Case Study: Carol's Cuties

I recently added a site to my Portfolio: Carol's Cuties. While that page gives and abbreviated version of how it came to be, I wanted to offer some additional insight into the process.

Carol Whelan creates hand-made dolls, but when she told people how to find her on the internet, she found they had trouble finding her Etsy page. She wanted a domain name that everyone could remember and a way to tell her customer base about her upcoming shows.

Carol is technically literate enough to have established an Etsy store with no trouble, but she doesn't take joy in technology, it's a means to an end. I wanted to provide her with a content management system so she could update her own content, but one with a low-learning curve.

Initially, I had planned to move her away from the Etsy platform and allow her to sell her dolls on carolscuties.com. I sought to avoid Wordpress because I wanted to try something little outside my comfort zone. I'd heard that Joomla was easier for non-technical people, while Drupal is preferred by nerds. I didn't find an easy way for non-nerds to put pictures up in Drupal, but it seemed easy enough in Joomla. I began installing and customizing Joomla, but I didn't see an easy way to scrape Etsy data. I began reevaluating my choice of platform when I noticed that there were many Etsy plugins for Wordpress and Drupal.

I was lying in bed one night when it hit me like a ton of bricks: Carol doesn't need a whole shopping cart. She's totally happy with Etsy. A blog would more than serve her purposes. In approximately 2 minutes of Googling, I found Custom Etsy Widget, a Wordpress plugin to show an Etsy user's latest products. Installing Wordpress and the plugin took maybe 10 minutes. I spent a couple hours customizing the default theme to focus on her dolls, rather than the (admittedly gorgeous) header graphics that come with this year's default Wordpress theme. I made an appointment with Carol to show her how to use her new site. In less than an hour, she was confident in her ability to make and edit posts and pages.

The lesson to me in this is not to overthink things. I love having control of all my own data on my own server, so that tends to be my first instinct when working on projects. In this instance, it was totally misguided. Fortunately, the project didn't suffer for it.