Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Even More Changes

As I mentioned last time, I had switched my website from my first host, DoodleCart.com, to Bluehost.com, thinking I could easily set up a shopping cart and make it look more professional. Then remember how I found out that HTML and shopping cart set up were harder than I'd anticipated?

Well, I've been playing around, and studying up and buying tutorials on how to work a ZenCart shopping cart. I bought the official ZenCart guide, and some other tuturials I found on Lulu.com by Leslie Richardson, who writes tutorials for ZenCart and others in plain english that is easy to understand. And, guess what? I about have it figured out. Woo-hoo!

I'm looking at relaunching the even newer and more improved Sherri Crochets & Crafts on April 1st, and that's no April Fool's Day joke. I'm really happy with it right now. I like the way it looks and acts (no, it's not live yet, so you can't see it right now.) I am going to be able to send newsletters from the site and will be able to do away with my Yahoo group. I'm going to be able to sell downloads right from my site, so I can do away with my Lulu.com store. And I might even do away with my Etsy store, since I'm getting really tired of Etsy's fees... I might even set up a bulletin board. Yeah, me!!

Also, I have a few new products.

There are new patterns:
a Huggable Pirate - a larger size doll, who looks like my Scurvy Pirate, only nicer, friendlier and bigger!
My Basic Character doll pattern - people are always telling me how they turned my Scurvy Pirate doll into Elvis, or The Boy Wizard into C3P0, so I figured, why not make a basic pattern and make it easy on them?
And lastly, Macaroni the Penguin - last summer my son wanted a penguin and we couldn't find one like the one he wanted, so we made one up. Based on a real macaroni penguin, this one stands taller than most of my patterns at about 12 inches tall.

That's all for now!
Sherri

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! Go you for figuring out the shopping cart! I got OSCommerce and I can't figure it out to save my life! D: I'm a little jealous. Maybe I'll try again once I get more settled. I swear, figuring out your website is sometimes the hardest part of business, you know?

Anyway, yay! I'm off to check out your big, cuddly pirate. n.n

Sherri Crochets & Crafts said...

Hey, ZenCart looks just like OSCommerce -- if you can install ZenCart instead do it. Then go to Leslie Richardson's site and buy her tuturials (buying them all will run you less than $40). They will get you most of the way there, plus she has a full tutorial coming up soon which is cheaper than the official guide (and probably easier to understand).