I’ve been selling my jewelry for over 5 years now, primarily at local craft shows. However, now I’m branching out and adding an e-commerce site, my own website. And what a challenge that is!

I had a personal blog for a while a few years ago and have recently returned to it. Having set up that, I assumed that the e-commerce website would be similar. Ah, if only that were so!

My first step was to get a WordPress theme and start setting up the site. Bumbling my way through that, I managed to get something put together. Thank goodness for support via live chat!

In the fall, I worked my way through an online program about a jewelry website. While I didn’t set it up immediately, the course was invaluable in helping me conceptualize the site, my goals, my logo, my brand — all of the business-related ideas so new to someone who has taught for over 30 years. But I took notes, did my homework exercises, and generated ideas that served me well last month when I finally began building the website.

So many things to consider — styles, fonts, pages, photographs, you think about it and I need to work on it.

And then it occurred to me that I’d need to host the website somewhere. DUH. Leave it to me to work in a circuitous fashion. Thus it was that last week I added iPage to my “to-do” list.

So much is involved in setting up a business website — not just a blog. Typically for me, I bite off more than I can chew, and so my progress is slower than I’d anticipated. As of this afternoon, though, I’ve got the iPage-Wordpress connection set up, and a business email selected, and another blog entry. Enough for today. Tomorrow’s goal: try to set up the first items for sale; work a bit on the online photography for jewelry class I’m taking; work on my craft room.

I’m hungry for time working on the jewelry — something I’ve kind of put on the back burner while I got the website going. Teaching part-time takes some time too. But I’m finding my rhythm and it feels good.