My first website for Nicola Porter Studio was a free site provided by the people I got my card reader from.
Being free meant that I could cut the cost of getting my business off the ground by a considerable amount. I was thrilled.
I set to work, sorting out legal policies and insurance etc. then went through all the settings for my new site.
Sorting out the design of the site was super easy because there were very few options to choose from, basically, it was just font and colour choices with a few options for layout. I wasn’t too happy that there were so many restrictions but I made the best I could of it.
Then came the hard work of adding my produce - I’ve got to say - I absolutely hated this bit, it seemed never-ending. I do struggle with sales-y descriptions, hopefully, that's something I will get better with, in time. It's a different kettle of fish to writing a blog, where I just ramble on (and on). I’m 100% sure I should be able to do better where that's concerned too.
Anyway, back to the website: It took a lot of fiddling with to get it working at its best and trying to get a blog on there - it wasn’t quite the same as a blog but it was ok-ish.
I finally published my website on June 1st (2023) but still had to get it seen in search engine results. For a page to be seen on Google, it needs to be indexed which is supposed to be a pretty straight-forward process. I needed to verify that I owned the site and sort a few other things out. After going through all the necessary steps I ended up on a page that said everything was being processed and to check back in a few days. That’s when the real problems started.
I won’t go into great detail - BORING! - It’s enough to say that after much too-ing and fro-ing, going backwards and forwards, speaking to help centres, writing emails, asking friends and trying all sorts of ‘solutions’, 6 months later I was still in a very similar position.
I was eventually reluctantly told that it was probably the fact that I was on a free account that was causing the problems.
So I bit the bullet and bought a domain name and signed up for a £24 per month account. And set to work once more. I spent another 2 weeks trying to it sorted, and while I didn’t expect the indexing problem to be immediately solved, I was expecting other things to have changed within my account. I had upgraded what I was paying so I expected what I was paying for to be upgraded too. Barely anything had changed, though there was one feature that was available on the free account that had been moved and changed to a degree where it was useless to me unless I paid an extra £9 a month for it. Again, I had a really frustrating time trying to get answers and essentially being ignored by customer services. I gave up, it wasn’t worth all the stress!
I left the old site up online while I set myself up with a completely new account with Shopify. I don’t want to sound like an advert for Shopify I had my site up and running in just over a week, Including being indexed on Google!
Don't get me wrong, there are teething problems and some frustrations - I had read that I could just import all of my produce over to my new Shopify site with a few clicks, but that didn’t work on my computer ( I think it was software/file conflict ). I still had to input all of my products individually and I still didn’t enjoy this bit but it did take much less time this time around - thank goodness for copy and paste :)
So here we are; My little handcrafted business website is now live and running smoothly. I hope you have a great time here but if you come across any issues, please don't hesitate to let me know.
I still want to change the photos at some point and sort out certain integrations but I am happy with it at last!
