Knitting a Website

Wouldn't it be great if you could knit a website? There'd be so many advantages - just pick the pattern you want "I'll have the jewellery store one please", select your wool "Hmmm, I think the rainbow with silver streaks would look nice", then go home and relax in your favourite chair and knit while you watch tv.

Of course the techie geek people have made it too difficult to follow their pattern, even though they make out it's quite simple. And it is - if you only have a single product to upload, with a single description and a single photo. And you already know the best way to photograph your one and only product, use imaging software and describe your fabulous product in such an emotive way that people can't resist purchasing it.

Then there is the tiny matter of understanding how the website and shopping cart work together, where everything is kept in each - and actually finding these things, in the construction end of your website, for a second (and third) time. A complicated fair isle is much easier.

You may have guessed by now that MinzBeadz was not actually knitted or constructed overnight. In fact it took a whole lot of overnights to get it to the point it could safely show it's pretty little face in public.

Figuring out how to insert products into my new website was relatively simple, but I have to admit that I've never really gotten the hang of Photoshop and prefer an old freeware program called PhotoFiltre - it's sort of like Photoshop for complete and utter dummies (as opposed to your regular dummies). Which means fewer bells and whistles and more of your basic 'must have' items, like the little lasso thing that cuts around your image.

Somewhere around 2am on a night where I was going cross eyed and thought I was never going to finish getting everything ready, I did question the wisdom of starting a business with multiple teensy tiny products, said a small thank you to whoever invented the digital camera, and cursed whoever invented imaging software. The cutting out part (which I'm sure some lovely photographer type people will have a proper technical term for) is really really (and one more just to emphasise it) really time consuming. It was at this point that the brilliant idea of knitting my website occurred.

Knitting a website is quite easy

There are a lot of pros to doing this:

• I enjoy knitting
• Intricate patterns are easy with needles and wool, limited only by my imagination instead of handicapped by my lack of knowledge
• There are only two stitches to learn and remember, rather than three and a half million things, most of which I don't know the terminology for
• The wool industry in Australia would sing my praises

 Just imagine it, I could be the first non-designer person to be completely relaxed doing my own website.

Even after all the practice I've now had, achieving a pure white background in a photo has defeated me. No matter what type of lighting (front, back, sideways, and sticking my tongue out left then right whilst hopping on one foot) the background always ends up greyish. Like Grandpa's old white underwear that's been washed too many times without a good bleach.

Exactly, totally unattractive. Unattractive Grandpa underwear background thus equals cutting out of images with the miniature lasso.

At this point I was thinking how I might convert my new jewellery business to being a service business with no products at all (i.e. a website knitting business). In my sleep deprived state it seemed quite possible, however with each new day the fantastic and inventive ideas of how to do this taunted me, just out of reach of my almost conscious brain. Most frustrating.

Given that I had rather a lot of products at this point, I finally gave up trying to retrieve the ideas, tucked away behind what was needed at the supermarket, and how to whiten grey underwear, and stick to selling the jewels.

Welcome to my nightmare

And besides, I was beginning to have disturbing dreams of strange little baby lassos cutting out every dream image... chasing me... chasing me.... 

Needless to say (have you noticed how people say "needless to say" right before they say the very thing that is needless?), eventually the virtual shelves filled in my store, I was happy with the descriptions of each item and I could at least, at this point, tell a potential customer that of course I had a website. (Duh, just knitted one didn't I?)

Except that my terms and conditions, my return policy, my shipping policy, my information telling all about "us", and hey, Welcome You Managed to Find My Website! needed to be tweaked. So tweak I did, and twiddled and I think I may have twitched a bit too, if the truth be told. And now I could, at long last, begin my marketing campaign in earnest.

As to how the marketing plan has gone in real life, well... that's a story for next time.