This was a big question for me. If you’ve read my previous blog posts you’ll know I registered Mummy’s Muse as a company back in 2017. I’ve always been sure that this would be an e-commerce business so I knew the website would be my very first shop front. It’s hard having high standards and not knowing how to achieve those very standards within a start up. READ: How do I have a really nice website without having to pay someone to build it?

This was the challenge. I didn’t (and still don’t) want to pay for someone to build my site. To be perfectly transparent, there are some things that I think you have to pay for regardless of if someone builds it for you or not: hosting (your domain name), if you’re going to be taking payments an SSL certificate, so the site is secure. If you want a base design theme – like I did – you’ll need to pay for that and then there may be certain plugins that you pay for so your site can have additional functionality.

However, I felt it would be nuts for me to brief someone on a site…when I don’t actually know exactly what I want. This is the worst sort of brief, one that invokes mostly feelings and is full of holes and not one that is detailed with clear instructions. What I thought my business would be and what it’s turning out to be has changed over the last two years so I decided I would need to learn how to build the site so I could tinker as much as possible in the back end and change as much as I wanted. I needed to have control over this and not have yet another element that was in someone else’s hands. I’ve already had to relinquish control of the early stages of design and the manufacturing process and the waiting drives me nuts…I like that I can control this. I didn’t want to brief someone again and again as I needed things changed or to see how it looked with boxes in a different order or new images inserted.

However the flip side is the shortcomings in my abilities when it comes to making the site look really slick. Believe it or not it looks better now than it did at the start (ha). But while I don’t have thousands of hits a day, I’m using this time to prepare for the day I do (praying hands emoji), by trying to make things a little better along the way. I think maybe one day when it’s stabilised in terms of its content, maybe I’ll hire someone to tidy it up. Or perhaps by that point I’ll be a web building guru and not need the help of a freelancer that will inevitably disappoint me and leave me questioning my faith in humanity’s ability to follow through on a promise.

So the verdict for Mummy’s Muse was to build. For those that don’t want to build or just don’t see this as a good use of their time (I have plenty of waiting time on my hands due to my relaxed manufacturers), there are sites like Wix and Square Space that promise to take the headache off your hands and leave you with a slick end product. I do also think the nerd in me enjoys tinkering in the back end. It’s all fun and games until it goes horribly wrong.

Bearing this in mind, please be kind if something looks odd. For the more proactive of you, feel free to email me on hello@mummysmuse.com if you have any useful suggestions on how to improve the site.