Focus
The past few months have felt like such a whirlwind with traveling, doctor visits and tests, our old doggie passing on, our new doggie learning the ropes, a grandbaby announcement, hosting Thanksgiving for out-of-town family, painting ornaments, designing Christmas cards and a 2023 calendar, remodeling our living/dining room...so many things going on, I feel a bit all over the place.
December tends to slow down with my business (although end of year inventory is a beast) and I will have more time to bring back some focus. Although, there will be a lot of Christmas cookie baking going on around here! It's the time of year to make sure my accounting books and inventory records are all in order for tax time.
Other items I want to bring my focus to are my website, art creation, photography, portfolio and wholesale.
Currently, my website is basically an online shop, which isn't really what I had envisioned when I created it. I want my website to also embody my portfolio and a blog, maybe even some classes, all of which Shopify (my current platform) does not do well. Shopify does extremely well with the shop portion, but their blog is basic and ugly and trying to put a photo gallery on their is super frustrating.
So, I've created a new website on Pixieset because they do a beautiful job with imagery, video, galleries and a blog. This post you are reading is on the new website. Pixieset is mostly used by portrait photographers, so I am not their typical customer, but I think it's going to work perfectly for me. I do have to spend some time adding a subdomain for my shop and then changing lisablakedesigns.com over to this website. Once I'm finished, it will all be connected in the eyes of Google.
I want to bring my focus back to my art, not products. I will still have some products I manufacture for my shop, but I'd like to have my main focus be creating art, patterns and photography for my licensing portfolio. While I build up my portfolio, I will add my art to marketplaces like Spoonflower, Society6, Fine Art America and Art of Where and let them take care of manufacturing and shipping products.
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Thanks for reading! I hope you like the new blog.
