Momentum!

I’ve wanted to write a post for almost a week now, but every time I start, I stop. I want to tell you guys about the snow! (24″ of goodness!!!!) and the huge concrete pad by the bath house (future home of RAGGEDedge Gear and the garage we can’t live another year without!) and Spring and garden planning and my new obsession with doodling. But my writing brain is not thinking Hawk-Mo Hotwire and it all comes out as boring gobbly goop. My writing brain is stuck over at RAGGEDedge. The good news is that its in high gear over there. I’ve been spitting good website verbiage out of my fingertips the way unicorns poop rainbows. Which I hear is often and plentiful.

This website thing has definitely been one of those projects where we had to start somewhere, but at the start, we didn’t know anything, everything was really hard to do, took forever, and we did it all wrong. Last week, rolling into this weekend, we finally have some momentum. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel and it is not a train. Instead, its a glorious glorious website that has far exceeded our expectations of what we thought was possible with our meager budget and self taught skills (plus our precious webguy Josh, we ❤ you).

I read most of a book on branding in today’s world called The Brand Gap that really gave me a new perspective on what it is we were after, and better how to go about showing it. If I had to summarize it all, I would say that it comes down to creating a feeling. We marketers think the consumer wants facts and features, but really what they want is to feel good. When I thought about it, I realized that this is true, even for me, when I’m shopping for something. That was a huge eye opener and has helped reshape a lot of our product descriptions and static page text. I give that book credit for single handedly getting the momentum flowing on the site. I want to show it to you guys SO bad, but we aren’t quite ready. We thought we’d be ready by Monday, but alas, we need a couple more days to tie up loose ends before the unveiling.

Sneak peak screen shots of the kind of awesome I’m talking about though..

Our actual Home Page:

About Us page: (if you click on the picture it’s actually big enough to read the text, should you care to do so)
Materials Page:
I have coined the term “Small Batch Built” to describe our gear (rather then handmade), so I wrote a page about it:

And there is so much more!! But I have to leave you something to explore when it actually goes live. Needless to say, we’re really stoked about this. Adding to the new website excitement, we ran into some good luck (aka Universe magic) a couple weeks ago, and unknowingly sold a wallet to someone in the PR business, who was more then impressed.  He pitched us, I very honestly told him we were bootstrappers, broke, and in no way able to afford what I’m sure his services cost, and he came back and made us a proposal we can’t refuse. So, for the next 6 months we’ll be working with a PR firm to gain media attention for RAGGEDedge!!! It’s the first time we’ve ever done anything like this, and we’re nervous, but we’ve gotten a really good vibe from this guy, so we’re going to give him a chance. We look at is an investment in ourselves, one that we know we need to do one way or another. New websites, no matter how shiny, don’t gain attention by themselves.

I’ll leave you all with my favorite of the snowstorm pics:

The rooster that wouldn’t cross the snow to go home…


The paths to and fro across the property were hilarious.

The chicken that slept in her own personal igloo the first night.

And me, rocking out on Bogart, plowing in a blizzard.

About mudly

Mud is main blog writer extraordinaire, picture guru, and the garden and adventure instigator. She loves to cook, but doesn’t much like following a recipe. She also loves typewriters, the color turquoise, and wearing tie dye with stripes. And she dorks out on permies.com while dreaming up and planning her next garden.

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