I’ve been chipping away on *this*, my new website and its shop over the last few months, usually during our Tuesday nightly Tāmaki Makaurau Open Music Hub meetings, which has been truly a heaven-sent of a space for me to focus on creative work that I otherwise simply don’t get done when left to my own devices.
It’s been pretty sweet updating myself on the new ways of WordPress after all the changes of the backend of the CMS over the last few months or so.
It’s actually super neat in terms of extending it to do more precisely what you want it to do, and doing webby stuff has always been a good skill to have going for me, and to keep updated, considering I’ve done a solid two different tertiary things that included specifically web dev, so I better keep at it somehow.
I had been getting increasingly grumpy with the fact that everyone wants some sort of fee these days for subscriptions or pay as you go – fair enough for payment services etc, but have you tried to sell anything on i.e. TradeMe in recent times? They fleece you!
Out with the old, in with the new
My old shop had been utterly disconnected to this website, sitting over at Big Cartel, and look, for what they do, their free tier service rules, and they helped me make a fine chunk of money – of which they also kept a nice share.
Love Bandcamp for merch because it’s such an awesome one-stop-shop if you’ve also got music to sell, and it remembers your sales so you can come back to it, if you lose your files, but me not really being a practising musician any more these days, it’s not really for me.
I asked around, looked around, got to work within different ecommerce shops for a few clients, and through some trial and error/playing around with other options, I chose to stick with trusty, tried and true WooCommerce, because they seem to have a ton of building blocks that’ll do just fine for me and my needs. As a rather small-scale business such as myself, most of us can probably get away using free tiers entirely.
WooCommerce is so handy
At this point, I’m yet to hit any limitations!
I love that I can upload different varieties of similar items, that it keeps a count of my inventory if I update it, I can send all subsequent emails through it, including tracking, and it made installing the financial side of things super easy as well. It’ll manage basic sales of both virtual (i.e. digital stuff or services) and real-life goods (earplugs or beanies in my case), donations, and even subscriptions!
If you’re curious what the backend looks like, hit me up at the next TOM, and I’ll let you have a look.
I don’t enjoy working as a web designer, but…
The headline gives it away, I’m not interested in working as a web developer, and there are enough of those out there already!
What I am interested in is empowering artists to take their affairs into their own hands and save themselves a ton of money by being able to set things up and run stuff without paying someone else thousands of dollars.
So basically, you can’t hire me to design a website for you, but you could hire me to teach you how to do it yourself – one-on-one or in small groups – how to set all of this up yourself, with me by your side.
Once you’ve got the knack of it, it’s super fun, and if I can do it, trust me, so can you. It’s meant to be easy, that’s what these systems were built for, but I can see how it would look a bit scary for anyone who hasn’t done this before, and that’s where I come in.
I don’t do that thing where I talk like someone who assumes we all know the right technical terms for everything. I’m just a normal person with a bunch of skills, and I enjoy sharing those skills without making you feel like you know nothing. I will be rooting for you, and help you with anything you need help with, using words you can actually understand. ❤️
