Sometimes when I set goals and get going on them I realize that it’s not taking me in the direction that I wanted to go, so I have to reevaluate what it is I really wanted the outcome to be.

This is how it’s been with one of my classes I was taking. I wanted to create a new website. I have created a couple of them, but didn’t feel like I really understood how they worked, and sometimes they didn’t do what I wanted them to. Consequently I decided to learn coding so I could do the work from the ground up.

I guess to back up a little bit, the reason I wanted to create the website was so that I could get rid of all the various locations I have for selling or sharing art and the various other things I produce, and combine them all into one site. I believe this will help with my marketing and will be a lot easier to brand. I also think it will help with my time management as I won’t have to be updating so many platforms so often. The marketing class helped clarify this.

I started researching website building sites to see which ones seemed to have the options I was looking for at a price I could afford, and they are all set up to be user friendly. I have found that to be mostly true, but not always. But getting the majority of a site built on one of these is actually pretty easy although there is always a learning curve.

I enjoy the WordPress format of this site for my blogging, but for creating a website that has memberships, ecommerce, and options for creating classes, WordPress is very expensive, over $500/year. If I was making a lot of money with any of these, I guess it would probably be worth, but just getting started is way too much money for my budget right now.

That $500+ also doesn’t include the plugins that I would need for some of what I want to do, and those have a monthly cost above the original fee. My daughter created a website for our joint venture on a Wix site in just a couple of hours. It is a very simple website (and currently needs an SSL certificate to work properly), but it looks great.

As I researched the different site building websites, Wix was by far the most recommended for what I’m looking for and the one most recommended for ease of use, so I will be creating my new website there. I will continue to use this website as my blog, but for my art sales, book sales, and video classes I will be using that website as it has some built in features for all of those things included in the cost which ended up being just under $200/year.

I am excited for this new endeavor. I have been working on the site, but it is far from being ready to launch. It will probably take me close to a month to get it all figured out and get things uploaded and going. I also have a wedding to go to this month, so probably more like 6 weeks. I want to have it up and running before the summer tourist season at the very least.

When it’s finished I will post a link here so you can check it out. In the meantime, I have also filmed, edited and uploaded the video I discussed in a previous post and you can view it on my YouTube channel here. I am in the process of painting the next one, but I’m slower than I anticipated. I may have to reevaluate that goal as well. But that can wait until later.