I spent a while this morning looking at eBay listings to try to get a sense of how the new rules are being implemented and what sellers are doing. I checked listings for home business and how to make money on eBay and found several hundred in each category - not the thousands that used to come up.

It appears there are only a few sellers using ads for their products. A few are complying with the auction rules and offering CDs to be mailed, but there are a lot of listings that are still up offering digital delivery. (The nine year old in me wanted to report them - they’re not playing by the rules! - but I resisted that urge. EBay will, I’m sure get this all figured out and get rid of the listings.) Interestingly, there are some folks who offer their items for pickup only and offer a telephone number. Hmm, could that call then lead to a digital delivery? Again, not my business, but it is interesting to see the way some folks are trying to get around the new rules.

By the way, can someone tell me how an image of a near-naked woman has anything to do with making money on eBay? I’ve seen the listings before and assumed it was geeky teenage boys selling to other geeky teenage boys, but one seller has over 6000 feedback!

So it looks to be a very good time to jump right in and get those listings going. I’m going through the instructions I told you about last time on how to do the work of getting products on CD and hope to get a bunch listed next week. If you didn’t take a look at that offer through John Thornhill’s report site, you really should. The instructions are very clear and easy to follow. (It isn’t an affiliate link for me, so I don’t tell you this to make money off of you.) There are other products out there, but I haven’t checked them out since I bought this one. Lucky for me, my new computer has the CD burning capability and includes LightScribe disc labeling (although I don’t know yet how to use it).

That’s really all today. I just wanted to share what I found at eBay. It could very well be that the gurus are right - this can be a tremendous opportunity if you’re willing to change direction and start offering your products in a physical form.

 Be well.

Well, today’s the day - the last day for digitally delivered goods to be sold on eBay. I’ll be closing up shop for a bit while I get my head wrapped around a new way of doing business.

The past week has been interesting, to say the least. The big sellers continue to point out that this is really a great opportunity for information product vendors, because there’s a greater perceived value in physical products. The general consensus is that buyers will be willing to pay $10 or $20 for products on CD - the same products they could have downloaded for $1 or $2 before.  We’ll see.

The other great wisdom is that this change will drive a lot of ebook sellers out of the eBay market altogether. This is think is probably true, at least for awhile. If you’ve been selling penny ebooks, it’s probably going to be a bit of a stretch to revamp your business so that you’re producing and selling physical products. And, for technophobes, it’s going to be scary!

As usual, John Thornhill of PlanetSMS has been a great voice of reason through this all. Here’s a link to his blog post with some very good resources:

http://www.planetsmsblog.com/

Both the report and audio have some great information. I particularly appreciate his comments about the various schemes talked about in forums to get around eBay’s prohibitions on digital delivery, and I agree with him wholeheartedly. If you’re trying to build a business by using eBay’s resources, it just doesn’t make sense to try to cheat on their rules. It’s their ballpark, and they WILL pick up the ball and all the bases and take them away if you don’t play the way they say. It might not happen today, but it will happen, and you’ll be left without an account at the worst or without that hard-earned feedback at minimum. I just can’t see where it’s worth it to get a few more sales before they catch up with you. eBay has been reading these posts as well and have answered one of the questions about whether it’s okay to sell the cd and then offer the buyer a download link to the same material:

http://www.ebaychatter.com/the_chatter/2008/03/digital-downloa.html  (look midway down the page)

Another point John makes is that the guidelines for placing ads, eBay’s only option for staying with digital delivery, are completely up in the air. It would seem that this decision wasn’t well thought out by the powers that be over at eBay. I did see a notice that they’d be discussing the changes on April 11th - hello? Eleven days after the change??

Moving on, keeping a positive attitude. Yes I am!

Included with John’s newsletter is an offer for a digital media system, offering instruction and tools for creating the products, including cd covers. I did buy this; Planet Divinity offers great value and good products, in my experience. I haven’t used the product yet, but I’ve already seen a lot of packages (you knew there’d be a lot of marketers jumping on this!), and this seems to be the most complete - and at $27, it is reasonable.

John talks about putting together a whoop-ee-doo package, with the thought that if you dazzle your buyer with the packaging (and great content, of course), you’re more apt to get great feedback and return customers. This has merit when you’re dealing with a comprehensive package of information, but I think I’ll begin with putting my offers in a more reasonably priced package. He estimates that you can do the dazzle for only about 50 cents more than the plain offering, but in my investigation of all this, you’re talking at least a couple of dollars more for packaging and packing materials - and a greater postage/delivery cost. At least I’m hoping there’s a market for the information I have to offer, people who just want the information without bells and whistles. We’ll see.

This change is also pushing me to actually do something with my web site. I can offer all my ebooks for digital delivery, because that system is all set up (the same system used for eBay sales), but the site needs to reflect that.  And, of course, all those products that are specific to setting up an ebook business on eBay now have to go.

Geez, I just discovered that the comments link on this blog are messed up. When it rains… Actually, snow here. In Oregon. On the last day of March. What the???

Guess it’s time to get over to eBay and take down my listings. Stay tuned, though. My goal is to have at least a couple of physical products up by the beginning of next week.

Stay well.

Well, isn’t this just a fine kettle of fish. eBay, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that digital goods being sold on their site offer no value to anyone, digital items are only bought and sold to manipulate feedback, and therefore, they must not be sold - except through eBay ads ($9.95 or so), where there is no participation in the eBay feedback system.

 You can see their announcement here: http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200803241300132.html

As you can see, the announcement was made yesterday afternoon, and it’s effective March 31. Nice notice!

There’s plenty of buzzing in forums about this, with suggestions that digital products be burned to CDs and offered as physical products being, so far, one of primary ways out of this fix for venders of ebooks. This is a viable option for higher priced books, and it may be that someone looking for information would be willing to spend the extra time and money it takes to get their product. It just seems to me, at least from my limited experience selling ebooks, that eBay is doing a disservice to their customers, both sellers and buyers.

The latest forum I visited also had plenty of “make lemonade from the lemons” comments on it. Well, bite me! Sure I’m working on backend and viral products, but the way of building that, of building a list so that I can diversify was all tied up in the ebook on eBay concept - a concept that has made a number of people quite financially comfortable, I might add.

On the upside, I can dump a whole bunch of ebooks from my hard drive that have to with this ebook eBay business.

I know that one of the reasons for this decision is that there are many venders selling their books for a penny, and they are primarily looking to build feedback. Apparently there are venders who will do this, build some good feedback, then move on to expensive product listings, which they don’t fulfill. Couldn’t eBay deal directly with that problem? They already shut down sites with penny books; they have to have the capability of ferreting out all the vendors selling penny books. Make it direct policy that digital products have to be sold for a minimum amount. They can’t honestly believe, in looking at their own site and the statistics of sellers who charge even $.99 that there can be any significant rapid accumulation of feedback. It takes a lot of time and energy to even list the damn books, much less get anyone to buy them. How is that feedback manipulation?

So, just as things are starting to take off in my eBay ebook sales business, it’s being shut down. Back to the drawing board in finding that one marketing method to focus on. Guess I’d better change the name of this blog, as well. But I know I’d better wait until I’m feeling a little less hostile towards eBay.

For now, I have to clean up the recommendations and resources pages to remove all the stuff about selling ebooks on Ebay. Also have to start doing some real work on SmilingPartners, where the entire first page has listings of those kinds of products. Check the site out in a few days to see the changes. Also, you only have a few days to find digital information products on eBay.

I’ve mentioned here a time or ten that I’ve been working on an old (circa 2000) laptop and my frustrations with it. Although it was top of the line when I bought it, the memory compared to today’s machines was abysmal. It was taking forever to do the tasks necessary to get an ebook business going, and I have to admit it cleary affected my enthusiasm for getting things done.

It finally completely overwhelmed me last week. I had entered a bunch of stuff onto Turbo Lister, taking several hours to complete the tedious tasks involved. All done, I hit the upload button, only to have the machine jam up, grind away for a looongg time, and then dump my work. After taking several deep breaths (away from the machine and the temptation to throw it out the window), I consulted with my husband who agreed it was way past time to make the investment in a new computer. Off to the local geek outlet - and home with a beautiful new HP Pavillion (I’m sticking with a laptop because I still have my dreams of traveling off to some exotic place and doing business from the beach!).

There are features on it that are going to take awhile to figure out, but I’m optimistic that I’ll be fully integrated into the new computer age soon!

The tasks are still tedious, but it takes less than half the time to get them done. It’s amazing to me to find myself full of enthusiasm again!

A help with that enthusiasm is that I’m making more sales of my ebooks on eBay. I’ve even started selling items from the store. I’ve sold 6 books this month so far, all at the $1.99 buy it now listing. Doesn’t sound like much, this being the 16th and all, but 4 of those were in the last 4 days, one each day. Again, big hoooo, but I do believe it’s the numbers that are starting to work. Get a bunch of books listed and somebody out of all those millions of folks who check eBay every day will find something they want or need.

I’ve been trying to find the books I have that allow rebranding and links to other books (Clickbank) and memberships, so that I can start working on the viral/backend/residual income part of this business. The dollar or so I make from a $1.99 sale through eBay is not going to pay the rent, obviously. Nor am I building any sort of significant list at this time (my sign up rate is not good, but I don’t have enough sales yet to have any sort of statistical base). And, of course, all the eBay information marketers that are making real money are doing so with their own products and through the back end sales from them or from others. I’m looking forward to the day I start having checks from Clickbank in the mailbox!

Well, I have bunches to do, both with getting more books listed and with learning about this great new computer.

 Stay well.

I wrote last time about the slump I was in for pretty much all of January and a lot of February. While I’m having spurts of activity and have done some real work on getting new listings to eBay and getting work done on the store and about me pages, there are still days of absolutely no progress.

One of the things I recognize as impeding my progress is my email. I’m on a lot of newsletter lists, ande most of them are geared more toward general internet marketing than to making money on eBay. While I’m trying to focus completely on growing the eBay business, other areas of IM certainly come into play if I’m to make this a real business: blogging (here we are!), building my websites (www.smilingpartners.com and www.chefjudi.com), getting traffic to those sites (besides any traffic generated from eBay), list building, etc. It’s also beneficial to know of the giveaways going on; at some point I hope to have products to offer myself, but in the meantime they offer opportunities to pick up products I can turn around and sell.

So, those are all my great rationales for staying on lists and reading the emails. The problem comes in managing my time. The other morning I started my day feeling full of energy and ready to get a lot of work done. For some reason I decided to see if there was something important in my email. Two hours later I was mad at myself for wasting so much time and completely exhausted and unmotivated about spending more time online.

I have found a good system for avoiding a lot of this time-wasting. I wait until evening, preferably after dinner, to look at my email. By then I’m tired and unwilling to spend any more than the absolute minimum time with my subscriptions. I begin with checking the visible subject line. If it references a seminar or call and is not from one of the eBay newsletters, I know I can toss it. I know there is a lot of information available in some of these calls, but frankly the information given is generally a prelude to the pitch for a product providing the rest of the good stuff. And by the time the interviewer gets through all the “how are doing” and “isn’t this marketer wonderful” stuff, I’ve wasted 5 or 10 minutes and been bored to tears.  So I delete those emails.

Then I look at references to “see this video.” Videos consistently jam up my machine, especially since most of them are set to begin as soon as you hit the site. I’m probably missing a bunch of good stuff, but having my machine crash and having to restart does me no good at all. Into the trash folder.

A reference to “get it now before the price goes up” can be a trigger if it doesn’t come from an eBay newsletter - and sometimes even then. I’m trying to stay committed to the plan of not spending any money for products that don’t further the eBay business.

These methods can oftentimes cut in half the emails left to read. If the subject line concerns something I just don’t feel like dealing with, the list gets even shorter.

So that’s how I’m trying to deal with information overload. There certainly are days when reading everything that comes in is appropriate. If I have some sort of niggling problem I can’t get my mind around, more often that not something in an email will directly address what I need or put my mind in the right direction.

And there are marketers whose email I read no matter what, just because I know I don’t hear from them unless they’ve found something of value. Jim Edwards (www.igottatellyou.com and a bunch of other sites) is one who comes to mind. His videos don’t start automatically so they don’t jam me up, and he’s an interesting and fun presenter. Even when he’s promoting a product, there’s a ton of very good information given before he gets to the pitch.

Another marketer I always read is Willie Crawford (http://williecrawford.com/blog/). He’s been incredibly successful online, has authored many, many guides, he hosts an online radio show about IM, and he put together the cookbook giveaway that was my first foray into the giveaway world. He also just seems like a guy you’d want to get to know. One of his projects is a membership called the InnerCircle, which I plan to join as soon as I have enough of a monthly income to support it.

I seem to be wandering a bit here, so it’s probably time to get to more lucrative endeavors. I’m working on getting back on track for my eBay listings. More about that and the eBay changes next time.

Be well.

It’s been a strange past month, and I’m not sure why. I seem to have one foot planted in the dirt and so am going in circles, unable to move forward.

Part of the reason is that I let myself get overwhelmed with all that I needed to do. I’ve written before about the process of actually getting my books listed on eBay: review, look at rights, plug in the thankyou/download page, write the sales page, write the headline, get everything into turbolister, input into both places of the digital delivery system, and make sure everything’s listed in my own databases. I’ve got all the processes in place and listed, and sometimes it’s just too much to think about.

So, instead of following my own good advice about taking each step as it comes and just DOING it, I let myself get overwhelmed by the process. A really stupid thing to do, but there it is, it happens.

I also let myself lose focus on the eBay line. I’ve been working and dinking on my websites, and I have added some good stuff. I’m just not so sure it was necessary right now to get that done. There is a satisfaction with being able to do the techie install stuff and having the web sites look like they’re actually somewhat professional. But I have been doing that stuff instead of buckling down and getting my eBay listings taken care of.

I’m still at the same pathetic 27 books listed. I’m recycling those into active listings, but the sales aren’t so hot, staying at one or two books purchased during the 7-day listing period. Not enough to pay my fees, and a long way off from getting to powerseller!

Even posting here seemed too much to deal with, and isn’t that silly?

I’ve signed up for a few new things - widgets and toys - for the web sites, but then I waited too long to do anything with them. I know they were good ideas and great little applications, but I put them away to do the implementing “later.” It’s later and I have to figure out what they are, how they work, and why I wanted them. More stupidity!

So, now I’m working hard at getting back on track. I am finding that the books about how to make money on eBay are generally the ones being sold (and I finally put together a spread sheet for what sells so I could actually keep track). I have a few new books to look at and get listed, and I’m going to figure out how make a promo box in my eBay store, so I can try listing a higher priced book. We’ll see how that works.

I got sidetracked today because of two new giveaway events, but they are worth it:

FREEPLR Giveaway Round 4, put together by a big who’s who list marketers, and

Odinn Sorenson’s DaddyGiveaway

It’s getting harder for me to find giveaways that offer books and software I haven’t picked up at another giveaway, but I found plenty of stuff to add to my collection (properly filed, of course).

There’s another I want you to know about, as well, although it doesn’t start until March 1. It’s a benefit for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. I’m already hearing a lot about it, so there’s a high probability that it will be a good event as well as a benefit for a cause close to my heart. They’re currently accepting participant signups. You can find out more here:

Gifts for MS Giveaway

That’s it for this time. Be well.

Despite my best efforts to get in my own way, I finally managed to write a book (well, report really I suppose; it’s only 11 pages including the cover and rights page). I’m using it as part of a bonus package for eBay ebook purchases. It has suggestions for tools and resources that I’m finding useful in building my business, and, yes, those links are affiliate links.

Just about all the recommendations are for free things: ebooks, newsletters, some stuff about eBay itself and their tools. If a reader decides to upgrade or buy a product, then I make a little bit of money. 

Drat! I just realized that I didn’t add a signup form to the book. There are links to this page and to www.smilingpartners.com, where there are opportunities to sign up, but I’m wondering if I shouldn’t have put a form in the book. Have to ponder that, especially since I’ve revised the darn thing several times as it is. Let me tell you about this particular ebook writing experience.

I used eWriterPro, the product I told you about that works something like Word and then lets you save your work as a .pdf file. It is a relatively easy-to-use program, but you really do need to play around a bit with it. One of the annoying things are the tabs you have to maneuver between to change your font or insert tables or links. For my small report, it worked fine. I have to do a little more work with it to see whether it’s going to be adequate when I actually write a “real” book.

Writing the book itself only took a couple of days. It would have been less time if I’d been better organized. I had my links and affiliate information for some of the items, but as I wrote, I found myself deciding to add more (an outline might have been a good idea!), so I’d have to stop writing, go hunt down the information, more often than not get a little lost in reading something new, then come back and continue writing.

Even with those detours, the book writing itself was pretty straightforward. My problem came with trying to figure out an ecover. I certainly could give the book away without a cover, but I want it to be distributed a bit. I’ve included both giveaway and resale rights. If someone did think they could sell it, having a cover with it could be handy.

So, I looked through my accumulation of ecover information and tools. The tools I have do generate a cover, but I can’t figure out how to add an image that doesn’t take up the whole cover area. I made one with an eBay logo on it, which I’d also included on the title page of my book. It looked okay, but then my lawyer brain kicked in. I don’t know what eBay’s policy is on using their logo. I could do the research (and I will someday soon), but I know that would add a significant amount of time to my project, because I’m sure I’d get lost reading policies and law and forget about my book.

So I decided to change the cover. Using the simple program, I came up with a simple cover. Put book and cover together, zipped it, and uploaded it to my server. Checked the links, took another look, and found that the cover change really meant that I’d have to change the cover page of my book. Otherwise, it looked like the cover had no relation whatsoever with the book. Downloaded everything, made the changes, regrouped and rezipped, uploaded again. Check. Oops, this time I forgot to put the .pdf version of the book in the folder, adding the word document instead. Download, regroup, check, check, and check again, and finally upload once more.

I’m pretty sure it’s what I intended now. If you want to take a look and add the book to your own collection, you can get it here:

Information Product Auction Tools and Resources - catchy title, right?

Then, of course, I had to change all the thankyou/download pages for the books I’m listing on eBay. The whole point was to be able to get something viral out there that might make me a few cents and get some new subscribers. I’m finally done with all that, and I’m once again ready to start adding new books to my eBay listings.

Next time I’ll give you a full rundown of how those listing efforts are going.

I got an email the other day asking me to verify my eBay information. I might not have given it a second thought, except it was to an email address eBay doesn’t have. Luckily, that triggered my suspicions and made me look more closely. I shudder to think what might have happened if the alarms hadn’t gone off. Since I’m trying to spend my time actually doing work and not going through emails, I often don’t look at my messages until late at night,when I’m tired and not paying that close attention. I needed this little slap up the side of my head!

Anyway, the alarms did go off. I do know that eBay doesn’t ever send these kinds of emails. Neither does any other reputable business. If they need information from you, that request will show up when you log onto your account at the actual eBay webpage. Another clear indicator was that when I hovered my mouse over the link and looked to the bottom left field over the explorer toolbar, the web address that showed up was clearly not eBay. It was something like www.ebay.bogusaddress.com/somethingorother. It’s always a good idea to do this little exercise before clicking on a link you’re not sure of.

I did report this to eBay by forwarding the email to spoof@ebay.com. You can find out more about spoofing and phishing at eBay’s site: http://pages.ebay.com/education/spooftutorial/

This isn’t a problem just for eBay, of course. I’ve received “account verification” emails that appeared to be from Bank of America, Sears, CitiBank, etc. What is important to remember, when you get an email like this is NOT to follow their links. If you think it might be a valid request, enter a url you know is valid into your own address bar (google the company if you need to find the valid address), then look for messages or log onto your account.

The damage these crooks can do to your credit and even personal life is enormous. And they are very talented at making their emails look official. Just remember to be very, very careful, even suspicious, and you’ll be able to protect yourself. And pass this information on to everyone you know.

As I’ve written before, I’m on a lot of lists and subscribe to a lot of newsletters. I probably should unsubscribe from the ones that don’t deal directly with eBay marketing, but I think it’s important to keep up with what the rest of the internet marketing world is up to. From the good newsletters I receive good information that will be useful as my business grows, I get an occasional free and useful item, and, of course, I get notified of all the giveaway events.

The end of the year and the holiday season brought a lot of giveaways. I almost always sign up, although I’ve found myself downloading fewer of the products. However, I’ve picked up some good stuff, either to learn from or to sell on eBay, which means I’m subscribed to a few more lists. I don’t keep track of what gift led to which newsletter; I just watch to see if I get any value from the new ones. Which leads to today’s customer service commentary.

I’d been noticing for a few weeks emails from “mailing list.” At first I thought it must be spam, but the email return address had what sounded like an internet marketing theme, so I decided to see what it was. I did see that the sender didn’t include a signature line or address, or unsubscribe information (by the way, required by CAN-SPAM), so I figured it was a newbie trying to build a list and using their own autoresponder. Okay, I’ll see what it’s about.

Nothing really stuck to my mind as any sort of good information; then I got an email saying that if  I didn’t submit my gift to the giveaway, I’d be deleted from the list. Oh, ummm, I know very well I didn’t sign up to be a giveaway contributor, because I’m still working on getting an IM product ready. Hmmm, well then, I’ll be deleted. Again, nowhere in the email was there a reference to what the giveaway was or even a link to where I was supposed to submit my contribution.

Except that I didn’t get deleted. So, the next email I got, again without any specifically useful information nor any unsubscribe information, I replied with “unsubscribe me.” That bounced, so I went looking to see if I could find this person. I did find him and found a valid contact email. I asked to be unsubscribed and mentioned that he’d probably want to comply with the law by putting an unsubscribe method in his emails (in what I thought was a helpful tone).

This person’s reply to me was that he’d unsubscribe me, not just from this particular list, but from all of his “more than 30″ newsletters. Not only was I unsubscribed, my email address would be banned from those lists! What?

I have no idea what those lists are, and I’m not feeling any great loss that I won’t ever do business with him. It’s just that this strikes me as being a really stupid way to do business. He doesn’t know the first thing about me or my buying habits or whether I have a huge list of my own that might be helpful to him in his business. There was no sorry to see you go, what can I do, or any other sort of attempt at customer service. His loss, certainly not mine!

Enough of that rant. The point I’m trying to make is that this is a horrible example of how to treat customers or potential customers. I can’t imagine this marketer is going to be able to build much of a business with this kind of attitude. The lists I stay with and the people I buy from (some of the very big names) are always helpful and treat me with respect. That’s probably why they’re the big guys.

Now, onto your gift.

If you’ve been reading along, you’ll remember how excited I was to find Open Office for writing and converting documents to .pdf. It is a great program, easy to use, and it probably has more features than I’ll ever even know about, much less use. The only problem for me is that the program is HUGE and it would only install on my c drive. A very real problem with my old, small capacity, laptop.

But I learned about a new program that does, at least for now, enough of the same stuff that I’ll be able to produce pdf’s on it that will be well-formatted. It’s called ewriterpro. You may have seen emails about it; it’s being sold for about $10 all over the net. However, one of my nice marketers gave it away! So I’m paying that forward. Download your copy here:

EWriter Pro

It also comes with master resale rights. I’ve only just started playing with it, and I’m getting excited again about getting something written and ready to sell. There are also some bonuses for you to look at.

That’s it for today. Good Sunday to you.

A new year and new determination to build my business into a powerhouse! How about you? Are you feeling the energy and putting it to use?

I’m making some progress on getting my eBay store in shape. I was able to add the SmilingPartners logo to it, and I set up some categories for my ebooks. My to-do list for today includes finishing the upload of a bunch of books to the store. I have at least a couple dozen in various stages of being ready. Have to complete things like making the thank you pages and getting them uploaded to the site, adding the books to SmartDD (the digital delivery system), loading the books into TurboLister, uploading to eBay, then sorting them into the categories I’ve set up. All nit-picky work that has to be done.

I had some help in getting the store logo set up. I found a chapter of an ebook called How to Set Up A Successful Automated Ebook Business on EBay. The “leaked” chapter deals specifically with setting up your eBay store, and it was spot-on easy to follow. The book is now on my wish list. I’m not buying it yet, because I’m following Joel Comm’s advice, as posted last time, about using the stuff I have before I go after shiny new things. I don’t think I have anything as thorough as this book seems to be on getting everything set up for complete automation, but I have to look.

I’ve uploaded the leaked chapter, so you can download it here (right click and save as). There are links throughout the book to his sales page, naturally, so go take a look. I’ll add this to the resources page, as well, in case you want to come back for it. If you’re setting up an eBay store, it’s very helpful.

I’ve also been dinking around with www.chefjudi.com and www.smilingpartners.com. Here’s my experience working on ChefJudi:

I used to wonder what online folks meant when they said it “only” took them 5 days to get a site up and running. I mean, how can it take that long? Can’t you just type up some stuff, add some products and upload it?

How silly and naïve was I.

Somehow I had it in my mind that doing web sites was just a little trickier than working on a regular word document, only with pictures and links. Especially with the availability of wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) html editors, it had to be easy, right?

Let me tell you about my day.

I’m using Nvu as my editor (and obviously need to learn more). I have the basic structure of the 4 measly pages I want to start with. I’m not dealing with a header, because I can’t find one I like (I’m going for free here, so that limits things a bit), but I did have an idea of using a font I liked and color and keeping the whole thing pretty simple. My first problem arose with the font. I really like it, but in Nvu it seems I’m limited in how big I can make that particular type. So, I played around with that for awhile. And here’s one of the lovely things about working on web stuff. The way things look in the editor is not necessarily how it’s really going look. So, you save the page, in this case as index.html, then open the saved page in Windows to see how it really looks. This is pretty close to how it’s going to look online, but not exactly the same. Change the file around in Nvu, save it, refresh the open Windows page to see if it’s anywhere close to how I want it to look. Do this several times as I try to figure out how to get my font bigger. Nothing works. Finally decide I’m just going to have to live with it.

Okay, I already have my left column listing my pages and my newsletter signup form in the right column, so I save what I have 4 times: index, contact, cookbooks, and kitchen stuff. Oops, I forgot to link the listing to a poster store on the site. Do that and save the pages again. Okay, we’re going now.

To the contact page and add a note and the contact information. On to the other pages to add a welcome note, asking for the signup, and promising a real web site “soon.” Have enough sense to copy the message to add to the other pages. On a roll and ready to upload the pages. I use FileZilla for my ftp (free and really easy to use), so I open that up, connect to my server, and upload my pages. Close FileZilla.

Now I open my web browser to check on how the site really looks. Click the links to other pages and realize that I’ve changed the name of two of the pages, so the links don’t work. Aarrgh!

Back to Nvu. Open each page and fix the links. Almost forgot to save my work, but caught it. Back to FileZilla, upload the pages, and all’s well. So far. I still need to find stuff to put on the pages and stuff to sell, but at least I now have the framework.

I’ll be lucky if the whole thing only takes a week.

I did finally figure out the problem with the header - I’d been trying to make it using just text instead of using a graphics application (Irfanview is what I use). It is better than it was, but still needs something prettier. I’ll just deal with that later. The important thing is to get it started, not wait for perfection, right?

Well, I guess I can’t avoid the fact that all those books are waiting to be dealt with. I’m keeping a written list of each day’s goals. I hate the idea of moving one on to the next day, because I didn’t get my work done. And there’s a great feeling of accomplishment when I can check a task as done.