HiveComb

I'm not quite sure if the content of this post violates the rules of this community, but oh well, only one way to find out!

Scammers tend to prey upon desperate people, and I confess that I am a desperate person. I opened my e-commerce website over two years ago, in October 2019, and I feel as though I've been beating my head against a wall ever since. I didn't expect to see results immediately, despite already having a few customers lined up (or so I thought). Of course, we all know exactly what happened three months later, and as a result, my steadily growing income from my already established e-commerce ventures was completely wiped out, thanks to everyone being... well, unless you've been living in a cave for the past two years, you already know. 2020 was my worst year for e-commerce, so I survived by buying and selling big pharma stocks (and had I the foresight to buy Novavax stock, I'd be a millionaire by now). 2021 saw some slight recovery on the e-commerce front, but my website's performance was still abysmal. I sold a single item in 2020 (@holovision bought a blueprint and shared it here) and only three in 2021. Three months ago, however, I was finally approached by a SEO/SMO company that offered to help promote my website. They even set up a Facebook page for my business, which has proven to be a huge boon. Now, however, I'm starting to get worried. The company has offered to build me a new website, but the minimum price tag of $4000 was a bit steep (since I don't have that kind of cash on hand anyway after already spending that amount on their services, and my landlord/business partner isn't going to cover my arse forever), and now I'm scrambling to reorganise my website to make it much more functional. Unfortunately, just as I was in the process of reorganising my Soviet tank catalogue, this message appeared in my inbox:

I am seriously concerned about this. I know that I'm not the greatest web designer (mostly because I'm an amateur, I can count the number of websites I've made on one hand), so they may very well be correct in saying that my site's design is so bad that no amount of fiddling within the confines of WordPress's StoreFront template will make it appealing to potential customers. On the other hand, I have no idea what a "professional" website is supposed to look like. I assume that a company such as Automattic (which owns WordPress) would create templates that facilitate the creation of websites that people will visit and stay at for a while, so it ought to be possible to simply change the visual design (which is terrible in my case) and fix the problem, but I simply don't know. What do you think? @taliakerch, since your 3D print shop is more successful than mine while being only half as old, I would especially value your input.

On a related note, I tried to share an update here on Hive, but I couldn't get SteemPress to connect, so my latest blog post from my website isn't showing up here. The plugin settings suggest that it's a problem on the WordPress end, but I'd like to exhaust all other options first. @thelogicaldude, since I'm fairly certain it was you who told me about SteemPress in the first place, do you know what's going on there?