We Need To Talk!

Hey everyone! This is more of a personal/emotional episode than any I have published before. Having debated with myself whether I should post such personal content on the blog and in the podcast over many days, I have now come to the decision to share all of this.

Reflecting

As the end of the year, or better the new year is approaching quickly, it is time for me not so much to look back but more towards the future, making plans and re-evaluating my goals. A lot has changed for me in the past months, and I might have left you confused by moving the podcast to a new website. Therefore I want to sit down and talk about a few things that led to this decision, what I am planning and where I might take things regarding retouching.

I Normally Do Not Talk About This Stuff!

First of all, this is hard for me to speak out in public about the plans I have made which puts me under a lot of pressure to deliver results and to reach my goals. But more I fear openly talking about what did not work for me, where I failed and to be held accountable. It is not something that comes naturally to me. But I guess that is my responsibility now.

I don’t even know where to start because there are so many gears moving in my life. I just know you might have the same questions as I had.

So, let me get into all of what happened in the past 2 years, many decisions and happenings behind curtains.

Let’s talk about moving the website!

By the time this episode is out, all the traffic is being redirected from edgeworldretouch.com to boutiqueretouching.com. Some links are dead as I have tried to update content, streamline URLs and so on. It was just me missing out on planning this properly. Over time I will only discover the broken links and manually sort them out. If you know about SEO, you might now also guess that this might have already cost me quite some traffic, possibly Google penalties, too. And that definitely is the case.

How Edgeworld Retouch started

But let me start way earlier in the past to explain how Edgeworld Retouch came to be, what I was not happy with and what contributed to my decisions to let it die off.

The Website

I had started with the domain edgeworld.de. Never had I real plans with the website nor was I thinking about putting a retouching portfolio up there. I am not quite sure, maybe I had the idea to sell t-shirts with that domain. Not that I knew anything about an online business back then.

I might have briefly talked about this in one or the other podcast episode that I once took courses on web design. While taking these classes, I had to work with Photoshop and eventually noticed that I liked playing around with photos much more over editing code. So I did more of it.

The website/domain was there long before I started retouching and knowing what to do with it.

The Start In Retouching

Long story short, as I did more editing, I found this thing called high-end retouching. Fascinated by what I have seen I was captured by the perfection in images that I have never discovered before. I wanted to learn this! So so badly!

Then I started probably like everyone else: not knowing where to start!

I have spent countless nights trying to figure this out. Have watched a few tutorials here and there but mostly, being so technical and analytical, I had the need to figure things out myself,