of banners to help advertise specials, new books, etc …

Anyway – despite the battles ahead please join with me in celebrating our newest arrival.