Beads-Bali Just about to go live
It’s five in the evening here in Bali and while I might have been out at the beach or walking the dog or drinking a nice glass of wine, instead I’m at home, at the desk, putting beads-bali.com through its paces.
My favorite part of the process was inserting a picture of our (my wife’s and my) new puppy, Jolie, to draw attention to free shipping. Ah, which reminds me: Shipping is now free!!
Please note picture at left.
I can see the ocean from my window — a small crack of it anyway now dominated by a ridiculous wood house.
Having said that, I’ll most likely have some wine later… and why not?
As has been often the case in the past, the problem has not been the content or even getting it all online.
- I use Dreamweaver for the page designs and CSS…. a sometimes completely maddening program and yet worked well enough today.
- Navicat to interface with mysql (an indispensable graphical front end to the unprettiest database on the planet).
- Photoshop for the piccies.
For anyone who’s interested, the site is hosted at Westhost — a seemingly friendly and straight-forward bunch of people… if they prove otherwise, I’ll update this note.
I would have hosted with IQUEST but I’ve had nothing but hassle, problem and errors for the past couple of months and as they haven’t been able to remove their collective heads from their collective butts, I decided to start fresh with this one domain so while I’m spending the money on click advertising with the all might Google and Yahoo — not to mention the ridiculously complicated and low value for money express submit thingie at Yahoo — I didn’t want to do all that without being one hundred percent sure the site was running properly.
All in all, as easy as 1-2-3 — start to finish, the site was up and running in about two hours. Not bad at all.
And then, of course, the real slowdown begins: getting listed in the search engines and putting these products in front of people who’re looking for them.
Why does it have to be so hard?
A sitemap for Google, a sitemap for Yahoo. Pay for this. Pay for that. Logins, passwords, little picture thingies to make sure you’re not a robot… truly, the lunatics are not only on the path; they’re running the asylum.
It actually takes me longer jumping through all these stupid hoops for no damn good reason than it does for me to put up a brand spanking new website/wholesale operation.
Why is it that I can buy a car more quickly than I can get my site listed. And why do they insist on treating us like we’re out to steal military secrets? Makes no sense.
Anyway, just about all I can do now is sit back and try to be patient as I wait for the search engines to come and visit. And, if I’m really, really, really lucky, someone might send me an email.
Sean
