Custom Boutique Illustrations and Graphics

March 6, 2017 Leave a Comment

Custom Boutique Illustrations and Graphics can add a touch of cuteness and fun to any website or social media post. I offer custom packaging illustrations, character illustrations, animals, essential oil bottles and more. I have been drawing cute characters since 2008 and have loved every moment of it. I was one of the original cute boutique illustrators. When my business first started back in 2007, it was called Sweet Boutique Design. I have since changed my business name to Design Edit Studio, LLC because my business grew and changed and I wasn’t the cutesy template maker for template shops and eBay anymore. But, I loved making those templates for the mom and pop shops and the cute, fun and girly graphics that went with it.

I have been going through all my extra extra backups. When you’re a web developer, 1 backup is none, 2 is 1 and 3 is 2. I have a MANY backups. No joke, I collect and collect files and make new ones and forget about them. I found a ton of my old work and decided how fun it would be to bring back and update a lot of it the illustrations. I have a so many cute girly characters, animals, cards, etc. I will have a new shop on my site soon where you will be able to order premade logos, branding kits, business cards, my fun illustrations as well as custom illustrations.

Custom Boutique Illustrations and Graphics by Design Edit Studio

Above is a cute and girly set of illustrations I drew 9 year ago. Cupcakes, turtles and babies are just so much fun to draw! And below are the cute woman and girls I drew in 2009. The 2 little girls in the picture below are based off of my two lovely daughters that were 3 and 8 at the time. I wish I looked like the girl in the picture, I guess my woman illustrations are always wishful thinking on what I think I look like. Or maybe it’s me in an alternate universe 😀

Woman, Girl and Baby Illustration

Recently, a project for one of good friends Melinda, inspired me to create a set of essential oil bottles. I have a preference my essential oils, but I’m not selling those here, just the cool graphics of whatever you love to promote or use. Coming soon in my new shop, I’ll have premade business cards for dōTERRA and Young Living reps. Choices will be available for background, colors and bottles and have a semi custom downloadable file to get printed at vista print or any other printer of choice. I’m totally flexible and can make a file up for literally any printing company you choose. If you have a local one, which a lot of my clients do or you like the online ones. I will have 1 or 2 side cards with lots of customization choices.

Custom dōTERRA wellness advocate business card design

I am also designing, drawing and making up downloadable marketing packages for any business whether you’re an essential oil rep, aromatherapist, retail clothing store, jewelry store, candle shop, body care shop and more. So, I have a lot of new products coming soon and a revamp of the oldies but goodies.

Essential Oil and Aromatherapy bottles illustrations

I can design any type of illustration for a Facebook cover image, twitter cover, google+ cover, website homepage graphics, etc.

Facebook cover photo with a girly illustration

Online shop homepage graphic with illustrated aromatherapy bottles

Get Your Own Girly, Fun Boutique Illustrations!

Get a quote for your new website or re-design, logo design, print design or marketing plan!

Get a Quote

12 Days of Christmas Landing Page Ideas

December 9, 2016 1 Comment

There are 15 days until Christmas and that means there’s still time to make a holiday marketing plan. My previous client campaigns to promote your items to your customers are a great resource!

The Twelve Days of Christmas campaign 2012 for Paula & Chlo was so fun and colorful! I helped her come up with the best products to promote and how to present them for each one of the daily deals. There were also coordinating email newsletters that went out daily to remind her customers of the daily deals. This campaign consisted of a website landing page with flip calendar numbers and multiple marketing images.

Next, a 12 Days of Surprises Campaign at Paula & Chlo. This consisted of a responsive website landing page with hover boxes that were activated for each daily deal. There were also coordinating marketing emails, homepage graphics, social marketing media graphics

This 12 Days of Giving campaign was a fun one to design and code. It consisted of a responsive landing page with circle coin flip offers for each day. Each circle when hovered on revealed a new deal and link to the product or category to shop. I made a super cute and fun holiday vector background in Illustrator.

These are fantastic ideas for a 12 Days of Christmas or 12 Days of Giving campaign for an online retail shop. If you’re short on time or don’t have that many promotions to offer, you could certainly drop some days off and make it a “7 Days of Giving” or “5 Days of Deals” promotion. There’s no hard and fast rule about how many days you need to have a sale for during the holidays. But, from experience, customers expect coupons and deep discounts throughout the whole shopping season until right after the new year.

Christmas Sale Collage Graphics

Another great way to market your holiday sale prices and products to your customer is with marketing graphics. If you don’t have time for the landing page or big plan, make graphics. A grouping of products with a holiday theme placed in a newsletter or social media post will work too!

Hire Me to Make Your Next Marketing Plan

Clients can hire me to help plan your holiday or any other time of the year marketing plan. I will consult with you about your business needs, what products you’re selling, the sales you’ve previously ran, keyword research, graphic design, landing page coding and optimization, web graphics, email newsletter creation and graphics and social media graphics and post planning. Contact Me if you’d like to start your own marketing plan for promoting your discounts, sales and products!

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Magento Vs. BigCommerce

April 6, 2016 2 Comments

I get so many questions about which shopping cart my clients should choose. You have so many options to sell your products online. I used to recommend Prestashop to all my clients but so many of them grew out of the software and upgraded to Magento. With Prestashop, I was noticing that if there were more than 200 products, it was really hard to manage the shop. The database was too large and making the back end run super slow. The same thing was happening with a smaller amount of products with tons of product options. Those clients that were having those issues moved over to Magento. Which was always a huge production, but I was more than glad to oblige and help them. That involved setting up temporary servers, installing Magento locally, then to the new server then transferring all of their data (customers, orders, products) to the new server. And, to top it off, making a new theme for Magento.

I’ve found over the years, Magento is fantastic to work with. A developer’s dream! I was able to customize and create fantastic options for the themes, custom landing pages, custom extensions for the exact need for my clients. But, again, as time went on, my clients expenses and resources grew with Magento. Now, when I say resources, I don’t necessarily mean money. Magento is very intensive. You literally need a team to handle one shop with it. If one person is managing it and uploading products, managing orders, etc. you need at least one other person to maintain the back end of the site (that’s the role I usually end up with – not a bad role either). Some have hired me for ongoing maintenance and some haven’t. Basically, if you have Magento, you need a support package. Whether it’s from me or someone else qualified to maintain your site on a regular basis, you need a Magento support package.

And, Magento and BigCommerce are set up for optimal SEO. Google loves both carts for their great built in SEO. Many high profile brands use Magento (Rebecca Minkoff, Vizio, Alex and Ani, etc.) and BigCommerce (Bulk Apothecary, Josie Maran, Martha Stewart Cafe, etc.).

This is How You Decide What To Do

I’m going to make this SUPER easy to decide whether or not you should use Magento OR BigCommerce to run your online shop. Ask yourself these 2 questions?

How much money can I spend each year on my website to keep it up? (including website hosting, and hiring a developer to maintain my site)
How much time can I devote to maintaining my own website above and beyond uploading products and processing web orders?

If you answered “Small Budget” for #1, use BigCommerce

If you answered “Large Budget” for #1, use Magento

If you answered “No extra time for I’d be doing it in my sleep” for #2, use BigCommerce

If you answered “I have tons of free time and lots of help from my staff or team” for #2, use Magento

Just so you don’t have sticker shock with Magento, these are the things you must buy to run your site:

Dedicated server ($1200+ per year)
Domain name (s) ($15 – hundreds of dollars a year, especially if you’re a domain name junky like me and buy up every variation of your business name)
SSL Certificate ($100-$1200+ per year)
Payment processor extension ($75-$200+)
Payment processing (authorize.net, PayPal, etc.) ($25+ per month)
Extra extensions to run your site if you need special features (up to $1000+)
Web developer who can maintain your site ($500+ per month) THAT’S ME
Extra support costs for priority support from you web hosting company ($$ monthly fee)

About a BigCommerce site:

BigCommerce is self hosted, so your server, SSL, payment processing are all in one bill and a fraction of the cost of Magento ($29.95 per month to $199.95+)
You do have to pay for most good apps (monthly fees of $10-$15+) On the downside, the apps leave a lot to be desired.
Product filtering is only available on certain plans (sidebar searching and filtering by brand, prices, color, etc.)
No real blog. Yes, there’s a blog that comes with it, but it’s not a WordPress blog and it’s not customizable and it’s not that great.

In conclusion, just to make this somewhat short and sweet and easy to understand, it’s all about money. It always is. They are both fantastic carts to work with. I personally love to work with Magento because it’s so customizable and I can do whatever I want with it. BigCommerce, not so much. But, it will still do a lot for your business! I go with what is the best option for my clients. If you’re tight on budget and manpower, go with BigCommerce.

Want to see what a site on BigCommerce looks like VS Magento? Check out Paula & Chlo! We started with Prestashop, moved to Magento then to BigCommerce. BigCommerce suits their needs perfectly and there’s no sacrifice of design and functionality.

Read more “Magento Vs. BigCommerce” →

How to Add Users to Google Webmaster Tools

February 19, 2015 Leave a Comment

You can add users to your Google Webmaster Tools account after you’ve set it up and verified it. I went over in a previous post How to Set Up a Google Webmaster Tools Account –> https://www.designeditstudio.com/how-to-set-up-google-webmaster-tools/.

How to Add a user to Google Webmaster Tools:

On the Webmaster Tools home page, click the site you want.
Click the gear icon , and then click Users & Site Owners.
Click Add a new user.
Type the email address of the user you want to add, and select the permission level you want. More information about user permissions.
Click Add.

If you’re wondering why you would add a user, this is a very important step if you have a developer or someone who is knowledgeable on how to fix the errors and read the reports in webmaster tools (like me). If you’re cool with fixing any errors in your webmaster tools account yourself. You will need to have access to be able to do 301 redirects on your site and change or modify your robots.txt file, preferably, ftp access.

Need someone to fix your errors on your website? Contact Me and I will set up a time to discuss what needs to be done on your site and help you fix it.

How to Set Up Google Webmaster Tools

February 19, 2015 Leave a Comment

Okay, so you have a new website or even an older one. Do know how Google is seeing your website? With Google Webmasters tools you can check the health of your website and keep your site from major errors with Google Search.

The most important part of having a webmaster tools account is to make sure your robots.txt file is searchable by Google and view any crawl errors and 404 errors. Those can be fixed easily by your developer who is knowledgeable in redirects and how to fix those errors in webmaster tools (like me).

How To Set Up a Google Webmaster Tools Account

Where to Sign Up for Google Webmaster Tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/. You need a Google account to do this.
After you sign in, click on add a site.
Verify that you’re the owner of the site by doing one of the following: (this step is where I have my clients send me the file to upload to their server).
1. Upload a file to your server
2. Add a meta tag to your website’s HTML
3. Add a new DNS record
4. Use your Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager account

Once you’ve done this, you can start to manage and monitor your website!

How To Find What’s Been Pinned From Your Website…

February 2, 2015 Leave a Comment

Ever wonder if any images from your site have been pinned onto Pinterest? Did you know there’s a quick & SUPER easy way to see what’s been pinned? Also, this is a wonderful way to track what is really popular on your site (other than with Google Analtyics- but that’s another post).

All you have to do is use this URL –> https://www.pinterest.com/source/yourwebsiteurl.com/ and replace the text that says ‘yourwebsiteurl’ with your own site url and then copy and paste that link into your browser. You’ll see the pins that have been made from your website! Easy!

You can find me on Pinterest at https://www.pinterest.com/designeditgirl/

How to Calculate Retail Sales Goals

November 13, 2014 Comments Off

Whether you’re an online retailer or you have a brick and mortar shop, figuring your daily sales goals is a must. This is an easy way to track what your daily sales are and compare it with your sales from last year. If you don’t have sales from the previous year, then you only need to figure how close (above or below) you are to your weekly goals.

I’m assuming that you’ve already figured out what your yearly sales goal is. If you haven’t, that is a must. These formulas are for online shops as well as brick and mortar shops. Read more “How to Calculate Retail Sales Goals” →

New Logo For Adelaide’s Houston

April 4, 2014 Leave a Comment

Post by Design Edit Studio.