Making a Website.....

Ok, if the truth be told it's not that new a website but here's the story. Once upon a time I used to sell via www.blackwillowtribal.co.uk where I offered tribal belly dance costumes and accessories.  I would import bits and pieces as well as pick up things here in the UK and incorporate them into well made and affordable costumes for those who weren't interested in making their own.  The site brought me a lot of work, particularly custom orders for headdresses which I absolutely adore making.

After my son was born some three and a half years ago I found that the recession bit deep and hard and although my site was looked at as often as it always had been, the orders were dropping off.  I also wanted to add things to the website that I couldn't unless I paid my hosts more to do so and the more I weighed up the costs of running it and the pros and cons of other websites the more I felt in favour of getting rid of it.  So last September I closed the website down and ever since I've needed to get in touch with all of those linked to me and let them know.

I'll try and cut this a bit short.....I'm currently rebuilding the site but with a slightly different slant as I sell via Etsy now when I'm not at events in real life, plus there is Facebook and Twitter and blogs and.....well, you get the picture...but I want people to know that I'm still here and that I'll happily make them a bespoke tribal belly dance or fusion belly dance costume or just a headdress.

This weekend I had a go at manually changing my A records (with a new registrar as the previous registrar had Detagged the site cos I didn't know then what I know now about claiming your domain) in order to point the domain at the new site and today was a little annoyed to see it still wasn't live until DOH!  I realised looking over everything again when the kids were in the bath that I had missed out one number of the new IP address.  Silly me!  I've rectified the mistake and hopefully by the end of the week www.blackwillowtribal.co.uk will be back up and running again.  Fingers crossed.

Note to self, never plan........

So, this week was the week where I was (for the first time in three years) going to have a little free time.  My youngest was due to start his nursery place on Tuesday and I had a schedule worked out as to how I was going to spend that precious two and a half hours each day...draft some blog posts, do a little on-line networking via various fora, tweak this, photograph that......

Nope. Never plan.  Not for the first week of a change of routine anyway.

On Monday night my seven year old daughter came out of school looking decidedly pale, and crying that she didn't feel well.  We got home, she walked upstairs and then said, "I'm going to be sick."  And she was.  From the top of the stairs.

Once that was cleaned up and the two of them bathed and sorted for bed I got on with writing a blog post and chatting about it on Facebook.  Then my PC monitor died.  Properly couldn't be coaxed back into working died.

So the next day I took the PC to a PC mender to check the problem that I couldn't fix and juggled the difficulty of taking the littlest one to nursery and picking him up whilst having my daughter at home ill (I cannot thank my friend and neighbour M enough!).

Thankfully everyone is now well, the little one is enjoying nursery (although he cries every afternoon mid-session as he is wondering where I am) and today the PC was returned home along with a new monitor (which was the problem and I'm grateful that it wasn't a more difficult and expensive problem).

Frighteningly, as a stay at home works from home single parent I realised just how dependent I am on the interaction with the world I have via my PC.  I don't have a *smart phone* or a back-up lap-top or a tablet PC.  I probably need to get out more ;-)