Welcome

I hope you enjoy my new blog, with fluffy love and quacks, Mother Duck xxxx

Thursday 31 March 2011

Our first six months in cyber space or the website is six months old and changes are afoot

Dizzy Ducks Creations website and facebook page are coming to the end of their first six months! What an adventure it has been ... navigating our way through technology has not always been easy but we are getting there. There are some tweaks we want to make to the website but that can wait until after our sale ~ oh I forgot to say we are having a sale on the website ~ 50% off everything with free UK P&P all part of our plans for change.


So what do we make of trading on-line? It's quite scary to take the step to create a web site ... learn from our experiences, if you can afford to get someone to do all the technical stuff for you, we didn't. There are lots of off the shelf programmes etc that enable you to build your own  and we have heard varying responses to them; some people have sailed through the set up and are successfully running their page and others have had a nightmare. We chose our domain hosts and started to create our site via them (free), they had a major technical hitch during the process and we had to find an alternative. We purchased software and went our own way, learning from a book as we went (when I say we read Richard) it wasn't easy and was pretty time consuming especially as he did it as when he could around his job. 


The biggest challenge to us is getting the website picked up by the major search engines, this is probably something that would have been done for us if we had been able to continue building via our domain hosts. We know that we need special tags and key words but working out what they are isn't easy. We paid a fixed sum to have a service to help us get noticed but we still haven't really seen a change. We are hoping to work on a way to help ourselves do this but again it is a time thing ~ I have very few computer skills above the basics and Richard has to do what he can outside work hours ~ from a very technical book. So is now the time to ask someone else to 'clean-up' the website for us? If you have any experience of building your website let us know what you did to get the big guys to notice you.


Once the sale on the website is over we will be loading new goodies through April BUT sadly we are going to have to start charging for all P&P. We are hoping to offer standard postage or special delivery (to be signed for) we haven't finalised the costing yet; should we do one fixed price across the board or weigh and price each item? We actually held the free P&P longer than we had originally anticipated, it should have ended after Christmas.


On a personal note, we have been listening to our son play his first gig with his newly formed band ... what proud parents we are! Who would have thought that young people not only want to play Jazz but are knowledgeable about the genre; a lot of people are surprised that this is his genre of choice but you can see the pleasure they all get from playing.  My daughter is revealing a talent for cake baking and loving it, her coffee and walnut cake is to die for and the ruin of any diet! Now I wonder whether she will change her mind from her Maths based ambitions and becoming a cake maker.


love & quacks
Mother Duck


PS we will be posting details of the Wedding fair we are doing in April and the craft fairs we are at during the year ... we are staying relatively local to us for the moment but who knows what the future holds?

No comments:

Post a Comment