UPDATE: Fixed!!! By 86ing the problematic CNAME & doing an htaccess redirect (thanks Alex!), everyone can now see the shop! phew! (this has been SUCH A THORN IN MY SIDE! that is now gone - yay!)
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Earlier a friend IM'd me saying she couldn't get to the WilloToons shop. She is using IE7 on Vista, but a bunch of other people using IE7 on both XP and Vista could see it fine, so I was dumbfounded at why it seemed that it was just her (and no it had nothing to do with a firewall at her company or anything).
So after asking a handful of other people, and having some people also say they couldn't see it - but finding most of them could - I realize that Dreamhost has actually had some DNS issues today... so my shop.willotoons.com URL - that actually points to willotoons.myshopify.com - wasn't resolving and basically giving them a message that the site could not be displayed/found. Real handy, Dreamhost! ug.
So anyway, very sorry if any of you have tried to access the store today, and been faced with that same unhelpful message. In the future, please don't hesitate to tell me about it - or you can also always access the site through willotoons.myshopify.com. Not that this post will be of any help should this happen again & it's archived (I'm at a loss!), but I'll no longer have it autoforward to the shop.willotoons url, just in case.
Hosting issues like this are annoying because they're so out of my control... but I guess I can only hope the large majority of you can see it fine. Can you? Feel free to leave a comment letting me know. And if you're super helpful, will you tell me what platform (XP/Vista/Mac) and browser you're on AND if you see the main nav buttons rolling over to the brown image on hover? Thanks peeps!
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UPDATE: Fixed!!! By 86ing the problematic CNAME & doing an htaccess redirect (thanks Alex!), everyone can now see the shop! phew! (this has been SUCH A THORN IN MY SIDE! that is now gone - yay!)
My brother, Max, and (my soon to be sis-in-law) Samara are getting married this weekend!
I'm heading down to Santa Cruz now. Can you believe, this is the first time I'll actually be a bride's maid? I'm excited... and I just hope the shoes don't kill my feet. haha. Should be a serious party though! I'm stoked.
They're the cutest couple ever & I'm so happy for them!
If you want to use this, all you have to do is hit INFO & enter your Flickr username. However, note that it wants whatever you have in as your actual name... i.e. for me it wanted 'Willo', not 'willotoons' (even though my link is flickr.com/photos/willotoons), so that was kinda weird. What happens when there's more than one 'Joe'? Luckily I'm the only Willo? I dunno, try it out.
I also found it's hard to see all your tags, for some reason, but you can easily select a word, copy the code & then replace the word you selected with the tag you want to use. Anyway, still pretty dang cool!
Just an FYI, for those of you who have written in asking about sizing, I just posted a Sizing Guide.
All of the other CSS little quirks I mentioned are getting fixed up little by little, too. Thanks again for all of the feedback and screenshots you've provided! Super helpful to have extra eyes on it all. Especially those of you trapped to the confines of IE. haha. (hech hemm, download Firefox!)
I've been super swamped this week catching up on client work, so I haven't even sent a mass announcement email out yet. But, as soon as I get these teeny fixes in place I will. Then, once I have some time, I have to put together some new business cards, create a little mini catalog for wholesale orders, create some sort of press packet (Aubs & Ali, I'll need your help on this one), and I still have plans to make WilloBot.com into my corporate design portfolio site! Alas, this weekend is my brother's wedding, so I'm gone again & it will all have to wait till next week.
By the way, why haven't you ordered something from the WilloToons Shop yet? :)
While I was sitting at the bar at Tastings, I got an email from Amanda (checking it on my TREO, because I'm a dork) talking about how we were excited to see each other at Samara & Max's wedding next weekend... and I replied telling her all about this cool girl Kristin I just met who reminded me of her. In my reply I also mentioned I was in Maui - and get this, the next morning I got an email from Amanda that she was there in Kihei too with her mom & sister! OMG! So, as you'll see in the Maui photoset, we hung out a number of times, drove to Hana together, etc. So awesome!
Her Mom & sister were so cool, too. I seriously couldn't have asked for a better match - especially for an all day excursion to Hana! We all share the same sense of humor and were able to instantly be comfortable and move at the same pace. So great!
I was going to go to Hana by myself, but I'm soo glad they wanted to go, because between the fish tacos & swimming in the fresh water cave pool, I know I experienced more going with them. Serendipity!
I'm officially in *love* with this black sand beach & I want to marry it! Every single beach in the world should have this sand... it's so wonderfully un-sandy! It doesn't stick to you & never come off like normal sand. Seriously, I love it!! :)
Can you tell she's really trying hard to smile? haha. Sandy's one of those that I have to talk into letting me take photos of her, but I gotta say, she did pretty good handling my incessant photo snapping while I was there! It's cuz she loves me. :p
I had SUCH a great time in Maui. I'm home and of course have a ton to catch up, not to mention a ton of photos to sort, name & post - but wait till you see them! The Hana pics especially... so dreamy!
p.s. Here's another cutie one of my gracious Maui hosts:
Thank you all so much for your awesome feedback so far! Apparently not everyone uses Macs though (go figure) & we've needed to go back in & make a few things look all pretty on PC's. This has been delayed a little bit due to the fact that (I'm insane) I basically pushed my site live, took a quick nap & then hopped on a plane to Maui. ha! That, and even though I have this super awesome CSS guy helping me, I am a retard & spaced that he didn't have a few key username passwords he needed to fix them for me!
So the shop is probably looking fantastic, since that's what he DOES have access to, but the other pages might still need some TLC... which they will hopefully get soon, now that Alex has the right info! I'm so happy to have him. Sometimes CSS issues can feel completely impossible and scary, but that man knows how to fix em! So great!
Anyway, a big HUGE thanks to all of you who emailed about it. I think a ton of people see errors, but don't say anything, so let me give you all permission now to SPEAK UP. :) I need your eyes & ears people! hehe. The good news is that it's pretty much only hit my circle of friends & regular readers at this point, and I probably won't be doing the big announcement email/press push till next week and we'll for sure have these kinks worked out by then!
Maui is absolutely amazing so far. Honestly I haven't seen much of Maui yet, but already it's soo good to be around my two dear friends Sandy & Derek. See, they opened a restaurant here 4 years ago, but in all this time I hadn't come to visit them (hi, workaholic!). And now, due to some medical issues and a big dose of island fever, they're closing it down & moving back to the main land. So it was now or never!! Literally, because they close their doors on Monday!
It was an insane weekend for me to go in a lot of ways, not only because I am usually (hence why I haven't gotten down here in 4 years, let alone can I barely get my arse out of the city on the weekends) so amped to get stuff done on the weekends, but this one especially, right!? Now that I've just launched!? Ya, insane. But it actually could not have come at a better time. I got about 3 hours of sleep on Tuesday night, and maybe 4 on Wednesday... so by the time I got on the plane yesterday I crashed out! Not to mention that being behind my computer for ~16-18hrs/day for the last few days and then adding ~7 hours of travel time to that, I am SORE! I am so stoked to go swim in the warm ocean right now!
Ooh, and turns out my new friend Amanda, from Samara's Bachlorette Weekend in Napa, is here in Maui, too! OMG! So rad. So I'm off to call her, walk to the beach & find an iced coffee. Have a great weekend everyone!
Finally! My goodness...this last week or so has felt like years! All the teeny tiny things to wrap up... taking photos, writing descriptions, figuring out shipping, oh my! Thankfully I've had an AWESOME team helping me. Seriously, how did I get such an incredible crew of friends?! I love you guys!
This whole process has been so amazing. I'll have to tell you the story sometime, really. But I will just say that it's pretty awesome how it all came together over the last few months. I actually dove into changing a ton of things in my business last October/November... but admittedly the holidays and end of year client work swept me away from it again. Then at the beginning of this year I launched a few other client sites, and then of course there was Noisepop and SXSW... the list goes on. There's always something isn't there!? :)
Well the good news is that by the time SXSW came around, I was on a mission. I had wanted to get everything around before I left, but there was just no time, so I let it go...but with the intention that when I returned I would make this happen once and for all. And I have! I'm soo stoked! Seriously I have wanted this since I was a little girl: My illustrations on products! I think with working online for so many years now, it's just so rad to have tangible items. That you can touch, and wear! So neat.
(Sidenote: I've gotten so spoiled with Ali & Aubrey's awesome editing skills these last few weeks, I feel like I want them to edit this blog post. haha. Let the record show I try to write well, but I'm no pro, like those girls - so no criticizing my errors, prease. :)
So ya, where was I? *sigh* I'm excited. haha. More than anything it's a big, fabulous experiment! I am just totally into diving into it, learning and seeing where it will take me. So fun! It's so neat, because I've worked solely on my own - Freelance out of my house - for the last four years now, and one of the big reasons I hit that wall last Sept/Oct was that I felt like I wanted to do some sort of collaboration. I have been wanting more interaction... to do something on a bigger scale, somehow. But at that time I wasn't even sure what that was. Wouldn't you know it, though...ask & you shall receive, because I've done more collaborating in the last MONTH than I have in years. And I LOVE IT.
Following my heart this last month and diving into it has brought me back to life more than ever before. I mean, I know I'm a pretty positive, happy person to begin with, but this last month I have been waking up at the same time every morning. Eyes wide open, and feeling so alive and so excited for another day! I seriously don't mean to get all sappy on you, but the old adage of listening to your heart is probably the wisest statement ever. JUST GO FOR IT. That's what my heart's been saying to me. So I did. :)
I can only hope that you all with stay with me, watch it grow and morph and we can all get together and have a big fun party singing and dancing and laughing! :) Seriously though, I really hope you all will give me your honest feedback. Tell me what you love, what you would change, etc. I want to collaborate with YOU.
The last few days - actually make that the last WEEK - I've been feverishly trying to finish up all the details for getting my new WilloToons store off the ground. And as of tonight I'm aaaaalmost there! Probably another 24 hours maybe? 17 hours? It can't come fast enough IMO, but then again I of course need to make sure it's ready.
Anyway, thanks to all of you who have asked and expressed your support. You rule! Stay tooned, peeps.
