8 years ago, when I first got into photoshop and HTML, I couldn't get enough of doing my own graphics and getting out there and advertising myself. People used to come from all over the world to my fan site...which had a bunch of focuses and 5 different portal/entrances...ME, Dark Shadows , Pokemon, I Dream of Jeannie, and Final Fantasy 3 (or 6...depending on where you are). I never really understood why or how they found my site, but just used common sense to get them to keep coming back. I didn't know it, but I was using awesome SEO (search engine optimization) techniques to keep my site at the top, and all that. It was kind of an accident. I made a website for every school project to try to get some extra credit since even the teachers had no idea how to code. I had found a lot of webhosting space free and decided to use as much as I could, but 50mB was hard to fill back then! The site just kept growing. When I posted pics of my high school's junior prom, the site got 500 views from the students in a day. That was unexpected. 2000-2001 saw the most visitors ever.
Once I got my license, I was never much at home. Too busy driving everywhere and stealing traffic cones with blinking lights. Then I went to college and decided to HELL with my site and deleted the entire thing off the internet in January 2003 and put up a tiny picture saying the site was gone till I felt like caring again. I was sick of it and didn't feel like trying to keep up with much of anything. Besides, I had LiveJournal! I didn't really need to code anymore and I could always make LJ icons !...And then I tried to bring it back in October 2003 with a whole new look and bring back the Dark Shadows page (Known as Reverend Trask's Hole in the Wall (if you visit, please collapse the stupid geocities banner on the right or else the page displays funny) and other pages under a uniform style. I tried adding a section for all my urban exploration photos and some other things that never made any sense. Then...my free webhosting site up and crapped out in late 2004 (it hadn't actually been updated since before I joined in 2001!)...so I scrambled to get the abandoned house photos back up since Insane Bunkers had just given me a link. And then Facebook and Myspace happened, and Geocities decided to frell good website design 50 ways till Friday by adding their banner on the side. In 2000, we could choose to put a banner on the top or bottom of the page. We had control over where Geocities put their ad. Now we don't, and my site looks like hell.
In 2005 I decided to leave Geocities. You may have noticed that never happened. Instead, I got a full time web design job for The Yankee Retail Company. During my time there I actually learned something about html and website design, marketing, seo, and some other stuff. A full website design went underway in 2006 and I was going to pay for hosting from my friend Josh and get my own domain and try to sell zines. Then Insane Bunkers offered free photo hosting for urban exploration photos and you could have albums and all that fun stuff. I still had dialup...so I spent literal weeks uploading 1300 photos of abandoned houses. IB gave me moderating and publishing privledges so I could post articles. My modem burned up that September.
And Insane Bunkers burned up in February 2007 in a massive site wide crash that brought it down till March of this year. They never brought back the photo galleries. During that time I attempted to start a blog similar to The Caldor Rainbow called The Indie Historian to make up for the absence of IB...but I never got far with that. I got a freewebs account but was extremely dismayed to learn that you could only upload 1 file at a time. Oh noooo. Not when I'm used to uploading via FTP or at least 5-20 files at a time! The freewebs page still exists, but it's just the design only and almost none of the links work.
Eventually I left Yankee Retail to start working for a startup called ITema, where I finally learned CSS and started to Twitter. But ITema went out of business and I learned I really hate office jobs and burned out on web design, especially when they wanted you to churn out a web template that looked entirely different from the one you just did every 3-4 hours or so. When I got out of there I wanted nothing to do with web design ever again and I haven't opened Aptana (web editor) since January. Incidentally, I opened the Mannequin Reject Emporium on Etsy the day before ITema let me go. I started this blog around the same time I started another blog called Is This Your License Plate? during boredom at ITema days.
I've realized while writing this post that I'm spread too thin all over the internet, especially since joining Etsy. I have accounts on YouTube, tumblr, JPGmag, Last.FM, flickr, deviantart, ebay, artfire, dawanda, and linkedin. Some I'm on a lot more than others. I lurk on the Antique Bottles Forum and used to be active on VisaJourney when I was doing immigration paperwork for X.
To succeed on Etsy I have to spread out MORE? There aren't enough hours in a day!
Nevertheless, I need to revise some strategies. My website redesign needs to happen and it's would be easier if I used joomla or modx or some kind of content management system, especially with all the photos. I need to get off Geocities. I want shopping cart functionality...maybe. Paypal buttons would also work just fine, I think. I had one for my zine when I first started selling it directly off livejournal back in 2005.
I need to start some kind of off-etsy marketing. Locally just isn't enough. The question is where to begin, since it seems there's an awful lot of cleaning up to do. I don't know what aspect of my shop to focus on when I make ads. Maybe some jewelry with a handful of buttons tossed around to advertise that I sell both jewelry and supplies?
Sorry for the braindump, bless your heart if you read the whole thing and bless you 50 million more times if you actually found it interesting! At least check out some of the links I posted, there's some cool websites out there :).
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