Site maintenance is annoying

Last year I put a few of my graphic designs on CafePress. I thought they were pretty cool, and I guess a few people agreed with me because I did manage to sell a few t-shirts. That part was fun. I'm not exactly a prolific artist, but I'll come out with something new once in a while that I think would look good on a shirt or coffee mug, so now I have over a dozen designs that I'm peddling. (Successful people on CafePress and Zazzle have hundreds of different designs, if not thousands. I am very much a hobbyist, not a serious player.)

Unfortunately for me, I am lazy. Once I've put a design on a variety of different products, I want to be done with it. I like making the image, and making sure it suits the item I'm putting it on is kind of satisfying, but tagging it so that search engines can find it is boring, and updating my personal website to include a link to the new design is boring. I tend to drag my feet on those parts.

Recently I've found myself in the position of having to set up the tagging and such for every design all over again, because changes in the way CafePress does business are driving me directly into the arms of their competitor. (If you want details, I think this blogger explains it pretty well.) I find that I kind of like Zazzle, but at this point in time, I have 687 different products there that use 13 different designs, and I'm starting to have a hard time managing them.

So, I'm feeling a little blue because I know my Zazzle site isn't as good as it could be. My mood turns positively grim when I try to figure out what to do with my personal website, which currently links only to specific designs on CafePress. I would just change all the links to Zazzle, but I don't want to abandon my clock designs (Zazzle doesn't offer clocks). Additionally, I have misgivings about some of Zazzle's shipping charges, so I would like to offer an alternative, even though I'm mad at CafePress now. Perhaps I will work on the Zazzle site, and leave my personal site alone until the end of the month. I will probably eventually set it up to point to both sites.

I have so much to do still that I really shouldn't be writing a blog. But honestly, I need a break from trying to figure out new tags to describe Thoth-themed shoes and such.