A Brand New Look (Again!)

Is it just me or does it feel like this year is speeding by really quickly?

Back in April, I realized that my website and hosting would be up for renewal in May. I’d previously used Squarespace for my site, and it was fine. It made for a pretty site that was relatively easy to update once I figured out how to use it. I was tempted to just renew the site I already had, but part of me has grand visions of expanding past my Etsy shop and eventually selling from my own site as well. I know you can do that with Squarespace. I also considered moving over to Shopify. But I wasn’t quite ready to jump into selling from my own site, and I didn’t really want to pay for something that I might not use yet.

And so I found myself back at WordPress. Once upon a time a long, long time ago, I used to use WordPress for my websites. At least until I started to find it complicated and frustrating to deal with. (I even took a whole course on building sites with WordPress and ultimately came to the conclusion that it is not my thing.) While I wasn’t 100% sold on attempting to tackle WordPress again, I liked the idea of having more control over my site. Plus, when I do decide to jump into selling products on my own site, I can easily add that with WooCommerce. 

So here I am, back on WordPress. I officially moved everything over in May with the idea that doing this wouldn’t take me that long, and I would get a new site up in no time. (Mwahahahaha.) This brings me back to feeling like the year is speeding by extremely fast, but hey, getting my site up in August instead of May is better than not getting the site back up at all, right?

I tend to be a perfectionist with work that I do, wanting to make sure that it all looks perfect before I release it into the wild. That’s exactly what I was doing with this site. “Oh, I can’t make the site live yet. I need to draw a new illustration for the FAQ page. Wait. I want to have an illustration for my first new blog post, too.” And so on. 

Yes, I did do this bear illustration because I wanted something for this post. I’ve been inspired by watching the brown bears of Katmai bear cams. I got hooked on those cams last year and have been so happy to have them back. Anyone else out there totally addicted to watching bears? I usually keep the bears open on one side of my screen while I do work on the other side. Watching bears snorkel around for salmon is rather soothing, I have to say. Not to mention very cool.

But I digress! As always.

My new site is here! And it’s a work in progress. I imported my very few blog posts from my last site and the format on them is a little wonky. I was going to attempt to fix them and make them pretty, but I realized that was just another excuse I was making to not make this thing live. So pardon the wonky looking blog entries.

Now that I’ve hit live on this new version of the site, I can move on to my other big project, re-doing photos for my Etsy shop and listing a zillion new items for sale (okay, maybe not a zillion, but it feels like a lot after editing all of the photos for them).

And watching bears. Gotta love bears.