This week’s issue of The Crafted Webmaster newsletter went out yesterday, here’s a brief excerpt…

…So if someone wanted to know if you accepted credit cards, or if you did custom orders, or needed to know how to return a piece of work damaged in shipping…or wanted to know if you even accept returns…would they be able to find out easily on your web site? It’s not glamorous or exciting but that is information that you should have on your web site.

This week’s article is the first in a 4 part series of articles about writing terms, policies, and other boring legal stuff for your web site. In this first article, I’ll discuss how to write sales policies for your web site…what you should have, what would be a good idea to have, and what you might not thought of having…

If you would like to read the rest of this newsletter article about writing sales policies for your web site, you can sign up for the free weekly newsletter. Subscribing to the weekly newsletter is quick, easy, and best of all it’s free! To subscribe click here…you’ll receive a copy of this week’s article instantaneously.

If you’re a Mac OSX user, you’re probably familiar with the Dashboard Widgets feature…those nifty little programs that let you look up airplane flights, movie times, traffic reports, gas prices, and pretty much anything else you would want to have quick access to with a couple mouse clicks. A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Kuler, which is an online color palette tool by Adobe Systems. If your a Mac OSX user, you can now download Kuler’s Dashboard Widget that will let you see the Most Popular color scheme and even download the hex values for each particular theme. If you’re not a Mac OSX user, you can subscribe to Kuler’s RSS feed and get updates on the most popular color themes that way.

Today I was surfing around to find potential interviewees for an upcoming episode of my Crafting Voices podcast, when I landed on an artist’s site that actually hurt my eyes. (I’ve blurred out the name of the site to protect the guilty)

Now I suppose that this artist has pretty good work, but I could barely look at it because they had unfortunately designed their site with a bright red background and tiny little pictures…and to make matters worse, the links were in pale lavender. After a minute or two of looking around the site, I just had to leave because of the vast sea of red assaulting my eyes. And my eyes were still watery a few minutes after leaving the site.

Now if I really, really wanted to look at the site, I could have adjusted my monitor…and to be fair the site looked a little less bright on my PC’s monitor…but it was still uncomfortably bright…but how many of your visitors will be willing to adjust their monitors just to look at your site? In most cases they’ll flee to preserve their eyesight just like I did. So when choosing background colors or background images for your web site, remember these tips:

1. Avoid large blocks of very bright colors. Watch your reds, oranges, and particularly vibrant shades of blue or green. If your color palette includes bright colors, make sure that it’s not large expanses of unbroken color, break it up with text and picture to minimize the impact.

2. Avoid large busy patterns for a background. These also hurt the eyes and it’s a nightmare when you add text.

3. Avoid background colors that are too close to the color of the text. Low contrast between the text and the background makes your copy hard to read and strains the eyes. That also goes for active and visited hyperlinks.

4. Try to check the color of your background on different monitors. What looks sunny and perky on your monitor might be blinding on someone else’s

If there are some tips I might have missed, leave a comment and add yours!

Every day I’ll pick a Internet-related term and try to explain it in plain English. If you know of a term to you would like me translate from geek to English, let me know
Today’s term is a part of a series that focuses on Web 2.0 related terms

The term “podcast” is a mixture of the words “pod”, roughly referring to Apple’s popular “iPod” and “broadcasting”. Simply put, a podcast is a media file, like audio or video that’s transmitted over the Internet through an RSS feed. Just like you can subscribe to an RSS feed for a blog and get updates about a web site, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of a podcast and get audio and video updates. While the most popular types of files that are sent are usually audio and video files, you can also send PDF files, graphics, or really any other type of file.

Now just because the term refers to Apple’s iPod, that doesn’t mean that you need an iPod to subscribe to and receive the contents of a podcast. Any computer that has an internet connection and some kind of media player like QuickTime, iTunes, or Windows Media Player can play the contents of a podcast. If you have a portable MP3 player, you can transfer your podcasts on to it and play them wherever you want. If you want to subscribe to a podcast, you’ll need something similar to an RSS feed reader called a podcatcher. iPodder is a popular podcatcher and iTunes also has the ability not play podcasts but to subscribe to them as well.

So why are podcasts so nifty? Well, because people can subscribe to podcasts and get new podcasts automatically without visiting a web site, it’s perfect for creating regular music and talk shows with multiple episodes. Anyone with a computer, an internet connection, and a microphone can create their own podcast. There are thousands of podcasts available from music shows, talk shows, educational shows, instructional videos, just about any topic you can think of. While most people creating podcasts are regular folks, big media organizations like National Public Radio and CNN are also launching their own podcasts.

Interested in checking out a podcast? There are a number of podcast directories available on the internet, the most popular include, Podcast Alley, iPodder.org, and the iTunes Music store also has section on podcasts.

Starting a blog to help promote yourself and your work can be a good strategy, but it’s pretty hard to know what to write about. You should of course be writing about your work and yourself, but one can only write about themselves for so long and customers have an even shorter attention span. So what’s a would-be artist/blogger to do?

Chris Garrett’s answer is to create “Killer Flagship Content”.

I ran across Chris Garrett’s blog after I downloaded his ebook, “Killer Flagship Content: How to Create and Promote Truly Compelling Blog Resources”. In his book, Chris describes his “Killer Flagship Content” concept like this:

…Walk into a shopping mall and at the ends or in the corners are usually huge big-name stores. These are anchor units, the flagships of the mall. For many people they are a destination in their own right, or a big part of the decision process in choosing where to go. Attracting these big stores can make or break a mall, without them the customer numbers aren’t as great and the smaller stores go elsewhere…

So how can we apply this to professional blogging?

What is your blog known for? Is there anything that you could point to that your blog really owns? It could be a single post, a series of posts, an over-arching “message”. Now think about your favourite blogs. I am sure you go back to these blogs because of good quality regularly updated content but is there also a reference or series that you can refer to again and again?

This is “flagship content”. It is an effective way of creating a powerful blog property using a core of content that you build around…

As an artist, how can you apply this to you and your work? Let’s say you’re an artist working in glass, what kind of information can be a “flagship” to your customers? Chris’ ebook lists several ideas including:

1. Your biggest tip- what is the one thing that customers and beginning glass collectors need to know about buying and collecting art glass?

2. FAQs- what kind of questions are customers always asking you and your fellow glass artists? Can you answer these questions on your blog?

3. Message- are you trying to send out a bigger message in your art? Perhaps you are creating your art to advance a political view or to point to a social issue. Your blog can also be a resource in help people learn more or even do something about it.

These are just to name a few…

I read a lot of blogs and I must say that the ones I enjoy reading the most are the ones that have information that can be classified as “Flagship Content”. One I can think of right off the top of my head is Grace Bonney’s blog Design*Sponge. Grace Bonney runs an online store called Design*Sponge shop that showcases the work of independent designers and artists. Now while she does use her blog to make announcements about what’s new in the store and in the business, much of her blog focuses on her discovering the works of new designers. Every day there’s at least 3 or 4 posts of her featuring the work of a new independent designer (some of whom shows up in her online store), or of a new trend she’s noticed in design, and every so often there’s a post about some design event that her readers might be interested in.

During the holidays she creates a series of shopping guides that focuses only on the works of independent designers. She happens to have a special love for letterpress, so she’s created a Letterpress Guide that has the contact information of small, independent letterpress artists and print companies. She even has a guest blog where every couple weeks a new designer writes about their design picks. I read her blog every day and always find something that interests me and more than once I’ve written in my own jewelry blog about a new designer she’s discovered. Now when the holidays roll around and I’m looking for a nice, unique gift, or if I want to get some invitations printed in letterpress…who am I likely to turn to for information?

That in a nutshell is the point of Chris Garrett’s ebook.

Chris’ ebook is very readable and at about 17 pages, you can read through it very quickly. But don’t be fooled by the size…it’s a very information packed 17 pages. The best part is that you can download his ebook for free if you subscribe to his blog…which is another blog that I find myself reading every day.

Check out Chris’s blog at http://www.chrisg.com/