Tuesday, November 8, 2011
On the spur of the moment, my family built a mountain for my ceramic Christmas Village scene. See the process of building a mountain scene here: It Takes A Village, Part 1.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
I blogged about grocery shopping yesterday. Raising six children made me very conscious about how much groceries cost, so I developed a system for making our grocery budget go as far as it could – without spending hours and hours clipping coupons. Check out my blog post with the downloadable spreadsheets to streamline your kitchen and grocery shopping: Grocery Shopping Motherlode.
Monday, September 19, 2011
I blogged about the Curves athletic club today. I’ve just recently re-joined this great club. Click on my blog post to read about it: Curves In The Road.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
This morning I blogged about the clothes and fabric I gave new life to, using Rit Dye. Clothes To Dye For.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Blogging about priorities in life, from the perspective of a WAHM (work at home mom). Running Backwards.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Wrote a blog post about Shapewear and a surprise visit. Here’s the post: Shapewear And Surprises.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Another blog update. I wrote today about some sewing and fashion books I picked up at my local library. I reviewed the books, gave reasons why I liked or disliked the books, and make a couple of picks from the pile. Here’s the blog post: Sewing & Style Book Reviews.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
I’ve updated my personal blog today. I always forget to put a note here when I do that! You can view my personal blog post, “10 Things About Me” right here.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
I’m testing out a new shopping cart. (You can see it here – but it still has the default products and categories.) Currently I use Magento – which is an open source program that allows for multiple online shops that share a central checkout. (you can see one of my Magento shops here.) I love the program in a lot of ways. It’s uber powerful and you can tweak it like crazy. But in others… I’m not a programmer and so tweaking the program is like slogging through oatmeal. Cold oatmeal…
In the research Allen and I did about shopping carts, we came to some conclusions. If you want a simple, easy cart for WordPress, use WP E-commerce. It’s free, there’s a plugin, it works; it does not use a credit card processing payment gateway, though. But if that’s not an issue for you, then I recommend it highly. If you want simplicity and accepting credit cards, then try ZenCart. It is still free, and fairly easy to use. It has a bunch of templates for customizing your store, which I like.
But if you want power, and are willing to pay for it, the best rated shopping cart is BigCommerce. You’ll pay good money for it – between $30 and $90 a month depending on your inventory and projected traffic. But you don’t have to tweak it much at all. It’s good right out of the box, and you don’t need to know any CSS or Html to use it. (If you don’t know what those are, then you probably want something like this or the two aforementioned carts.)
Okay, then come the open source carts. These are like basic recipes that you can edit yourself. They can be customized to your heart’s content, providing you know how to use css, ftp, xml, html, php, cpanel, mysql, and an assortment of other acronyms. (And aren’t afraid to muck around in your shop and break it occasionally!)
Like I said, I’ve come to have big respect for Magento, and I’m still waffling on whether or not I’m going to shift from it to OpenCart. The biggest issue for me right now is whether or not OpenCart is going to run multiple stores through a single back-end administration. If not… then I might stick with Magento and try to do the upgrade to the newest version.
Thank God for Etsy and eBay, though. It’s nice to have backup stores for when I break the custom ones!
Saturday, March 5, 2011
I don’t have a whole lot of time to work on the website this morning, but there are still some tweaks I was able to make – primarily the sidebar! Got a bunch of links and widgets up (have I ever mentioned that I love widgets? Hhmmm…. I seem to recall having made reference to that once or twice). Basically I’m done for today, though I may work on it some more tonight. I want to add a bunch of buttons to the main cms pages of the memorial beads and fimo nail art shopping carts.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Well, the website here has had a radical face lift. I’ve been working on it all day, getting the updates installed. I’m exhausted but exhilarated! My favorite part: the navigation links. So much easier than the last WordPress theme I was using.
Looking good! Very inspiring. This was the year I was going to get an ETSY shop or start a blog. Hmm. It is only March.
It’s never too late, Trina. Maybe start slow, with a blog. You can make one on wordpress by going to wordpress.com. It’s free to do and there are lots of fun things you can do with them. My blog is on wordpress (fimofanatic.wordpress.com) and I just love how much functionality you can get for free.