1. I really don't know what I'm doing.
Let's start a web based business... Yep, there is nothing like tackling something completely new to make you feel totally inadequate. One voice in my head is whispering " you're crazy, you suck at this, no one cares..." Luckily I have another voice that says, " You got this. You may suck right now but you're learning. Do you remember the first thing that you ever knit? No you don't! That's because it sucked so bad you have erased it from your memory like childhood trauma. But now you can custom make just about anything. Everything is figure-out-able." Whew! Thanks nicer inner voice, I really needed that.
2. The more you learn the more there is to learn.
It's not so much that this is a new statement but more of a reminder (yet again) of all the things I don't know. There are times in your life where you get cocky about what you think you know just to get knocked on your butt with the vast amount of things that you don't. So I know how businesses run. I've even run a few and in principle they all work the same. Except this time I'm not running someone else's show, I am the show and what I don't already know I'll just learn as I go right? True, I am learning. But damn, if I didn't seriously underestimate just how much I would have to learn. Adobe Illustrator, charting, pattern writing, layout design, product photography, photoshop, website layout, publishing, branding, blogging, Facebook, Instagram, Yikes! I've only scratched the surface of all of these things, enough to know that I'll never be an expert at any of them. I just wanted to share my love of knitting with the world, and maybe if I'm lucky even get paid for it. Okay nicer inner voice, what do you say to that? "Hmmm... well you know, you don't have to be a mechanic to drive a car but it sure helps to know as much as you can about your car to avoid needing one." or maybe "Learning is a process - get over it."
3. Setting up a website is easy. Making it look good is hard.
One of the many goals in this journey of mine was not only to get the website going but also to make it look good. Kudos to the companies out there like Wix (who I ended up choosing), Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly and so on that make setting up a site as easy as picking a template and following a few steps. In the olden days...it used to cost a fortune or a degree in programming or both to set up and maintain a website. I'm just old enough to remember computer data storage on huge tape reels so I really do appreciate how far technology has come. So, setup = easy. Making it look good = not so easy.
Because my product is unique hand knitting patterns for mittens, I could not just go populating the shop part of my site with stock photos of yarn in baskets. I needed to have pics of the finished mittens and they need to look good. So enlisting help of friends and family we went and took a whole bunch of photos. None of us are expert photographers so we made up for it with LOTS of photos - thank the universe for digital phone cameras. So these are blurry - toss. Only half a mitten - delete. Well this one is great for the mittens but my face is caught in an expression that looks like I'm having a stroke so we're gonna need to crop that one down. And oh, those colors that look awesome in real life look horrendous in the photo and I really don't want to knit up another pair just to take more photos so lets Photoshop it, but not too much because we don't want it to look like its Photoshopped. Ok, so this looks good. Lets load it up on the website and I can only see half of it. Why?!?! Go back to the photo and re-crop or re-format or re-do whatever and load again. Sigh. My not so nice inner voice is calling me crazy again...
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