Goodness, how do people manage to set up a business on their own with no knowledge of the technology? I guess they hire someone, but you hear so many horror stories about people charging for work that never gets done, or turns out so shoddy, you’re ashamed to give anyone the link. It happened to a friend of mine. Don’t get her started on that subject!

Thank goodness for my very patient and tech-savvy partner, Rick Leslie, formerly of PCServices. I would never have got as far as I have without his expertise – and his knowing where to look and how to search for the information he didn’t already know. Which is most of it, to be fair.

Having settled on a plug-in for setting up some parts of the website, we then needed to choose an e-commerce partner, because, after all, we need our clients to be able to pay for the services they want to receive. So after a lot of research, we chose Woo Commerce. It’s a pretty popular option, but unless you’ve tried it, you’d never believe the time, effort and frustration involved in setting up the back-end of the product pages!

Thankfully, we have made progress. We now have a cohort product set up, complete with ‘Buy Now’ option, and (I think and hope), if you want to sign up for the next set of sessions, you can now do that – at a discounted price, too. We’re still customising the emails you’ll receive, so bear with us if you choose to sign up before we’re quite finished!

Now, you’d think it’d be easier to set up a newsletter subscription, complete with Welcome email, than a whole commercial offering. And so it probably will be, but my goodness, it’s harder than you’d think – at least, we’re finding it so. We kept getting error messages saying the sign-up had failed, but an email was being sent to the signed-ip address anyway. We thought he’d found a fix for it, and now it seems to have broken again, and while the error message is back, the emails aren’t being sent.

And there’s a strange message that pops up at the top of the site, saying it’s a demo site and no orders will be processed. Not the message I want my potential clients to find!

I’m so relieved that once this is all sorted out, it’s basically done, and will hopefully only need the occasional tweak. Having to go through all this again would put me off trying to set up the services my clients need so much. I think I’ll owe Rick a slap-up meal, if not a whole week’s holiday, by the time we’re done!

I meant to publish this the day I wrote it, but apparently failed to hit the right button to get it sent. I don’t blame anything on my age – I’m not even 60 yet, for goodness’ sake! – I blame it on menopausal brain. That and lack of decent sleep. Thankfully, that seems to be resolving itself and I’m getting my brain back at last!

Things have moved on since then, and the next instalment will be out soon. Thank you for bearing with me!