Orlando Menswear Store is now officially open.....

Arrowhead Warrior Necklace

I declare Orlando Menswear Store is now officially open!!!..And this is my first blog... Those of you who have been following my blog will know that it has taken quite some time to get this site going. So I feel it is quite an accomplishment to get this site officially launched!!! I was intending to tell you every thrilling installment of my struggle to create this web site... This being a site about the day in the life of a Jewellery designer starting her own business. However, I felt I had to keep working away and get it constructed.. There were some hairy moments... and so I haven't blogged for a while. I thought I might share what I have learned, none the less...

 Taking the advice from The Dummies guide to Social marketing. I decided I wanted a WordPress blog,and on further investigation found that many web sites are designed with WordPress. Including Etsy and Life Magazine. I thought I could maybe be a bit more ambitious and have a store of my own. I followed the recommendation of the Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies and chose the Server Bluehost as they already have WordPress installed, so you don't have to launch your website into hyperspace using FTP.. Which does take a lot of the stress off. Needing more information.. I bought...WordPress For Dummies, WordPress Web site design For Dummies, HTML, XHTML and CSS For Dummies and Blogging for Dummies... If in doubt, buy a Dummies guide or five... On the advice of the WordPress web site design guide, I decided to modify a theme. There are free themes which you can select through WordPress in the way you can choose a Template in Blogger. I chose the theme Pinblack which is inspired by the Pinterest site, which I like. It's not as easy as it seems modifying a site...just a word of warning...I altered the CSS style sheet and it's rather like a detective game trying to find out which fonts, backgrounds etc..are the ones you are looking for.. and once you decide to change the colour theme.. you have to keep on going until it all coordinates..It took a bit of tracking down.


For my Store I designed the layout in Dreamweaver MX. I luckily have an old version I bought, when I designed my web site for Ziffo eleven years ago. Fireworks MX isn't compatible with Mac Os X 10.5.8, but thankfully Dreamweaver still works!! I created the layout in Dreamweaver, copied the HTML, and pasted it into the WordPress page window. I also used Dreamweaver to create a layout for the HTML in the sidebar. I pasted the HTML into the Text widget section. I decided to use Mal's E-Commerce, for the Shopping trolley, which I also used in my Ziffo web site. You can link your store to his site using hyperlinks and it's reasonably straight forward.... What's more it's free for the PayPal version. I tried using the WordPress plug-in Cashie Commerce, but I found it a little complicated. Next I decided to be brave and upload all my blogs from Blogger, I used a plug-in for WordPress called Blogger Importer. You can find this by going to Plug-ins on your WordPress dashboard - Add new- type in Blogger Importer. The nice thing about WordPress is you get lots of free plug-ins, tools, widgets etc..It only took a minute to import, but about three days to check the HTML and re- load the featured images so they appeared on my Blog Board.

It's now back to SEO again ( l am learning the jargon... for the uninitiated that's Search Engine Optimisation..)...I am amazed to find that that's now a specialized subject and there are now books devoted to it!! I thought you might be interested in the books I used for this project...So I've put all the Amazon books I mentioned on a widget in my side bar. I've got this widget thing going.. while you're at it, check out my current favourite tracks on the Amazon MP3 player... Cool...