5 Website Dilemmas for Artisans
As an artisan or craftsman, you are the best person to develop your own
website. You know your work, your target market and the image you want to
portray better than anyone. Giving control of your site to a professional
developer may sound great, but you will need constant updates, excellent images
and a consistent marketing program to bring your website to the top and keep it
there.
Dilemma 1 - Develop Your Site
Setting up your website can seem almost overwhelming. If
you take it step by step from planning to publishing, you can
publish a great website.
Plan the goals for your site carefully. Many people have
only the goal of selling from the site. A website can be used
to aid in customer service, public relations and image enhancement
or to introduce new pieces, introduce your work to new people,
provide information to your customers and much more. Choose
and secure your domain name. Be sure that you are the
administrative contact for the domain name you secure so you can
access your choice of website hosting. From goal setting to
securing a domain, you will find a site host that can further your
goals, chose your HTML editing software, develop content, photograph
your pieces, edit your images, design the site, test and retest your
links forms and publish the site.
Dilemma 2 - Market Your Site
After your site is online and you are sure that it is
functioning correctly and all of the "bugs" have been found, you
need to attract visitors. Be sure you have done all you can to
provide the best search engine optimization (SEO) for your site in
the form of keywords, alternate text, meta tags, clean code and good
content. Introduce the site to your online groups, post the
site on directories, submit it to the search engines, write articles
and develop a solid linking strategy. This is an ongoing task.
Dilemma 3 - Maintain the Site
A website is a living document that is never done. Repeat
visitors become customers and if you have something new on your site
for them along with a subscription to an email update, you can get
those return visitors that are so valuable. You will need a
consistent program of updates and additions in content as well as
maintaining an updated catalog of your products. If you are
having problems finding new content for your site, check some of
article marketing sites for content that you can use free just for
the inclusion of links and information about the authors.
Dilemma 4 - Images
For an artisan or craftsmen, this is the deal breaker. You
are working with one-of-a-kind or limited edition items that need
the best of images. They need to accurately represent your
product. Showing the piece from several angles is helpful for
your site visitor. People at an art show will pick up a piece
and turn it over in their hands. Turn it over for them.
You need good lighting, a camera with a macro and white balance
control, a tripod and lots of practice and learning to get those
images, but it is all worth it. You will also need image
editing software to crop and resize your images and correct color as
needed. This is a job best done by you. A graphic artist
may be able to make your images sing, but he might also change your
pastels to neon in one click of the mouse.
Dilemma 5 - Time For It All
You are an artisan - not a website developer. Your main
work is to create your pieces. A website can and will take
over your time. It is like a child. It always needs
something. Setting up a task list for your site and a time
block to work with that list can go a long way to helping you get
your products created as well as maintaining your website. You
know when your best creative time is. Use that for producing
your work and try to limit your website maintenance and marketing to
other times of the day.
A website is a large project, but if you approach it step by step,
you will soon have a site that works for you in may ways. You will
probably find that the development of the site is about 25% of the work,
maintenance is another 25% and marketing the site is the other 40%. If
you produce just a few pages at a time you will soon have a full site.
Louise Coulson © 2007
Used with permission of the author
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