Emele Casestudy.
How I came to be where I am today, website wise at least!
I started my handmade cards and gifts website in September 2004 after I had researched and read everything about starting an online business, about e-commerce stores, shopping carts… You name it; I think I must have read it!
I built the Emelegifts site using FrontPage, with absolutely no knowledge of what I was doing. I just made single pages, scanned the photos in, wrote the content and then a friend actually linked it all up to work and someone else did the shopping cart for me.
I remember the day of uploading it all to my host. I had to email them halfway through saying that I had uploaded the files but my site wasn’t displaying properly, please help! Turns out I was missing one teeny little file that was causing 90% of my pages not to show up properly.
I eventually got everything working, people could view the site and I was very pleased and proud of myself.
One day I finally had to do something for myself - put a link in! I didn't have a clue how to do that though so it was very much trial and error and asking for help! But once I had that in I felt I could do anything… That was day one of seeing what I could do with the site, how things worked, doing things myself. Since then I haven’t looked back! Sure I would get stuck, mess it all up and cry “help” but that was all part of the learning process!
I started a SEO and HTML course in January of 2005 which helped immensely; I learnt how to get my bad looking site actually found in Google!
I learnt by trial and error to clean up all my html code as well.
On most pages I had over 600 html errors but one by one I fixed them. By this time I had moved onto Dreamweaver and was horrified at all the extra code FrontPage had added in since I knew no better than to drag and drop things. One page at a time I got my pages to validate to the 4.01 standard using the free online validator. With about 250 pages at that time it took a few months, with every page having 150-300 errors, some were little errors such as missing alt tags; others were bigger issues with sloppy code!
By the end of 2005 I had a website that had clean code; I knew what I was doing with the search engines I was doing pretty ok!
But I also knew the design was lacking a professional look. That was quite scary, all of my original hard work going down the drain but I knew I had to take the leap and redesign.
I researched what I wanted my site to look like, what colors to use, what others were doing and slowly I built it all from scratch. It took a while; I had to learn CSS. I also had to learn about Dreamweaver templates and editable regions. What I was trying to do was very advanced for me at the time, a difficult but very rewarding challenge!
So... That’s the story of Emelegifts. As you can see, it’s pretty safe to say that I was the most hopeless person regarding website in the beginning! Hence, no need to be embarrassed with me as I've been there, done that and learn it.... so can you!
Gradually I realized I enjoyed website design and SEO more than the making cards and gifts part. That was a bit of a shock! I thought it over for a while (also know as burying ones head in the sand!) then told a few trusted people what I was thinking of doing, shocked them as well, did some research, asked people in the Etsy forum late one night if there was any interest – there was, so much that I was surprised and Emele Website Services was born.
As for Emelegifts, I still do it, but more of a sideline / hobby. Emele Website services has taken the pressure off of me to be creative which has given back the fun side to Emelegifts.
Everyday I learn more... From knowing nothing about websites look where I am now, surely an inspiration?!
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