Cinnamon Jewellery Website - Finished At Last!

After rather a long delay - almost a year - I'm happy and relieved to say my very own website Cinnamon Jewellery has been set free to roam the internet wilderness.

I bought the .com and co.uk domain names last May with the intention of making a start on my own site but other things got in the way, the amount of work involved was putting me off and I started having doubts about whether anyone would actually find it so it just got put on the back burner.

But with laughable views to my shop on Folksy and dwindling sales there I thought it was time to start work on my own website. I made a start about six weeks ago starting with the boring stuff - privacy policy and terms and conditions, delivery and returns and I even designed my own 404 and contact page. I worked on it for about 1 hour a day to avoid burnout (!) as some of it is incredibly boring to do and slowly got more into it and into making it more personal than a shop on a selling platform.

I added jewellery info and supplies info pages with images and played around with Paint Shop Pro to create little text graphics for the home page and category titles like the one above and below.

I really enjoyed the design aspect of it at the same time wanting to keep it looking quite clean and easy to navigate. I kept the background white and the text a brown colour which sounds horrible but it works (I think!) I saved the homepage till last as I wanted to get all the items for sale done first. That was fun (no it wasn't) and time-consuming as they are the same items as I have in my Etsy and Folksy shops so I needed to rewrite all the descriptions to avoid creating duplicate pages which isn't helpful search engine wise.
When I'd finally finished adding all my items I let myself play with the home page. I had a vision of how I wanted it to look in my head - big photo at the top, explain what the website was about then smaller photos for each category with a bit of text below. That's basically how it turned out. It took three attempts to get it "right" and several template changes before reverting back to the one I'd chosen right at the start - you can tell I'm a woman :D

 Here's a screen shot in two parts. That's how it looks but with less space after the "Welcome to Cinnamon Jewellery". I tried to take a screen shot of the whole homepage but it would only take the visible part on my screen so I did half the screen at a time and I've put the two images together here.

 Every time I thought I'd finished and it was ready to publish I'd find something else I'd missed. There's a lot more I could do to customize it and I'm sure I will tweak a few things as I go along. It also has a blog which I did think about binning and just linking to this one but I think I'll keep it as the blog page has the sidebar and links so that could be an advantage.

When I finally was ready to publish it I thought I'd better preview it first and ended up with a page and a half of notes of things that needed sorting, like spelling mistakes, image links not working, etc, etc! So I sorted those things out and published it just over a week ago. No sales yet but I have had a fair amount of views considering it's just over a week and I even remembered to set up a filter in GA to block my own views.

It's early days but I do like my little website and I'm sure it will grow and improve as I learn. Now I just have to sort out uploading my items to my Google Merchant account so they appear in Google shopping. Been having fun all week with doing that (very wrongly) and I think Samshika from Google who's dealing with it probably hates me by now........