New Website, New Direction

I spent last week redesigning my website to improve my online presence.

You may or may not know that I left my main employment in July after almost 15 years of service. I had six incredible weeks with my family while the schools were off. I have to admit, I was a little bit lazy in actually focusing on what I was going to do moving forward to earn money and pay all my bills. The reality hit the day they went back to school and work.

Obviously, I have been applying for work and attending interviews, but at the same time, I have been attending car shows and promoting my little business, whether with my trade stand or even just at car meets. The one area I had not really focused on was my online presence.

This is why I started looking into how my website was performing and what things I could do to improve it. The WooCommerce site I had was out of date, had no SEO, and was a bit messy, in my opinion. So, I looked at other providers to see my options. I ended up back at SquareSpace, which was where my original site was all those years ago.

That is when I started my journey of creating my new website myself. I have decided to watermark all of my artwork on my website and to resize everything, so as you can imagine, it has been very tedious, haha. I have been learning on the go how to try to make my site look cleaner and to include SEO in my attempt to become more visible online.

A good friend of mine told me to look at my business as two separate ones: the commissions part, which I am pretty competent at, as evident in the number of custom drawings I have done and am doing; then the online shop, where I sell my artwork that I have drawn over the last 15 years, as well as apparel featuring my art. How did I miss this? They are quite clearly very different from each other. He helped me understand how I need to think about DrawnByMatt. It was like a new pathway had opened up for me—one which I am on right now.

If you are reading this, you are already contributing to my new journey.