The new website is nearly done!

The first website was a little challenging. The software was not what I'd hoped it would be. On first glance, it seemed like a good program, with a lot of bells and whistles. Customers could rate products on a five-star system and leave reviews. There was an inventory management system where I could type in the quantities of the products. There were weight fields so that shipping could be calculated. I was a little taken aback by the look of the sites it created, but with a bit of revising, it didn't look like such a bargain-basement site.

Once my website designer and I really delved deep into it, however, it turned into a bit of a headache. The image manager system it used was horrid. With up to four pictures per product, there are a lot of images that have to be stored, and the image manager would lump them all together randomly. You could not sort them by date or title. At the end, I had 42 pages of images and I just gave up sorting through them. Instead I would copy the file name that I'd uploaded to the image manager and just paste it in.

The weight system turned out to not have enough different divisions. There were issues with a lot of different things on the site. One of the most glaring for me was the strange horrible grammar and spelling of the various system messages and displays. One button proudly displayed "IM NEW HERE." There was an error message that read, "I'm not sorry, but that product is not available."

After enough of these setbacks, I decided I wanted to use different software. My website designer enthusiastically agreed, and we've been working on a new site ever since.

Last night, I uploaded the last product. Now I just need to tweak the verbiage and check the photos, as well as test the site. I'm very excited about this and I'm hoping that it turns out to be a better system. I'm already happier with it in many ways. The look is nicer, the error messages aren't rude, and it isn't bogged down by a ton of affiliate bells and whistles that I don't need.

I'm including some of the new product pictures I've been taking, too:



I am crossing my fingers that this will be a better solution to the need for a website than the other software was. I'm already far more impressed with the new site.