Better Than Yesterday

Ha!  I knew it!  Cafe Press isn't exactly user friendly!  It's not just me, my web designer confirmed it.  I feel so much better about it now.  That place was driving me nuts.  And yes, I have to upload pre-set photo dimensions for each…  whatever you call it.  Product.

Jeez, I'm tired today.  Web designer and biz consult meetings today - 2 in one day.  And I had the youngster with me the whole time, but it was good.  I'm glad he's seeing this side of his mom running a business.

So, 3 levels productivity today.  Quality child rearing, web design/cafe press progress, and a refreshed itinerary for the biz in the next 2 weeks.

And I made a sale.

Conquering Cafe dePression

Cafe Press is driving me nuts.  It's so much harder than it looks.  And there are some funny dynamics to it.  Originally I started with the "free" style shop to experiment…  kinda liked it…   then decided to upgrade to a more customizable shop.  The free version doesn't let you edit out items you don't want to sell, but it's easy to size the image on the items available.  But it seems like you have to size an image for each item in each color and each size, waaaaaaay too much work!  Especially if you don't want to sell some of those things in the first place.  So the upgrade seemed like a good idea.  So it seems…  The premium shop upgrade requires you to delete your original shop (and all the work you put into it) if you want the same name, and sizing images is apparently impossible (at this point, as far as I know).  I think I have to pre-size the image then upload it, save it, then designate it to the item I want to sell.  I don't know…  the whole thing is a bitch to deal with and I'm really discouraged.

 I'm NOT happy with it.

Maybe I'll talk to my web designer.  She could probably figure this out for me.

I think I just hit a major epiphany.

Wow, blogging is good!

Okay, I'll update you later on how that works out - this Cafe Press jazz.

Decisions

I made my 1st sale with my website this week. 4 items. I didn't even realize it was functioning like that.  I know I talked about it with my web designer but I didn't know she had it set up for sales already. The customer was super nice and easy to communicate with and we worked out all the details through email. This is fabulous in 2 ways: 1. I learned that need to revise the shipping charge for multiple purchases in a single order, and 2. I need to get on top of getting my site more user friendly with more items for sale. So exciting!
Basically, I'm super happy about it.

What I'm not super happy about… These dresses.  They take too long to paint, think up the design, composition, color, repeating the pattern for sizes...  and then I don't want to do them. I wind up procrastinating it into a long story, then get freaked out about how long it's taking.  Discouraging.  I'm going to figure something else out with these dresses. Raise the price?  Do I want to reduce the amount of batik I do on them? That would be kinda boring….   I should step back and make new plan for my batik dresses.