We're still not live - but almost there. Supposedly the site will migrate over to our hosting site this weekend and we should be live on Monday. We had hoped for yesterday, Friday but there was still too much undone, or untested and we certainly don't want to, as Manish our project manager in India puts it, "make the site LIVE like a crap."
Everything looks really good though, so we are all very excited to see it happen.
Of course, for me this is just phase one, which has had numerous phases within it. And I have had to handle a really steep learning curve, with all the "bits" that go into making a site and business like this. And there is still so much that I need to figure out, one being the bookkeeping. I have the basics down, in quickbooks, but I know it is going to have to be more complex and broken down so I hope to be able to hire someone to do that because that is just not my forte.
I had a training with the merchant account people yesterday so I know how to accept payments and what it takes to do refunds etc. And I have to spend some time watching the tutorial videos - it's all pretty simple once you get the gist of it. And everything is there online to refer to and I have the "Oh shit, what do I do now," 800 numbers! 24/7!
On Thursday, I turned the dining room into a photo studio to do all the gift baskets and I enjoyed that. It is ages since I did studio shots and it took a little getting back up to speed, but digital is wonderful. In the "old days" you didn't know if you got the shot until the film went through processing and printing. Now, I pop the cf card and slip it into the computer, make my adjustments, and post to the site. Well, it does take a while, but not hours or even days sometimes. But there is still crinkly packing paper around the table, which Buddy thinks is a lot of fun. And I have to redo a couple of the shots as I blew out one of the lights. It felt really good to be doing the pix instead of sitting glued to the computer with all the myriad setup details.
My new lids arrived so now I can organize the garage - and these are the easy on, easy off ones so I won't destroy myself putting them on and taking them off! And just getting the baskets ready to shoot, and making the mixes showed me that I need to get the stuff organized alphabetically, so that is the task today, plus making up a bunch of baskets to ship on Monday for Annie and Joe.
But it seems like there is always something else to do, or organize, and some things that couldn't be done until two or three other tasks were completed. Like shipping boxes. I didn't know what sizes to order until I made the baskets, and I couldn't do those until I made the mixes, which I couldn't do until I had supplies which I couldn't do until... You get the picture. So I had to run down to Silverdale to get boxes yesterday to do the initial Joe and Annie orders while I wait for bulk boxes to arrive.
But slowly it is all coming together. Although, when you think of it, it really hasn't been that long - basically three months since we decided to do this and we have a huge, complex site almost ready to go live, most of the systems set up and ready to go. Not a mean feat, if I say so myself.
I keep telling myself, when I am dragging at the end of the day, or when I have "one of those days," when I am so tired, that if I can do this, I can do anything, so the next one will be a cake walk!
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