Last Minute Preparations

Coo coo ka-choo, how do you do?

     It's launch week and I am scrambling again. This is a fantastic start. Always put off to tomorrow what you could do today, right? I've procrastinated enough, time to buy a package scale and get to work!

     This'll be a shorter one today because I have a lot to do with 3 1/2 days. Last week, I checked the actual store page for the first time in a few weeks and... oh boy. I've been working on back end stuff for the last couple months. I fixed up inventory, have been writing these blogs, worked on brand colors and logos... but other than the main page, I hadn't looked at the product pages too closely. Of course, right now I have no product images since the photo box I got for Christmas is still in it's packaging. I thought that was the last hurdle I had to set the store to public. A little bit of housekeeping, maybe a new coat of paint here or there, but not something as drastic as what I discovered. 

     I came over to this website because people were leaving/boycotting Etsy due to really bad deals and the influx of resellers. Those sellers recommended making your own site or using a site hosting service so you have less fees and, hopefully, less fake competition. Aw yeah, getting down to business! So I switched gears to focus here and have been making steady progress. That was (maybe) early/mid 2021. What I didn't realize was I have been building my deadlines on an incredibly shaky foundation.

     So, around two years and a ton of both online and offline work later, here I am with a website full of placeholder text and broken dropdown menus. Yeah... it's not looking too hot. The problem was, or still is, not checking what the live store looks like as I went. Since the site has been locked behind a password its' entire existence, I think up until recently you had to put the password in regardless of admin status. I was pretty much like "Ah, it's fine. I'll just do the preview product mode and as long as the formatting is okay, it'll be fine." Wrong. Totally wrong, younger me.

     If you haven't seen the backend of one of these shops, I'll tell you what's the issue for me. Each store has either a fully customized layout or a template you can use to set it up, right? When I signed up, the first thing they did was flood me with options for premade templates. Most, at the time, were either hundreds of dollars to use or expected you to be stocking a department store level variety of items, if not both. For the site to be small business friendly, the options were not particularly one person making crafts friendly. So that's what I did. I chose the "Craft" template for my site and called it a day. The template is a lie. It doesn't like crafts. It likes drop-shipping just as much as the others. So, I've gotten all my products all nice and organized with proper credits and everything. Pretty smooth, right? There's even nifty dropdown menus you can click on to edit! ...Wait. There are? Those are not in the backend. Oh, oh no.

     So yeah! Looks like it's another unseen mountain of formatting reworking to do for me before Friday hits! Other than that, it's taking pictures of my already finished products and fixing the front page. I think I'll end up leaving that video box blank in the end, I don't have the energy to figure out video editing software and animation. I wrote a script, sure, but that's the easy part. I know I can get everything up and running by Friday, I just have to not get locked into a loop of infinite hypotheticals! I was up til 4am last night fretting about this!