Enter the code “newsite” for a 10% discount in my shop!

I’ve been slightly derailed from the Presidents series of late, but it’s not for lack of good reason. One of which is new jobs, the other is a brand new Shorthandedstudio.com!

If you’ve happened by the site of late, you will have seen some of these growing pains. I’m not a “web designer” so I choose to tweak my site a piece at a time instead of launching new versions overnight. However, I believe I have finally put the finishing polish on this version of the site and I’m really excited with how it turned out. It’s much cleaner than the last iteration, and most importantly to me it features a brand new store!

If you’ve really been following Shorthanded since it’s debut launch in January of 2008, this is in fact version 4.0 (4.5 if you count the crash and collapse that happened on January of 09 that caused a massive loss of data and many unkind words spoken on my part). The second version was launched January 2009, the 3rd in November of 2009 and now this version in February 2010. I wish I would have kept screenshots of each version because it would have been nice to see the progression, but I’ve never been that organized.

This version directly adresses two areas that I’ve always felt were problem areas for my site.

Problem #1, the store. Paypal is a great tool, but their popup and cart system are hideous not to mention I dread adding products because it means I’ll have to login to Paypal’s backend site. As a person interested in design and usability, Paypal’s administrator area is the nastiest place on the web. Even though I came up with a quite genius setup for adding products to the store, I always felt it was a weak link. Now I cannot lie, the store I just added to this site rules! You should really go check it out. I’m so excited to finally have it integrated as a shopping cart.

Problem #2, the navigation. I’ve never liked the navigation systems I’ve employed in the past. To me, the beauty in a navigation is hidden in its simplicity yet as a peddler of visual goods I want every viewer to see everything I do, but that’s the worst approach to a navigation system possible. When those two opposing ideas collide, there’s chaos. Your best bet in navigation is always sub navigation and since I hate hate hate dropdown menus, I chose to employ a sub navigation system my own way.

There is a photo of a recent version of the site so you can see the changes.

Those who choose to shop in my store are my means of existence, my most appreciated visitors. To say thanks, and to entice anyone who may want to make a purchase from my shop, enter the code “newsite” in the discount code field and take 10% off the order total.