Pease Press has a new website hosted by Wix.com, including an online store! Farewell to filling out a paper form and mailing it in with your check, hello online shopping carts, customer-entered credit card charges…new fees… I am late to the party but I am happy to be here now.
I created my original website 20 years ago using Dreamweaver (by Macromedia, then Adobe). There were things about it I liked a lot, but it required a lot of remembering and linking, and I had started to lose track of the format due to broken HTML or CSS links, not to mention “improvements” by Adobe (the text containers I used to make clumsy columns kept working, but the menu item to make them vanished in an upgrade because they were not best practice).
My old site was definitely not adapted to the big/screen/tiny screen era, but I couldn’t tell from Adobe’s templates if there was a dynamic format that would do what I wanted. (Sometimes I want to set a long list in columns, or the text next to the image, at least when possible). Knowing what I know, I should probably go back and do a little forensic reconstruction what parts of the Wix experience Dreamweaver can be set up to do. But really there’s no need to look back. Dreamweaver got me here, and I’m gratefully moving forward.
Wix has done a nice job of integrating a lot of moving parts into a fairly neat package. I was able to recycle a lot of my existing graphics, and (as advised by my wonderful partner) I copied the legacy text out of my Dreamweaver files into a Word doc, then paste the best parts into my new Wix pages. It was also a chance to drop a lot of legacy verbiage… turns out I was happy with half as many words.
In starting this transition, I also looked at Square Online, AKA Weebly. Several friends who run businesses jumped into online sales during COVID using Weebly, but when I tried to sign up in early 2020 they seemed overwhelmed (loading, loading, loading…nada). They may have worked out those kinks. I did a two-week test of Square Online in Spring 2021 and it was promising, but their store templates were eCommerce oriented from page one, or artful home pages for single-purpose businesses.
But at Pease Press we wear multiple hats – book publishing in partnership with my partner Shizue, self-published trail maps, selling my own maps and others, and the work that pays the bills – my freelance cartography, with samples of my work. Happily, Wix had at least one template that I could shape into into the landing page I needed; that says to all my potential customers “You’re in the right place for…” and where to click for the full book page, map store, and freelance map info.
In one week I got all my major maps and books set up in the store, ran some test purchases, refined the graphics, and redirected my URL to the new site. This week I continued to refine it, add flat maps and help publicize a book launch. It’s looking good enough, and working well enough, I can stop tinkering and get back to making maps for my customers (and mail books, do my bills, take us both on a short trip).