For those interested, I have since moved to E-junkie.com. Although there is a monthly fee to be paid, I’ve not had to shell out a single cent for refunds or hard copies of downloadable files (which is what my problem was with Lulu). I’m very happy with this solution and you can find my comparison of the two sites here.

I have a small update to my previous post, Lulu.com you suck. Two things:

1. Lulu.com’s PR replied to my post. You can read it here, plus my long reply back. (I will add that they only replied to my blog post after I tweeted it to them; they have not replied to any of my tickets regarding the matter. Nor have I had PR contact me after I replied via email. In all fairness though, they have replied to my customer’s issue - described in my above post - but not done much more than ‘look into things’ on other issues)
2. I have now removed every single pattern from Lulu.com and am now selling via E-Junkie.com. More info about it is here.

Frankly, I have tested E-Junkie enough - all of five minutes - to see the huge difference in ease to download the patterns after purchase. Lulu.com yes, you indeed, do suck.

Skip the explanation, just go to the tutorials.

I’ve noticed a big jump in subscribers lately, so I wanted to do a quick recap of what’s been going on. I’ve been posting a lot about changes and stuff that many of you might not be understanding, and there’s been quite a bit of chaos lately. I thought it would help if I’d give a bit of an intro, plus recap the 2010 events. And maybe give a clue of what’s going to happen in 2011. (Eek! 2011 already!)

Basically it all started in 2006. Having a ’spare’ site that was used for a theatre newsletter until the end of ‘06, I wanted to get the most out of my annual payment for it. I decided to set up a blog, detailing my puppet builds. You can even see the first ever blog post still. Over time, it occured to me that no one on the net, outside two people (Gary Friedman and Hilary Talbot), really talked about puppetry in Australia. I had recently complained at Arts Hub - an arts website popular in Oz - at how finding out about puppetry here was difficult. Despite being told by many pupppeteers who read the article, that puppetry was indeed in existence, none of them really seemed to have a handle on the use and influence the net could bring. Anyway, I decided to write up a couple of FAQs on puppetry. My most popular one at the time was where to buy puppets in Australia.

Also at the time, I really didn’t know what kind of puppetry I wanted to do. It had pretty much been a hobby up until 2008, when I started to take it a bit more seriously. But I also didn’t have a style, genre, or type of puppet. I did a bit of everything: mainly because I was learning the basics of puppetry from books and experimentation.

But early 2008 I did a workshop at the UNIMA festival, two masterclasses with Richard Bradshaw. He’s probably THE best known shadow puppeteer. I discovered I liked shadow puppets, and when I got home I tried making my own.

Since 2006 and 2008, two things have happened: the FAQ part of the site got increasingly more detailed and popular; and I got to liking shadow puppets even more. In fact, the popularity of the ‘Learn Online’ or FAQ page surprised me - it really was just a way to increase hits to my site. Free publicity via content. It wasn’t out of the goodness of my heart I was posting stuff. I just wanted the google love. There are all sorts of websites around talking about puppetry; but the Australian bent made it unique and has become a resource that even the well-known Australian puppeteers are referring to. (OPEN, a new emailed newsletter, references my site. UNIMA Australia, years after my joining as a member, now has me to run its website. And Gary Friedman once called me the best known puppeteer on the net. - Though he does like a bit of hyperbole )

Fast forward to the end of 2009 and I had been getting frustrated by a few things. Workshops that I’d been trying to hold were falling apart due to lack of numbers. I kept being asked to make things I either wasn’t capable of or had no interest in. Commissions were enquired about but never followed up by the person making the enquiry. I was increasingly interested in building shadow puppets, and increasingly dis-interested in every other kind of puppet. And the website seemed to be serving two masters: my own products, and the wiki-style content that provided me with so much free publicity but made me seem like a jack-of-all-trades and willing to make anything.

Something had to be done.

Did I have to just stop posting content, or take it all down? Could I keep up with the constant pace of new content? Could I pay for my ever-increasing and astronomical web hosting bills? Should I stop trying to sell shadow puppets? I thought about it quite a bit, had some input, thought about it some more, and finally made a decision. I already had www.schoolofpuppetry.com.au to present info for my - failed - workshops. So it was decided to move everything from the Learn Online/FAQ page to this new domain name, creating a separate and independent location for the exponential info. School of Puppetry (SOP) would be a puppetry resource: Puppets in Melbourne (PIM) would remain my promotional site for my own products (shadow puppets).

Mid this year, I began the task of creating new web designs, migrating content over, and doing a lot of research to ensure that both sites serve their purposes better. I’ve learned a lot actually, and the new PIM web design reflects a sharper understanding. Indeed, before I would have called myself a hacker, someone who knows bits and pieces of code, but can’t design. Now I think I could probably call it designing. (I was recently flattered by an actual web/graphic designer, who said the about page is one of the best she’s seen)

So that’s where we are now: migrating content and worrying about how to sell my shadow puppets. SOP, with its patterns and other things, will ’sell’ itself. Along with the plans already detailed in the ‘decision’ post above, I have many ideas to increase the passive income of the site with more patterns and - hopefully - ad placements.

PIM is however, where the plans get murky. I’ve recently had a discussion with some puppeteers over at Puppets and Stuff about how best to sell my shadow puppet patterns. They suggest, and I agree, that they would sell better if packaged up into a book instead of individually. Obviously, to do this is going to take some time: hence the ‘coming soon’ images on my newly-designed product page.

2011 is likely going to be more of the same: migrating content, creating new, pushing patterns, and building more shadow puppets to sell. Already I can see some redesign coming for SOP, as I notice some problems in it that I couldn’t have foreseen before. The rest of it has nothing to do with either site: it has to do with finding some money to continue paying for both. The chaos of migration means less income from patterns and other things, which I expected. I did however, have a strange notion that migration could be done in a couple of months. Tsk, silly me

Still, things are looking better than they did at the start of the year, and I’m extremely happy with how things are going. A big thanks to my reader, Rob, who inspired so much thought about how to get things on the right track. And thanks to every single person who’s read, participated, downloaded, or visited in the past several years. This journey wouldn’t have happened at all without you.

I’ve completed all of the redesign now, with the new blog page finally done. It’s pretty awesome, especially considering how it was before. You’re looking at the new design, but compare it to the old here. It doesn’t go without saying… but Internet Explorer sucks. For the best results, view my site in Firefox or Safari.

Funnily enough I also happened across this, a blog directory page for my site. It has the snapshot of the really old PIM site design, the one I had in ‘06 and ‘07. It’s interesting to see the changes over the years. This makes about the third design in four years.

At any rate, the best thing about the new blog design is improved navigation. For some odd reason I thought it was a good idea to have only one blog post viewable at a time, with no pagination and only category links to browse. This means there was no way in hell you’d ever see anything archived, unless you stumbled over it via a search engine. The good news is that you can now see 5 posts per page (except of course, for the individual post page/permalink), can browse previous/next 5 posts, can click on the archives per month, AND still browse by category if you wish. Yay! Now even I know what I’ve posted and when

Additionally, I’ve gone back and deprecated a whole stack of posts: largely to do with selling things I haven’t been selling for over a year now. Some which do discuss those things (or things that have since been moved to SOP) I have left in place, as they also discuss other things, like milestone site statistics or festival stuff.

There are other improvements, such as a quick links list on the right sidebar. I’ve made a ’shadow puppets made easy’ blog post, which lists all my shadow puppet tutorials in one place - on this site at any rate  - so people can see just how good they are. Maybe someone will be enticed to buy a puppet that way. There are also links recommending you to the festival diary categories, and a link to SOP.

My favourite improvement though, is the footer at the bottom of every page. I’ve made use of a great new feature of browsers: they allow you to change the opacity of a background or image. The footer has a dark background, but not completely opaque, so you can still see through to the background of the actual site. In the footer you can also find my latest tweets, a pic from my Flickr files, a ‘like’ button for Facebook (not a ‘be a friend’ thing, just a like for this domain name. Although you can still be my friend if you want ), and a link to Youtube.

Another interesting thing is that the rolling background (which you’ll find it hard to notice, but it does actually blend into itself over and over) creates different effects depending on the length of the page. On one page you may notice the next/prev post links appear lighter than they do on another page. The background of these links is the same colour: it’s simply a perception issue, since the background image of the site itself is different colours at different heights. The knock-on effect is that the blog page will look slightly different every time, making it less static over time.

Amazingly enough, I’m also enjoying the three-column design. I’m normally a hater of three column websites, most of which seem to be so full of stuff that you can barely find anything. But keeping everything big and giving each item a big bit of white space (margin) means that it’s not too overwhelming. Another thing I like is my error page. Try visiting: http://www.puppetsinmelbourne.com.au/gallery.php/&disp=arcdir. (For some reason IE doesn’t bring up my custom error page. So try a different browser to see it) I had a little fun rewording the error message .

There is still a lot to do, as I want to go back and do some minor re-editing of posts so they fit in with the new design. Since there are lots of posts (some 400 or so pages worth) it will take some time and will likely be a ‘one a day’ task along with the migration of content still ongoing for SOP.

The good news is that I will now be able to refocus my attention on other things: largely the creation of new content, and the work on new puppet builds. Thanks to everyone for your patience over the past year, as I know there’s been a lot of chaos and everything’s been a bit all over the place. As many web people say: a website is never done. I think Puppets in Melbourne has been the dictionary-image of that!

I had a little bit of a rush of creativity a few days ago, producing some new videos (an updated tutorial using my Spider shadow puppet pattern, plus another which I will post another time) plus a new shadow puppet. More on that in a second.

But I decided I should probably get a move on with creating the new design for my policies page. The old one, which was a cross between the current blog design and the old shop page, sorely needed to be streamlined. Additionally, the new product pages all link to the policies page, and since I’ve been re-releasing each product page one at a time, I thought it was a good idea to get the policies up as soon as possible.

What I’ve ended up doing is another cross-over. Using the new ‘about’ page, the hidden tabs function, and the basic design for the drop-up list of products from the main products page, the policies are now listed in a type of FAQ. Navigate with the links on the right; read the text from the FAQ on the left.  The policies are now very streamlined in comparison to the old ones, which were long and covered two whole pages of worth of stuff. As well as the usual shop policies - payment options, shipping, etc - I’ve added a couple of answers to some common questions.

Those playing at home will notice something else… a new shadow puppet design.

I won’t be releasing this design for sale for some time, until I get some decent photos and the video done. I’m also planning on having a few more new ones made so I can do one big photo shoot. This is the new puppet I discussed above, and I’m quite pleased with how it turned out. I just used some sparkly crepe paper, although the size of the image doesn’t make this very clear.

As you can see (and as discussed in my first post on the new redesign), other than the general layout of navigational links and background, each page of the site does not have a restrictive way of presenting things. I’m mainly interested in creating something that is functional and minimal; and then from there I work out how to reuse previous elements I’ve designed.

So, the tally up until now: the home page, main product page (or gallery), individual product page, contact page, policies page and the about me page has been completed. Still to do: the blog, the aggregator (archives), and the search page. Not doing too bad!