After the hectic Christmas season, and incoming New Year, I had finally reached a point where it was time to take a break. While I haven’t been posting a lot, I have been working on the site. In essence… the store needed a lot of attention. While it was never my intent to offer an online store per say, it has been my desire to see my work loved by others. When my wife suggested the craft ideas, it was only natural that we’d setup a store to distribute the items that didn’t sell at the shows to the masses.
However… the state of the store has always been in ruins. When developing a new business, new products, new site, new designs, and new store…. it takes more than a few minutes to get everything working smoothly. While the store was initially online for about 12 hours, the more I looked into the workings the worse I felt. It wasn’t good. Products weren’t listed correctly, purchasing methods were lacking, and the design was atrocious. Couple that with the dark/light theme options I’m using and it made browsing the store both cumbersome and painful.
I’ve been spending the past few weeks working on the CSS and layout of the store itself. I wanted the design to be functional and beautiful. I also needed the design to be usable. Having black text on a dark brown background is far from usable. I’ve redesigned the theme from scratch and built it myself. I’m still tweaking it to some extend (colors need a bit of tweaking yet), but it’s getting there. I’m finalizing the checkout page now, and after completing this task the store should be “functional”. I figure a few more weeks and then I’ll get it online. I want a way for users to log in, save preferences, view past orders, communicate with me, and see tracking information at their leisure.
Unfortunately, most of my current product revolves around the winter season and Christmas holiday. However, that only means one thing…. big discounts. I’ll post a coupon code in one of these posts when we go live. Keep your eyes open!
