TheWeeJenny.net

I’ve been making changes around the site, both functional and cosmetic. The Photos page is now called Portfolio, but I’ve left the link the same because I’m not sure if that change will be lasting or not. I’ve gotten some feedback about that section that indicated that some folks coming to the site were hoping to see pricing info on the jewellery pictured there, but alas, there were only pictures to be found. My sincere apologies, I’ve been struggling with the best way to sell through the site for some time now and still haven’t found it. I know there are a few simple ways to do it until I get a proper shop up, but I have a couple domains that would work for a standalone store type thing and I’m trying to decide whether or not to use one of those or just make it a subsection of this site. You’d think that would be an easy decision, but I’m also going to be setting up Zazzle and Cafepress stuff that needs to be linked too so that complicates things.

While trying to figure things out, I’ve thrown a wee Amazon widget up on the Shop page filled with as many of the books I use for reference in jewellery making and drawing as I could think of in one sitting. A couple are in there just because they’re books I’d like to buy myself and I don’t want to forget about them, but the rest are all ones I own, have owned, or had sufficient access to to know whether they were useful or not. I’ve done this partly in the interest of being an educational resource for crafters, but also in the hopes of making the site able to pay for itself a little bit.

I’ve been looking into various monetization choices and frankly, I’m a bit over and underwhelmed at the same time. There are those that can be put to legitimate non-spammy uses but are commonly used in a rather spammy way (like sponsored posts) and those that are completely above board but do not pull in income with as much certainty. In the end I’ve decided that the things that aren’t working so well would probably work just fine if I put up some good sticky content, like the tutorials that I’ve been talking about doing for a year and the store and so forth. I just need to get the lead out and make some changes.

I’m going to be trying on a few different themes because I’m looking for a new base to work from. I still don’t feel confident coding my own yet, and I don’t think I have the skills to code the functionality that I’m likely to need. I’m looking at some of the “New Site” style themes because they make it a bit easier to present several kinds of content in a way that’s easy to parse.

I’ll let you know how it goes.