How to Remain Lovely: When Your Website is Stolen

Ah, Lovelies. I don't even know where to begin this post.

The other day I woke up and realized that our website, Lovely at Your Side, wasn't working. Well, it wasn't working the whole day...and we thought maybe it was a server issue, or something. We had Andrey working on the case all day (it's his real life job, website stuff), and still nothing. Finally, when Jenny called Go Daddy (our old server site), they told us what was up:

Someone had bought www.lovelyatyourside.com right out from under us.

Let me explain something. The term "Lovely at Your Side" was invented by moi. I was sitting on my bed, in my mom's house, and it came to me. We had been talking about starting a website for a long time, and it just happened in my head, this name. It had a few meanings: Jenny and I are always by each other's sides, we're lovely...it just stuck. To be fair, I thought of "Lovely By Your Side" and my grandmother said the "at" was better.

Now, when we were switching registrars from Go Daddy to another registrar (they were shady about their business practices), something didn't transfer correctly, and someone (a "private buyer") apparently was waiting for this moment, and on the day that the domain name (apparently) expired on Go Daddy (though, they weren't our registrar, so it's confusing), this person bought our name.

My name.

My heart.

Seriously.

This was something we've been working on together, and loving, and building for over three years. Then, someone came along and stole it. It's pretty upsetting. We keep saying it's like a bad breakup.

Now, that person is using our name for some weird wedding site. It's heartbreaking. I contacted them, to no avail.

So, what happens when life hands you sour lemons?

You add sugar (or splenda, or date sugar, or whatever) and make some awesome lemonade...right?

Well, we cannot express to you, our dear dear readers, how much you mean to us, and we just wanted to say, we aren't going anyway. Lovely is our empire. Lovely is our brand. Lovely is us!

We're going to take some time to re-think, re-brand, and re-invent. We have some awesome ideas in the works. Let's just say that The Lovely Sisters are here to stay, and we're going to rock a new Lovely website!

We're upset for many reasons; we feel like a piece of our identity has been stolen and taken; all of our past links are now not useable...we feel so let down.

For now, however, posting will be light, but we love you all, and we're here! You can find us at our blogspot, for now, and soon, somewhere else that is Lovely and wonderful.

Thank you for ALL the love and support. We'll be back!

XOXO O&J