I thought making the products was the hard part.
I was wrong.
Very wrong.
Painfully wrong.
At this point, I would rather wrestle with holographic sticker paper than spend another hour looking for a photo that I KNOW I saved somewhere.
Building a website sounds simple.
Take pictures.
Edit pictures.
Upload pictures.
Done.
Right?
Wrong.
Because first you have to convince yourself to actually take the pictures.
And that is where my problems begin.
You see, I love creating.
I love designing.
I love making shirts, bookmarks, stickers, tote bags, mouse pads, and whatever new idea decides to visit my brain at 3 o'clock in the morning.
What I do NOT love is taking photos, editing photos, organizing photos, and uploading photos.
So naturally, when it's time to do those things, I suddenly become inspired.
Very inspired.
Dangerously inspired.
I don't want to upload a product.
I want to create another product.
Why upload one tote bag when I could design a whole new collection?
Why edit photos when I could make another sticker sheet?
Why organize files when I could start a completely different project?
My brain has amazing timing.
Then comes Shopify.
Oh, Shopify.
One minute you're fixing a shirt listing.
The next minute you're wondering why a button disappeared, why a collection isn't showing correctly, or why the product you were looking at five seconds ago has suddenly vanished into another menu.
Thankfully Shopify has Sidekick.
Now don't get me wrong.
Sidekick helps.
He really does.
Sometimes he saves me from losing my mind.
Other times he decides we're going on an adventure.
One day he tried to get me into coding.
Coding.
Me.
The same person who sometimes struggles to remember where she saved a photo.
I looked at that screen and immediately decided that whatever was broken could stay broken.
I deleted everything and started over.
Best decision I made all week.
Let's not even talk about duplicates.
I have enough duplicate files to open a second business.
And videos?
Take video.
Edit video.
Save video.
Lose video.
Find video.
Celebrate.
Realize it's the wrong video.
Repeat.
At one point my desktop became so full of files that I started suspecting my computer was slowing down out of protest.
Honestly, I wouldn't blame it.
Poor thing has been working overtime.
The funny part is that customers will never see any of this.
They'll see a clean website.
A pretty photo.
A nice product.
A simple Add to Cart button.
What they won't see is me sitting at midnight complaining, whining, drinking coffee, threatening to quit, and then creating another product just to avoid uploading the ones I already made.
But that's small business life.
Sometimes you're creating beautiful products.
Sometimes you're creating beautiful chaos.
And sometimes you're creating more work for yourself because taking pictures sounds harder than designing a whole new collection.
If you're building a website right now and feel overwhelmed, don't worry.
You're not alone.
Somewhere out there another small business owner is yelling:
"I KNOW I SAVED THAT PHOTO!"
And somewhere else, another small business owner is creating a brand-new product just to avoid uploading the old ones.
Trust me.
I understand completely.