It's been over four years since this website got a facelift, and it's overdue. I'm long past the light obsession with homesteading in Portugal that blossomed in 2020 as a result of early sobriety and the insecurities of the early Pandemic. I still keep up with many of the YouTube vlogs of expats in the back country of Central Portugal and the Algarve, but it's been a few years since I've spent time pouring over real estate listings of olive farms in Castelo Branco.
These days, I'm in the midst of a five-year plan to establish an online store that provides income by the time our youngest, Rowan, graduates from high school. I'm a creative guy, and so I wanted the business to have a creative quality. I developed LazyRiverDesignWorks, a store that uses print-on-demand and dropshipping to put my designs on t-shirts and whatnot and ship them. After learning a lot from getting the Lazy River up and flowing (so to speak), I applied those lessons to my second store, the noir-themed Big Shadows. All of this work was facilitated immensely by my use of the Ai image generator, Midjourney. At year three of the plan, I'm ready to start doing some marketing, and to this end I've been developing Ai video creation and editing skills. You can see many of my recent efforts at this website's Video page. Not long ago, I put $34 into boosting a post with a 90 second video of mine on Facebook for a couple of weeks, and the response was overwhelming - traffic at Big Shadows increased by over 900% during that window. I feel like I'm on the right track.
WhyTheAlgarve now is getting a look and feel that is more in line with my current goals. This website gets the bulk of my traffic, and I need to think of it as a soft landing place that delivers content (the blog will continue), but also redirects visitors to the two stores. So, a new colour scheme, new wallpapers, a Best of Blog section on the Home Page, and a complete revision of the Video page. Coming up is a make-over of the Sounds page and an update of the 3 year-old About page. I could also add another page to the site - that header menu has some room. We shall see if something occurs to me.
I should also mention that I will be keeping the Homestead Portugal page, and if anything making it a little more robust. After all, there's a significant portion of the traffic here that arrived because of one of my older Portugal oriented blog posts.
Stay tuned!
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