Adding products

Adding products with WooCommerce is simple, but there are a few things that need to be done each time, the first thing when adding a product is to name it and give it a description, after this you then have this box

In this section you can add the price of the item and then you have the option to add a sale price which I have done to most of my featured items. The boxes ticked at the top let the server know that the idem is a download after purchase and this is where you can add the actual product link rather than the thumbnail. You then have the options to limit your download per purchase, this is something that has come in very handy as I only want one download per purchase on my site, this means that if the customer tries to download it again, they get an error message saying they have exceeded their limit on that purchase.

When uploading my products I came across an issue that took me a while to get around, there is no way of stopping the customers taking the image you have uploaded to the shop gallery and printing them off without paying, for this reason I was worried that people would come to the shop and steal the products, I tried to add watermarks to the work but unless I covered part of the work, making it look bad in the store, there was no way a water mark could stop someone cross stitching that pattern. 

The only solution I could think of was to take away the grid in the thumbnails, then upload the fully finished and labeled piece so they can only access it when they have paid.

Here is an example of what my thumbnails look like in comparison to the actual pattern print.

Changes and customisations

After adding the plug ins I originally planned on getting such as WooCommerce, I also found that when you add products you can add tags, these are great ways of people being able to locate your patterns if they are looking for a particular thing such as a dog. However, the search bar that came with myplug ins did not search via tag, this meant that a lot of my products would be missed when a customer uses it. To sort this problem I found a secondary plug in that could be used in conjunction to the search bar I already had, this extra plug in was created by a guy called Matthew Lawson and he has simply named it, Search By Product tag. This extra plug in has really opened up my shop to its maximum ability of search, this way I can tag products with a range of things that I think customers may search, the beauty of these tags is that you can have as many as you like and can edit them whenever suits you, without effecting the rest of the site or products.
I wanted to make the theme my own but found that the feature image was too big and took up too much valuable space, so I decided to edit the code in the head of the document, at first I changed the size of the feature image to a max-height of 300px, but even this did not look right, so I changed the header to have a background of my own image which I uploaded into the theme folder on my server.

Using this code I managed to get my header to appear like this, which I feel is much more interesting but also hopefully different to all the other people using this theme. I also changed the theme to be boxed, giving me space to have a small border where I can see the background that I have made look like cross stitch material. I am hoping that this along with some other changes will make the theme seem like my own and will not look too similar to other shops using it. 

Mystile

Once the decision was made to use and modify a pre-made theme, I looked through the internet to find a good low cost one that I felt could be changed into what I wanted. I ended up back in WooThemes like most of the tutorials I watched had and the theme I picked was called "Mystile", this theme is very plain and simple, its clean and easy to use and the main thing that I wanted was for it to be responsive and I have tested this theme to check that it is.
The reason I chose such a plain theme is that I want to make it my own, so getting as close to a blank canvas as possible but avoiding having to try and code the PHP, this theme seemed like the best option. WooCommerce is the addition to this theme to make it a shop which is exactly what I needed.
Here you can see what the theme looked like as a demo, but when you get this site it is completely blank for you to customise yourself.

The only downside to this theme is that because it was free you are not allowed to take off their branding on the bottom. However for all the plus sides this theme has come with, I can live with their watermark. 

Joomla VS Wordpress

While at the start of this project I had decided to use Joomla, I had not looked at the differences between it and Wordpress. It wasnt until my tutor suggested that Wordpress could do everything I needed it to that I started to look into it.
The first thing I did was go on Wordpress.com, not realising that it was different to .org, seeing the prices I was sure that I had gone wrong somewhere, this is where the book by Chris O'Connor "Wordpress For All : How To Create A Website For Business Or Personal Use, Quickly & Easily - Whatever Your Skill Level" came into its own, this book clearly established the difference and the pros and cons to either, his book was very pro .org which luckily was what I wanted to use. After working about that I would use Wordpress without taking a loan out! I started to watch tutorials of both Wordpress and Joomla to see which I thought would be most suitable, but I found that I struggled to find a good clear video for Joomla, while there were hundreds for Wordpress. This to me was the first sign that I may have jumped to the wrong choice.
I had another flick though the book by Chris O'Connor "Wordpress For All : How To Create A Website For Business Or Personal Use, Quickly & Easily - Whatever Your Skill Level" which was very useful and almost instantly sealed the deal. Before I made my choice I also had a look at some of the information in "Wordpress for dummies" which despite the name, was also very useful in giving me a head start with tips and tricks of the software.
To make certain I had made the right choice I also looked though "The Official Joomla! Book" by Jennifer Marriott, this book was useful and interesting but by this point, I had already made my mind up on Wordpress.
So I paid for hosting and started to set up the Database and upload the files, with the help of some good walk though videos to make sure I got it right.
Once Wordpress was up and running on my website I started to look at more videos to give me a place to start. The thing I noticed with all of the videos was they they all used themes, and 90% of them used themes from WooThemes, I looked into what it would take to create my own theme and teamed that with the comparison of how much you can modify from a preset theme. My decision was made on the basis that you can modify almost all of the templates you can download, but they come with the bonus that all plug ins and widgets that you could think of will definitely be compatible and above all else the check out and cart ability would not have glitches forcing customers away.

New Logo

Since changing the name of my business to Pixel Patterns, I have been working away on a new logo.
I started drawing designs on note paper as you can see below

After multiple different ideas that were wiped off, this one stuck and started to take place the more I drew it. Here are the white board scribbles of its first appearance

Starting as a simple swooping P, I found myself adding extra details such as the X instead of the dot on the I and pixels at the bottom of the P. The more I drew this piece the more that came up, the final drawing before moving to the computer was to have the first P as a needle and tread swooping round and looping through the eye and the second P to have pixels dropping off the bottom of the stalk. 

From this I headed straight to the computer and started to recreate this logo. Picking a font to go with the large swooping P's was tricky and I wanted it to look somewhat similar to what I had drawn in the sense that the letters are tall, reasonably thin and well spaced. After a while of searching I found a font called Tall Films, using the fine version of this font I feel that I managed to keep all of the aspects I wanted from my whiteboard drawings. 

Here is the final logo and its smaller icon version which I will use as a favicon and possibly much more.

To make sure that I dont run into the same predictable issue, I have used the needle on pixel and the pixels on pattern, this not only keeps away from them being too predictable, but also represents how I am bringing the two together to combine them in my work.

Logo and Name troubles

I wasn't 100% sold on the last designs I mocked up for this project as I felt they were lacking in something, after showing my tutor the designs she agreed. While I couldn't put my finger on it, she suggested that the problem may be that it is too predictable. Pixel fonts on the word pixel has been used a thousand times before so we just expect to see it now. She suggested I try to come away from taking it so literally and think about the imagery past just fonts.

While I was considering new logo designs, I decided to buy the URL for Pixel Stitch, so that I could start setting up my hosting and website. However when I came to buy www.pixelstitch.co.uk, I found that it had already been taken and so had .com

The company that had taken the name, to my surprise were nothing to do with sewing! They are in fact a software company in Australia.

As much of a shame it was to lose the name to another company, it did give me the opportunity to revisit my brainstorm and see if I could add anything to spark my interest. After a few days of pondering a new name and flicking though what other people were using online as inspiration, I found that the names I liked the most were ones with double letters such as sew sweet and cottontail crafts. So I decided that I would stick with pixel and see what words that began with P could work. After a few such as pixel pig and pixel pie which were sweet but didnt really make sense, I thought of the most obvious of all, Pixel Patterns. I quickly checked online to see if the URL and name was taken and to my surprise it wasnt. This is the perfect name for my shop, it says exactly what it does but also have a nice ring to it with the use of two p's. Now I just need to design a new logo and start building the shop.

Cross Stitch Patterns

Since I will need to fill she shop up with my own patters, I have been drawing some designs that have started to cover all bases of big, small, hard, easy and so on.
Before I started this however, I was looking through books at other designs that have been done before, how they are laid out and what information is normally given with them.

In the book "Mini Cross Stitch" by Michael Powell, I found some very good information on what sort of stitch notes are normally written, all of his pieces have a stitch count, letting the customer know what size material they need to start on, along side this he always has a colour key, while patterns can be stitched from simply looking at the colours on the grid, this does not suit everyone and sometimes colours are very similar, because of this most cross stitch designers code each colour pixel and then add a chart at the bottom of the design, here is one of the charts out of Michael's book against the designs coded symbols.

Ed Hardy's book Love Kills Slowly Cross Stitch, also showed me a very similar style of charting colours, however this book did not show the colours and the code together as we can see above on the dairy. Instead this book shows you the finished article and the colour code then sets you off with a black and white image. 

Although this is a perfectly reasonably way to lay out your designs, I feel that looking at the two books I prefer the style of coloured images shown in Powell's. For this reason when I code my designs, I will leave the colour showing through.

Here are some of the designs that I have drawn up so far.

Some of the designs that I have drawn are full scenes that would be stitched and framed, these ones are naturally more complex than the single ones. These full images will be very large and time consuming pieces for an advanced stitcher who is looking for a new project. I have also done some medium sized patterns as you can see by the tree and dogs, these can be taken on as a small project or as a welcome challenge for someone new to cross stitch. The other designs that I have done are small singular designs that can be done by all abilities from beginner to expert, these designs are great to use on things such as birthday cards, but can also be added together to create a scene if wanted. These small fun designs will be cheap for customers to buy and quick enough that they will return for more.