Hello, and welcome to Derbyshire Drones 2.0!

We started building our original website in spring 2015, and as we head towards Derbyshire Drones’ 10th birthday, we decided it needed a little sprucing up.

We decided to go ahead with this work, both to make our website more streamlined, easy to use and more modern looking, as well as to ensure the highest website security, by updating and retiring some older elements that were nearing the end of support.

We have the majority of software and plugins updating manually and do weekly manual updates for those that don’t, but earlier in the year we had come across a pretty major roadblock.

Our hosting provider wanted everyone to move their websites to a minimum of PHP 8.2 (PHP is the scripting language used by our website), but due to our old WordPress theme no longer being updated, updating our website to the latest version of PHP caused it to crash.

I would love it if it had been as easy as simply finding a new theme we liked, downloading it, applying it and away we go, but sadly that was not the case, the way websites are made and the way they look has changed massively over the last 9 years, and applying a new theme on top of our existing site turned it into as colossal jumbled mess (well, more than it normally is).

After weighing up all of the options, including moving to something like Squarespace or Shopify, starting afresh with WordPress & Woocommerce, or even just moving to Ebay/Amazon selling only, we settled on a ground-up reworking of our existing site.

We started by coughing up some extra cash to our website hosting provider so we could create something called a “Staging Site”, this is a direct copy of our existing site, so we could keep the old one online while we could mess around (and break, repeatedly) this new site while building it.

The first actual step of the upgrades was to find a new, modern theme we liked the look of and thought we could work with, install and apply it, and then finally successfully apply the PHP update. After that, we played with this theme some more, decided we didn’t like it, and decided to try some others, finally settling on the one you see now.

After that, we had a look through all our plug-ins and other software used with the site, pruned the ones we either didn’t use or that were not longer receiving updates, and then, once we had a roughly stable site again, we started the job of updating the bits of the site you actually see.

For each page (and later, blog posts, like this one, which we are now using for all our news posts) we made the first and most important decision: Do we need this page? If we didn’t, it was unceremoniously binned, and those that were needed went through a set-out procedure of updates,

First, for most of our pages, we simplified the content, and then modernised the look and feel, before deciding where the page should be linked to, the most important pages being linked at the top of the page, and the other resources being linked in the footer. We also tried to move pages to the new “Block Editor” instead of the old Classic/Linear editor that had been the only option in WordPress back in 2015. this allows for easier, smarter and more constructed layouts of content. Not everything is perfect, but it’s a damn site better (Pun Intended),

The main diffrences you can see from that work are the new colours, simplified toolbar and added footer details

We then moved to where there would be the most changes on specific pages.

We upgraded the cart/account/checkout pages to use the new woocommerce layouts enabled by the block editor, to give these areas a much more modern and sleek design, with less clutter and a better layout of elements.

After that, we moved to the home page.. At the top, we integrated a new “Our Most Popular Products & Best Deals!” section, to highlight just that, our best sellers and best offers currently available. We moved our enter shop button, as well as tidying up our latest news into blog posts, and moved the headlines to an auto-updating headlines section (this is still a little bit of a “work in progress” feature, as it could look better, but for now serves the purpose).

Extensive testing has been completed on this heavily reworked site, but some bugs may have slipped through the net. If you do find a bug, please report it through the Contact Us form at the top of the page and we will assist you and fix the issue ASAP.

The last thing to do is to Thank You, not just for reading through this wall of text, but for being the best customers our little online shop could have asked for. As we approach our 10 year anniversary with this new look and feel, we hope you will continue to stay with us for another 10 years.

Thanks,
Jake
Derbyshire Drones

Gorilla Glue has just come back into stock – you can find it here!

We have recently decided to go back to offering only Royal Mail as the shipping option for Derbyshire Drones.

This is due to Royal Mail becoming much closer in price to Evri, while offering a superior service (at least in our area), it is also much easier for me to get to the local Post Office compared to the local Parcel Shop to dispatch packages.

This also means we have greatly simplified our delivery options.

If for some reason you have issues with Royal Mail, please use the Contact Us page on the website and we can organise shipping an order to you with a different courier

Thanks,
Jake

As of 11^th of March 2020, Derbyshire Drones will no longer allow shipping of orders to Storage Facilities and/or Mail Forwarding Companies.

This is due to a recent issue we had through our eBay store where we believe the customer used the UK to Europe mail forwarding company to scam us out of an item he bought from us, thankfully this item was relativity cheap and most of the costs are being recouped through Royal Mail.

Derbyshire Drones has successfully sent items to Spain, Italy & the USA directly, all customers are required to do is contact us, and we will provide shipping quotes to the required destination.

We understand that Storage Facilities and Mail Forwarders are legitimate Businesses’, and we believe the ones used in the eBay scam are legitimate too and received great communications from one of the companies involved. Our neighbours run a self-storage company and we often use Mail Forwarding companies to source some items, such as our Glues & Adhesives, so we are not saying these types of companies are bad news or can’t be trusted.

Customers we believe may be using the address of a Storage Facility or Mail Forwarding Company may have their orders delayed slightly while we contact them to check the address and make sure they are aware of this policy.

DERBYSHIRE DRONES HEREBY STATES THAT ANY ORDER THAT MAY SLIP THROUGH THE NET AND GET SENT THROUGH ONE OF THE AFOREMENTIONED TYPES OF COMPANY FORFEIT ITS RIGHT TO A REFUND IF THE PARCEL DOES NOT MAKE IT TO ITS FINAL DESTINATION. DERBYSHIRE DRONES WILL PROVIDE ANY PROOF OF SHIPMENT/TRACKING NUMBER THEY HAVE, AND MAY IN SOME CASES ISSUE FULL OR PARTIAL REFUNDS DEPENDENT ON THE SITUATION, FULLY AT THE DISCRETION OF DERBYSHIRE DRONES.

A factor that also didn’t help us, in this case, is the fact that the item was sent with a delivery method that did not fully cover the cost of the item, due to an issue with our eBay setup. When purchasing through the DerbyshireDrones.net website, please also be aware of the following, pre-existing shipping condition:

“If the customer does not purchase postage with enough compensation for the value of their goods, it is their problem if the delivery company will not pay out for lost items, Derbyshire Drones can not be held responsible for the loss of items in this event.”

We apologise for this becoming an issue, and for having to take this stance, it is not the value of the item (although we are glad it was not an expensive item), it is a fact we believe we have been stolen from by this eBay ‘Customer’. The customer used the Forwarding Company & the Storage Facility they operate from as a way of creating barriers and loop holes between us and the customer to make it hard for us to get a complete picture of what was happening, and to create plausible deniability if the item did not arrive.

Bruce from RCModelReviews & Xjet has been spied with one of our shirts!

It’s great to see the guy that got me into Mini Quads wearing one of our shirts,

Thanks Bruce!

Just received this months (Nov/Dec) RC Flight Camera Action, containing a 3 page interview i wrote with them after talking to them at Weston Park about how i got into the hobby and Derbyshire Drones!

You can pick up a copy from WHSmiths or directly from Traplet at http://gb.trapletshop.com/rc-flight-camera-action

We have recently added White Gorilla Glue to our store, Gorilla Glue EU have stopped importing it themselves from the USA and advised that i should import it my self, so I have! You can find out more here.

Hello everyone and welcome to 2016! Lets make it a Quad one!

We have received confirmation from Xhover that we are the only UK Stockists of the MXP230, we are deeply honoured to be in such a position, we think Xhover is a awesome company and are a joy to to work with.

We have just added the MXp230 Elite V2 – Frame Only, To the store, available with or without the arm extensions.

In other news, we just received our first review on our Custom Copter page, you can check out what our customers think here.

Hope you all had a great Christmas and here’s to a fantastic new year!

Jake

Welcome everybody to Derbyshire Drones!

We are very pleased to have our website up and running but there may still be teething problems, if you find any problems please let us know using the contact us page.

All our products are currently on a pre-order basis, we will keep you update on when stock arrives.