Websites are great for craftspeople to sell work if you have repeatable items. They are not so easy for one off pieces as creating a webpage with photos and details takes time this is OK if your pieces are hundreds of pounds but for £20 piece it can take as long to update all the details as it took to make.
Blogs are much quicker and easier to do and more to the point once set up can be updated by someone with very little technical knowhow (like me) So Nicola has just replaced my bowl gallery pages with a blog. I had imagined this just being a link to open the blog in a new window but somehow by cleverly tweaking the HTML code she has embeded the blog in the website so it all looks seamless.
The beauty of this is that I was able to upload a range of the more unusual bowls that I have in stock in minutes, within 48 hours several had sold and I was able in seconds to mark the ones which were sold.
https://www.robin-wood.co.uk/bowl-gallery.htm
Web 2 software, things like blogs, forums etc makes it much easier for non technical people to publish information on the web, I don’t need to know how to fix the engine in order to drive a car and now I don’t have to understand HTML in order to post stuff on the web. There are various websites popping up which allow craftspeople to use this sort of software to upload their work for sale, etsy, folksy, misi etc but they all take a commission on sales. I know several friends that use blogs to promote their craftwork and post pictures of work, pots as they come out of the kiln or whatever, the problem is unless there is a price on the work it makes it difficult to buy and blogs are chatty places where I don’t necesarily want to make a sales pitch. Also pictures of work rapidly get lost amongst other blog posts so a dedicated seperate blog only with work for sale seemed a good answer and it seems to be working for me.
I have to say I took the idea from a fellow blogger who I follow the potter Euan Craig. This is his new work gallery blog. http://euan-craig.blogspot.com/
And whilst you visit Euan be sure to have a look at this blog post of 25th November which is just a wonderful heartwarming story.
http://euancraig.blogspot.com/2009/11/coming-of-age.html
The other main advantage of the blog format is the built-in RSS feed. Don't forget to mention that people can now subscribe to your bowl feed at https://www.robin-wood.co.uk/rss.xml and have new updates come directly to their feed reader.
Wow I never thought of that. I so often get emails from folk asking what bowls I have in stock or if I can send pics when I have something new. That is the answer.
Robin great info.you told me about the same thing a while back in a e-mail and i have started my own blog. it was real easy and i like being able to post a picture anytime i feel.by the way heres the adress. http://2 handswoodcraft.blogspot.com/
Very tantalising Robin. Could you persuade Nicola to give a brief overview of how to sew a blog into a web site? I guess it can't be a lot more than a link to a dedicated blog that's not used for anything else? But very effective, excellent idea, I've been shy of selling from my site, but this looks like a real goer.
BTW Netvibes is an excellent way to subscribe to blogs, it looks like this: http://www.netvibes.com/bodgerlaw#Blogs .Surprisingly easy to set up too (definitely no knowledge of HTML required!) I have to confess an interest here, my son Will works for Netvibes in New York, but still, I find it a good way of keeping up with quite a handful of blogs. You get your private pages as well where you have sole access to what ever you are following, as well as e.g. live updates on the weather forecast!
It's all there on the help pages of blogger Richard, but it's not that straight forward. Firstly you need to change the publishing settings of your blog so it uploads to where your web site is hosted using FTP. Then you need to change the page template to include all the layout you have on your regular web pages. I did this by cutting and pasting the code from a web page across into the blogger template, but it takes a fair understanding of what the code means and how it works to be able to do that.
Also, if you want people to be able subscribe by email as well as RSS, you can set up a Feedburner account and re-route your feed through that. That's how the email subscriptions work on the HCA site.