This is a George Costanza quote.  I like to quote Seinfeld characters whenever possible.

The room re-do is almost 100% complete so pictures will come tomorrow or the next day.  In the mean time, I spent the weekend fine-tuning my hollywest.com website and she is finished!

Click here to see the goods

I suppose I should explain myself a little here.  For the longest time, I envisioned the “new” hollywest.com as being a second place (or actually the first place) I’d be selling my jewelry.  I’ve had that website since 1998, it’s well indexed, and I already had all of the “back end” I needed, as in shopping cart, authorization gateway, etc.  Over the years I’ve sold a lot of jewelry on hollywest.com and it never occurred to me not to use it as my main web store.

Then came Etsy.  My intent was to use my etsy store to promote my main website, which was to be hollywest.com.  But after a couple of months on etsy, I’ve realized that for the size of my business, it is the perfect, and least expensive, way to sell my jewelry to a huge audience.  Of course, Mick had already put in a lot of hours programming my website and I felt a bit bad about that, but he told me programmers have to deal with that all time–working on stuff that never sees the light of day.  Last night, Mick moved hollywest.com to our own server and I canceled my merchant account with verio.  This will save more than $100 a month in web hosting fees that I’ve basically been flushing down the toilet this past year while I tried to decide which direction to take my business in.

As you will see, hollywest.com has become a portal to my etsy shop.  It’s so much easier to tell people my URL is hollywest.com, and of course my business cards and packaging materials already say hollywest.com, so I’d never get rid of it.  With all of this in place, maybe Holly West Jewelry Design will break even one of these days?  This will be my goal for 2008.