It is with such pleasure that my sister, Joni, my brother, Craig, and I announce the opening of our Fine Art Photography shop on Etsy and showcase on WordPress.

This project has been in the making for just over four months, and though it’s been loads of fun it hasn’t always been easy to get here.  But here we are at last.  The journey has been extraordinary and the learning experience intense, but matters such as websites not always being as intuitive as one would prefer, periodic slowing of internet connection speeds, and hours of pouring through and choosing photographs (by unanimous vote only)…well let’s just say that my house hasn’t seen a vacuum cleaner or a dust cloth in four months!  My daughter Emilie quips, ‘Are you on the computer again?’ and  ‘Are you still on the computer?’   Or Erica asks, ‘You and Craig are having another working day?’

The formative ideas for this venture began about two years ago when we first thought about selling our photos.  In May of this year the idea became a ‘project,’ and on June 1st we purchased our domain, twogalsandaguydoitdigitally.com,  and opened a blog on WordPress, thephotoimpression.wordpress.com.  We were going to sell directly from WP.com but soon realized that venue didn’t support e-commerce.  For that we would need to use a WP.com requiring that we manage servers and computer lingo ourselves…an expertise for which none of us qualify.  We had been wrangling over this dilemma for a long time when my son, Daniel, suggested that we open an Etsy shop and sell our photos there.  I’d spent months, though, designing what we all felt was a clean, attractive blog…with a detailed ‘About Us’ page, featured page headers for our photo categories, appropriate widgets & links, and finally the photo galleries…and I couldn’t give it up.  She was my blog-child…I’d invested so much time & effort in her…I thought she was a beauty, I loved her, and I was determined.

I inserted a ‘Purchase Photos’ page and custom-designed an order form.  The thought was that we would take an order, allow time for a client’s check to clear, and then ship the photo.  This approach, however, began to feel much too ‘non-tech,’ long & laborious, and not very client-friendly, but still I was reluctant to give up my blog…clearly, in my mind, it had become mine.  The next thing I knew Craig had jumped on the two-seater Etsy wagon right next to Daniel (well he didn’t exactly jump as he’d never heard of Etsy until his friend, Debbie…another Deb, not me…told him about it), and I decided I’d better check this place out…if only to get Etsy off my back, over and done with…so I could get back to exploring other selling options with the blog.

The next morning I took a look at Etsy, and very little about it appealed to me.  It wasn’t an especially attractive site, I thought, and for the seller it was not nearly as intuitive as I thought (and still think) it should be.  By the end of that day, however, and to the bewilderment and dismay of my siblings, we had a merchant PayPal account and a shop on Etsy with just two listings.  I had gone off half-cocked, as I am prone to do, and a day or so later had to put the shop in ‘vacation’ mode for a about a week while we all scrambled furiously to accommodate this new schedule and get the shop stocked.

Whew! and kudos to Joni & Craig for their enduring patience with me when I know they were probably filled with mild to medium outrage.

And me?  I now have my cake and can eat it too (how often does that happen?), because we have our shop for selling, we still have my (oops, I mean our) blog for showcasing, and they’re both lovely.  Check ‘em out!

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