That's right, I've just started working on my very first website. Selling through Dawanda, and through my blog is great, but after reading a bunch of books on online marketing (see my previous post, for example), and talking with several knowledgeable people on the subject, we all agreed that I do need a real website, with a real shopping cart where I can not only display, but also focus more seriously on selling my jewelry, as they all say, it's worth selling.
But boy what did I get into?? I've decided to use osCommerce, a free open source shopping cart software, and I've signed up with HostGator as my website host. The last two days all I've done is learn about domain DNS, how to transfer it to Hostgator, how to work with a website host, how to set up a mySQL database, then installed osCommerce and started configuring it. And that is two day's work (two evenings really as I can only do this from home, after work). I'll be happy if I can get the website up and running, at least the basics of it, by Christmas. But at least, it's a start.
I'm also in the middle of redesigning my logo, so if you go to my new jewelry site (there's just a static page for the moment), during various times of the day and night, you'll most probably see it changing until I like what I have :)
In the meantime, I'll keep you posted. I might have to slow down just a bit on jewelry, to focus on setting up the site, as I do not have the money to pay for a website developer, so I'm learning as I go along, html, php, how to configure the shopping cart, etc, but luckily I have plenty of jewellery stock at the moment to keep all my trusted friends and customers busy browsing through :)
