Moving, redesigning the website and opening the shop…
Ooohhhh! It’s been a long time since I wrote a post here!
It must be said that some of the content is reserved for my Patreon subscribers and that I’ve been working a lot these last few months.
In fact, I’ve been working hard on the redesign and migration of this site before the opening of my shop on October 1st 2021.
Until then, my site had been hosted for more than 20 years by Free, on the personal page linked to an old email address in the name of Lucy Dreams (and yes, beware of imitations, I’ve been using this pseudonym since 1992 after all…).
The service was free and quite correct to host a blog but it was not sufficient for a professional website, especially with an online shop.
Indeed, for this was my goal for 2021: to leave Etsy and its exorbitant fees to host my own shop on my website.
At first, I had considered to simply add it to my old website, but it soon became clear to me that the payment methods would not be very secure.
So I looked into hosting companies, services and so on before choosing Hostinger and its specific hosting for WordPress, a platform I’ve been using for a long time (I used to be on Dotclear first, but that’s prehistory!).
Once the domain was created and activated, I had to manage the transfer of the existing site… and there my friends, what a nightmare!
A horrific one.
Do you remember Free’s French advert ” he has Free he has got it all?” well, let’s just say that as far as personal pages are concerned, Free is… well, free and you get free value for your money and you “get it all”…
Even the shitty bits.
My new host found it impossible to move my site from Free to their own domain ( yes, true story…) and I finally had to get my hands dirty to fix the switch-over problems.
Of course, I was heading towards a better situation, but it meant going through a period of untold mess, especially since my site and my blog are both bilingual (double workload for everything)…
It took me the whole month of August to transfer the site, change the theme and get it to look right (yes, you heard me right, which means no holiday. Everything. Nothing. Nada, not a weekend. Not a drop.).
PHEW. I said to myself, that’s done!
Of course, all this was before I wanted to redo my graphic charter and completely redesign my site.
This weekend . In a hurry.
In time for the following announcements.
For :
Of course, most of the work was effectively finished and I could focus on the creation of the Halloween illustrations a bit more relaxed.
However, the reason why I started to create these illustrations at the end of August is that I had planned to integrate a shop on my new website thanks to Woocommerce, in time for Halloween.
That’s why, as soon as the Halloween illustrations and the exclusive creations for Patreon were ordered at the printer, I hurried to create my shop.
So many things to calibrate, adjust, manage, think about! It is both a great excitement and a huge stress. How do you know if you have thought about everything, if there will be no bugs or bad surprises?
Even though I work daily using Notion and my Bullet Journal together to leave nothing to chance, a mistake happens so quickly.
Normally everything should go well and I am happy to announce that
my online shop will open right here on this site on October 1st 2021!
You will find everything I used to offer on Etsy, namely :
- Original Illustrations
- Original linocuts
- Quality prints in postcard, A5 or A4 format
- Fine Art prints on demand
- Stickers
It will be possible to pay by credit card but also by Paypal and all this, directly to the artist, without intermediary!
All the new Halloween illustrations posted in this article will be available for sale (at worst during October if I haven’t received them in time…) and will also find older illustrations for sale.
For the moment the commissions are closed because I have to finish the mock-up of the children’s book I am preparing with Virginie Gobert-Martin.
I can’t tell you more here for copyright reasons, if you want to be in the know and get some insights, I invite you to support me on Patreon where I share my work in progress in more detail.
Finally, to sum up, let’s say that until the presentation of our projects to the publishing houses, I will not be available to do any commissioned work, or even personal projects.
All the more so as I have planned to produce, nevertheless, some illustrations for the Holiday season.
So for the time being, I’m focusing on this illustrated book project and the exclusive contributions for my Patrons.
However, I’ll be back here soon to post new posts and other things…
So I’ll see you soon for more illustrated dreams!