Coffee, Coding, and Crazy Hair

Coding your own website is a lot of hard work, but if you're on an extremely small budget, the time invested in getting those fingers css dirty is more than well worth it. Before building (or in my particular case, redesigning) an e-commerce site, I had to figure out what was really important when I sold it personally and how to translate that on a screen without human interaction. The product I am selling is is definitely hard to describe and when put into just words it isn't appealing at all:

"Recycled water bottle cap jewelry." 

This definitely  did not embody the fun, sparkly, and super-cute nature of the look and brand personality my product has in-person. My products are colorful, engaging, and sets a stage to display personal interests and hobbies. My decision was made, the focus had to be on images and bright graphics- meaning functions and navigation had to be easy to keep my customers attention on the cute designs. 

Blogger was a free platform where I can easily update my ever-growing collection of charm designs. It also offered less function coding for me as it allowed me to add search, subscription, SEO, tagging, and auto-updating categories in just a click. Plus as Blogger is owned by Google, it wouldn't hurt me SEO-wise.

One week later, a majority of my new site is done. Last night I stayed up till 4am to have the site up by today-- that's a pic of me on top happily enjoying my site with my final cup of coffee for the day. I had a lot of questions during that week, but I made my questions very specific because I knew how I wanted particular parts of it to look/function. Like when I wanted my navigation to stay put and the products to scroll, I simply googled it and was able to find my answer quickly. I recommend to any one making their own site to not be afraid of knowing what you want, the answers ARE out there.

For the cart, I chose to go with Mals-ECommerce as it's free. Completely free, forever. You can link it to your Paypal and you can also accept credit card information and I use Square to process them.

Here's how my site looked before (I used a cart that was part of a template- not too bad. I could only get it to link to my Paypal and I wasn't able to easily create discount codes):

And here's how it looks now. 

I'm planning to fix up this blog just a little bit later this week... maybe, I kind of need to recover from making the Treasurette Girl site :)  

I'm always willing to give some help to other's trying to build their own e-commerce site for practically for free.