Recent changes to our website and products

New Look 

If you’re a regular customer of ours you’ve probably noticed some changes with our website recently.
Last autumn we gave the site a facelift. We liked the old look but it was getting a little tired and had some technical issues. The new look is a work in progress but we’re getting there.

Where have the products gone?
In late 2013 we started making some major changes to our product structure and some customers have contacted us asking why their regular strings have disappeared?
The good news is they haven't disappeared. Previously we had every product on a separate page. While that worked ok it was becoming a nightmare for us to manage.
Let’s take a popular product like Martin Phosphor Bronze Acoustic Guitar Strings. These strings come in several different gauges such as M530 Extra Light 10-47 or M540 Light 12-54. Some customers go by the gauge numbers, some by the term Light, Medium, Heavy. Some go by the set code and some go by the colour of the actual pack. The problem for us is for every gauge we had a separate product page. So if we needed to make an update to pricing, images, description or create an offer we had to do it several times for that group of products. When you have thousands of products to manage it becomes a slow tedious task. Also, Google has been penalising us because a lot of our content is duplicated across several product pages. So what we have done is group all the gauges of a specific product type into one parent product with options. You can then select which gauge/set you want to purchase from just the one product page.
Ultimately it means we have so far have reduced our website pages by over 600 so it should make things less cluttered.

So how do you find that product you’ve been buying for years?
Simply navigate as before via instrument / brand / then go to the parent product of the type of strings you use. From there you can select the gauge. If you want to select more than one gauge just add the first gauge to cart and click ‘continue shopping’ and it will take you back to the same product where you can add further gauges.

Images
The next stage in our website changes is to address images. Those of you who recognise your strings by the pack colours might find it difficult to locate if the parent product has an image of a different pack colour/gauge. So over the next couple of months we will be updating images across our range to try to make things clearer.

Stick with us
We understand change isn’t always for the best. But quite simply our product range had grown so large it was becoming unmanageable so that’s why we’ve had to shift things around. We hope in time you’ll find it to be a good shift. As always, if you have any questions about using our website just drop us an email at sales@strings.ie or leave us a comment below.