Yeah, I know it’s July already, but I wanted to post a recap anyway. Where I left off last, I was experiencing some minor () problems with the activity of actually breathing. Happily, the meds I am now on have improved things considerably, to the point where I do indeed remember what it’s like to breath like a normal person. No coughing, no wheezing, no back pain, and no feeling like I’m going to die. (This would be a good point to mention that apparently the inhalers that I’d been given previously had been for pediatric doses; which explains why I never actually felt any better!)

In order to keep working, but having a bit of the shakes due to the new meds, I spent the remainder of the Kukcrafters challenge powering through the new website design for School of Puppetry. The whole thing was completed at about 4am yesterday. I’m very happy with the new look, and can see the benefits paying off already: I’ve increased the amount of ad space available, which means I can seek more advertisers in the long run. My stats show a slight decrease in visitors (which I account half of to the 4th of July celebrations in the US, the country which represents most of my visitor count on any given day; the other half to the mess whilst migrating to the new template). Indeed the following stat represents a good example of the benefits:

What the above shows is that one visitor googled ‘puppet terms’ and found SOP. They then saw the ‘featured pattern’ at the top of the page, wanted to know more, and clicked on the link. (This ‘featured pattern’ advert for myself is a new addition and one of those benefits mentioned above) They decided they weren’t interested, and went back to the puppet terms article, continuing to read until they got to the related posts section and clicked on one of the related items: what is water puppetry. I’m also seeing that having a randomly selected bunch of posts on the home page encouraging exploration, and though I have no definite way of knowing, I suspect that the menu navigation implemented has made things easier for further browsing.  And a small increase in ‘likes’ for the SOP facebook page, which is now easily found at the top of every page under the ’subscribe’  tab - And this is all from half a day’s stats since checking them at 5pm today.

… This brings me to the end of the Kukcrafters challenge, whereby June was supposed to be spent making things. Although I spent very little of it making anything crafty, KUK is all about being creative, not about craft itself. So I guess in the end I achieved that: I succeeded in solving a few problems with shadow puppets; developed a lot of my ideas for my new product line; and hunkered down and created a new web design for SOP. I’d say that this challenge has been a good thing, forcing me to sit down and focus on getting stuff done, instead of waffling around it as I tend to be doing these days.

What’s next? Well, I will continue on as usual: migrating content from Puppets in Melbourne to School of Puppetry; a Kukcrafters day on Sunday which will allow me to work on the next pattern for SOP; and continued development of characters for the PIM product line. I will also be posting a couple of those completed prototypes that I’ve been promising - I’m still finishing off one of them and would like to solve a problem before posting further news.