Hello there. I’ve done some yoga, had a cup of tea, and I’m feeling calm right now. I’m finally ready to talk about the trauma of last week.
Last week…
…I finally gave up on my Etsy shop, which I never paid much attention to anyway, and decided to set up a shop on my website. Things were going swimmingly, it was so much easier to set up than Etsy, and I had customers eagerly waiting to inaugurate my shop. As soon as I had posted a few items for sale online, my heart did a little happy dance, and I told my customers that the shop was open. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself, maybe even smug.
That evening, a customer texted that she couldn’t complete her transaction, “that’s weird” I thought. I went online, and tried to order a product. Now this part I remember in sloooooow motion.
First my screen froze, then when I tried to refresh it, my site crashed! It crashed spectacularly. It was the mother of all crashes. After a long series of nail biting conversations with WordPress Help, it took more than 48 hours for the site to rewind and recover (because, of course, I have more images on it than the National Gallery owns). I realized that my entire website was just a big, hot, gooey mess.
After retreating into a foetal position for a few hours, I started to rebuild the whole site from scratch with a lot of help from my tech savvy husband. We realized that the site had so many flaws; we found a new theme for it, and re-examined its purpose. I pretty much spent the whole of Sunday and Monday frowning at my laptop, and ignoring the outside world. This was not easy for me. There’s a reason why I wear a badge that says “Analog” you know.
Anyway, we are not quite done building the new site. There are still a lot of problems to be solved, and things to improve upon. The shop is coming together, and I’m so much happier with it already! Don’t you think the site looks better?
It’s funny that all it took for me to pay attention to my poor, neglected site, was just a total and utter crash and burn! My worst fear turned into an opportunity for improvement. As my wise husband says, failure is the just the first step towards progress. Go out there and fail boldly people.
