Setting up and amending an EKMPowershop

I've got an EKMPower shop - Muddy Ground. To be fair I've had it about a year now, so I've a slight experience in the thing, but nothing more than a few hours playing really. Today I spent several hours re-hashing the thing as quite frankly the viewing figures fell through the floor and became part of the bed rock. Something had to give. Either I terminate the thing or try and re-design it entirely. Quite like designing my t-shirts and postcards, so I'll keep it going. Now re-designing it is a fag, as you use templates. Change the template and you have to change everything. Changing everything takes ages to do, and invariably ends up worse than when you started. The templates are fine when you start off, as all you want to do then is have a viable web page that takes money from people. But once you've a few products going the templates kind of work against you. They're all a bit random.

So I've left the basic design of mine alone. What I did do was play with the content a little, bringing it more in line with where I am at now with my designs. All the same it is a slightly hateful process as the EKM server seems a little slow to respond. Make a change, then it throws a strop; freezing the page for eternity, and nothing works. I've found the only way to get it to work is to re-enter the site via my Google favourites and start again each time I make a change.

All the same, four hours of playing have brought it 60% up to date, as I still need to play with the META tags. Sounds like I know what I'm doing eh? Well I've no idea what a META tag is, but I do know they need changing. Not totally confident that any META change I make will be viable though. Anyways I'm happy with the few changes, especially as it was obvious that the last time I'd done anything on site was four months ago, and that was just a weather report. lazy or what?

What I find hard to judge are the photographs. They are either massive things with huge amounts of detail, so much that they cannot be viewed on a monitor, or so small and lacking detail that they may as well not be there at all. I've settled on a postcard format using 1750 x 1325 pixels. Works for me, but is a bit of an hash. To personalize the images a little, and to make them different, I now draw them freehand. Again no idea if this helps, but it's more me so I'm naturally happy with that. only done one so far, and it's a bit boring but what the heck, it has to be done.

The text I've changed totally. I'd obviously written it when a bit bored, which is just wrong. I've made it a bit more zippy now.

Hopefully my changes will result in a greater hit rate, but really I need to pay more attention to it rather than let it lie dormant for 6 months at a time.

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