It seemed a rather simple endeavor—building a web site. Templates are supposed to make it easy, just fill in the blanks…right?! When I saw the picture of this mouse I knew I had to post it as this was what I looked like at various points while building my .com! Web design seemed like a bottomless pit of possibilities and, being the creative person that I am, I felt compelled to explore as many of those possibilities as I was able. At some point I realized I would never create another piece of jewelry to post on my .com if I didn't back off a little and let it rest…as is…

     SEOs, CSVs, SLLs, SQLs, URLS—and the list goes on—of acronyms that I was clueless about. Working with my computer, a server host, a theme host, and various modules sites proved to be rather complicated, and when I finally thought I might have some small handle on the whole process I found that different browsers...taaaa, daaa...work differently. I spent two hours working on making a voucher box appear at check out--a relative simple, straight forward task--when I stumbled upon the fact that it would appear in one browser, but not in another. There was no “fix” to be made! There went two hours I could have been working on jewelry!

     As it stands, I now have a dot .com--www.bachscrafts.com. I've managed to keep my costs down on my “free domain.” After buying host time at $1.99 a month—to get that rate you have to buy several months at a time—I needed to buy an SSL (secure site lock) to encode and protect credit card purchases. To add any of the bells and whistles to my “free template,” took all my will power to resist. On several occasions it possibly floated around in the back of my mind that if I would upgrade my template or add certain modules some of the problems I was having would disappear. I was able to find free modules to satisfy my desire to expand my template beyond the basic Prestashop mold and tweak some of the features without having to risk all by rewriting the html coding. One misplaced comma can dismantle a whole site!

     What really saved me from becoming a totally bald mouse were the Nemo tutorials on You Tube: a step by step guide through the drop down menus in the back shop (as opposed to the front shop which you view on the web.) Prestashop’s back shop has a menu bar of 11 different items, and sub menus beyond count, and that expand with every module added. The drag and drop features of this blog are NOT to be compared to the eCommerce back shop that exists with both the domain host and in the template design itself. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I cried when I came across Nemo’s step-by-step easy to follow—let me emphasis here—visual instructions. And I loved to hear him say that some features were not intuitive, or not working properly--“bugs”—and to realize that I was not a complete imbecile when I did A, then B, but C did not fall into line…so I’ve learned to live with bugs. I guess I could upgrade to a “better” template, but I doubt even that would get ride of some of those pesty bugs!

     I hope you’ll visit my web site (and make a purchase), and though it doesn't stand out as anything terribly creative, I’m rather proud of my accomplishment. From start of project to launch of web site only took me three months! Once I started to figure out the basics it went a lot smoother…thanks Nemo! And thanks to the complication of figuring out shipping costs and linking to the USPS, I found it easier to just offer free shipping for now

. I hope to figure out that module sometime this summer, so while I’m doing that I’d make use of the free shipping feature on my site! Happy shopping!!!