Well, after hours of talking to tech support, and after waiting for the new site to show up on my own computer (after it showed up on other computers all over the place), the new pieceocake.com site works! If, as you click around, you find a problem, please do let me know. I’ll do my best to fix it.

Now I will share some pretty pictures with you that I took last Saturday morning at Gardenland, a most amazing local nursery. I was there on my 52 Week Photo Challenge assignment and I’ll be going back. What a great place to take photos—and to shop! That welcome sign is now hanging in my backyard :-).

Gardenland Nursery in Sherman, TX

I want this wagon wheel but am not sure where I’d put it. Steve loves the welcome sign but is less sure about the wheel.

Gardenland Nursery in Sherman, TX

Isn’t this a good edging idea? Although I have no idea where to find a lot of license tags.

Gardenland Nursery in Sherman, TX

There are lovely flowers at Gardenland and they just beg to be photographed.

Gardenland Nursery in Sherman, TX

I leave early Thursday morning to teach for the Pride of the Prairie Quilt Guild in the Chicago area. I hope the web site is running seamelssly by then, and that I can get my email sorted out. It’s a long story but changing the site changed my email. Sigh. Computers are great when they work and terrible when they don’t.

I’ve spent the last several days getting the new website up. I just talked to Register.com and http://www.pieceocake.com should soon connect to the new site that looks like this:

I gotta say that I should have done this a very long time ago. I think everyone, including me, is going to find the new site easier to use. That said, I’m still tweaking. In fact, I just realized I have not set up the About page. Sigh.

Once it’s up, if you click through and find problems, please do let me know. I’ve edited each of the 467 products at least 4 times. In some cases more. I suspect that there are errors. With your help I hope to find and correct them.

Soon, very soon, this task will be off my plate and I can quilt again! I just can hardly wait.

The opposite of being fluid is to be rigid. Sometimes being rigid is good and sometimes it’s not. In web design, rigidity is bad.

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted much lately. That’s because I found out that on April 21 Google will no longer include ‘rigid’ web sites in their searches. My site, pieceocake.com, is rigid. My oh-shit-o-meter nearly cracked under the strain.

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, it’s this: Web sites used to be only viewed on a computer screen so you could design a site to look great at that size. That’s what I did when I built the Piece O’ Cake site. It doesn’t feel like that long ago but it was probably 10 years or more. I’ve tweaked it a lot since then, but have not changed the underlying structure of the site.

During those 10 years, phones got smarter and tablets arrived. Their screens are smaller. New websites started to be built on a ‘fluid’ base, meaning that they would change how they looked depending on the size of the screen. This is a good thing and I knew I needed to upgrade but I kept putting it off in favor of spending time with family…

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…and making quilts, and writing books, and teaching, and on and on. You know what it’s like because you all are busy too. Side note: we are ALL way too busy.

So, it two weeks ago I found out that I had to re-write the entire Piece O’ Cake site. I spent 2 days trying to figure out how to do it myself, learning more html, setting up a MAMP server (really, you don’t want to know what that is), until I came to the realization that that is not what I want to spend time doing.

The next step was to look at WordPress business sites. I really thought that was going to work. In fact, after 2 solid weeks of work, I was ready to go live when I found out that the shopping cart service I had chosen was not going to work the way I needed it to at checkout. Deep, deep sigh—then I moved on.

I am now rebuilding the site (3rd time’s the charm, right?) on Shopify. I am going to use one of their templates because I am not going to learn any more html. I want to go back to making quilts! The new site will be up before April 21. It will look different but I think it is actually going to be way better.

Today I am not working on the site. I am going to teach a workshop and give a lecture for the Coastal Prairie Quilt Guild in Sugarland, TX! It’s going to be nice to spend a day with quilters!