My weekend was gladly filled with work for notepads and a cute design for a do not disturb door hanger. Everything turned out as expected...colorful and fun!
I am trying to decide on some new animals and different items I can place along with children's thank you notes, notepads and note cards. I have been trying to think of a great design and wording for a clam bake invitation. I would love to get orders from the New England area since this is where all the clam bakes usually are! This might lure them in. Also, I need to come up with some more designs for baby, wedding, showers, things like that. So keep looking at www.sooboodesigns.com for new things. I know how important it is to keep things fresh, but still keep the same design elements with the new items.
I have been having some hardships with my web designer/host. I will forego, naming names because that might just upset me again. I needed some page titles changed so my search engine organizer (SEO) can get my site seen by the major search engines, i.e. google, yahoo, aol, much easier. This is NOT an easy task.
My Web Host/Designer doesn't seem to take kindly to phone calls. Everything is done through e-mail. This infuriates me at times when I truly need to hear a person's voice to figure out what in the world they are talking about. So, I have gone through some 8 frustrating e-mails instead of one phone call. I begged, but to no avail. What is that? Patience is a virtue.. I mostly understand now what the e-mailer is talking about (I say e-mailer because I do NOT know if this is a man or a woman!). My SEO (3rd one now) is really great. He ( I can talk to him over the phone if I wish) is my third seo and seems to really be genuinely interested in getting my site more viewed. After all, it's all about being seen! He has given me instructions as to what I needed to do to enhance my visibility and now, I wait. wait wait wait! BE PATIENT! I keep telling myself.. Something good must come of it after the length of frustrating e-mails.
What I need to forewarn people out there is this: DO YOUR HOMEWORK! I thought I did. I really liked this group of individual in Florida. They offered everything I thought I needed. I loved their design of my website and thought it was an easy process. I learned a lot in the few months I had to enter all my data into the site. Again, patience paid off. I adore the ambiance of my website. It incorporates the colors of my business cards and also has a background I have used in the Early American Designs Note Cards. So, this was all great. But the longer I get into this process, the more I wonder if made the right decision. Hindsight. I have an e-commerce site which entails a very important shopping cart. It took a while to straighten out the flush right copy in this area. I didn't think that should have been an issue in the first place. Some of the copy was yellow and I e-mailed repeatedly to change this, and finally they did. I even had to purchase a wholesale "module" where I could enter wholesale pricing. I have just started this process and surely there will be issues with this area as well. What I did find out was that I even need a more detailed module for what I really want this aspect of wholesale to do. Gosh, I wish I had the patience!
Well, just beware. Even my SEO company has not lived up to the great service they claimed on having. I also researched this and made 4 phone calls to would be happy customers. They were, they all had a huge increase in business, but I, not yet. They coupled me with seo's who were either going to be fired or who just decided that they weren't going to do their job by not calling customers back. BUT, I feel that my new seo is the answer. All this time since August 2007 has been wasted. I don't get much empathy from the seo manager, either. I feel jipped for sure, and it's not over with yet. Hang tight, Susie, you must be patient!
Another story of patience paying off is this: for two days I have been playing around with a bandana design for a BBQ Invitation since summer is approaching quickly. Well, I did my little drawing then painting thing like I do. I scanned it into my Photoshop, of which going forward will be my enemy for the duration of this paragraph! Now, Photoshop is not an easy piece of software if you don't have a CLUE what you're doing. I fortunately know just enough to get me by for what I need. Well, I knew there was a way to erase the white background of this design so when I go to rotate the item to make my card design, I won't have overlapping white squares! Get it??? Well, for those two days, I must have scanned, erased and saved a zillion times, only to put it into Illustrator and see that the white squares are still there. ARGH! So, I thought, "What in the WORLD am I doing wrong?" I decided to save the image in a PSD (Photoshop document). HELLOOOOO! It worked. Later that day, I saw a gentleman who knows his Photoshop and I told him the story with my head hanging low... and this is what he said to me, "Well, DUHHH!" So patience paid off for that and here is the outcome.
Enjoy the rain!
Susie
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