Booths
Originally uploaded by rpongsaj.
If you do shows as your main or as a major source of income, you know that the upcoming holiday show season can be the make or break time for you. Just like most retail businesses make the majority of their sales and profits during the holidays, most show artists make the bulk of their money during the holidays.

But did you know that if you have a website, there are some things that you can do to help jump start your sales? In this week’s newsletter article, I list eight ways you can use your website and the Internet to help increase your craft show sales. To read the article sign up for the Crafted Webmaster Newsletter for free here:
http://www.craftedweb.com/subscribe.html

I love discovering new blogs to read. I recently started reading a great blog for indie designers called “Try This at Home“. It’s a fabulous little blog with designer interviews, advice on how to build an indie business, and various craft tutorials. While exploring the blog, I found this post called “Build a Better Website” in which the blog author, Maddy lists a couple of suggestions on how artists and designers can better design their websites. I love that this is written from the point of view of a typical web surfer. Advice includes:

3. Don’t use blink or marquee tags, or use a large block of h1, h2, or other headline text…

I remember when the web was crawling with this…yetch!

4. Try to keep your typefaces down to three, maximum…

Unfortunately the web is still crawling with this…

6. Sketch out a clear and concise way to organize your information before you get started, and always consider how YOU would use the site if you were just a visitor, not the owner…

Out of this list, the absolute best piece of advice is #6. So many people just jump right into the process of designing their sites with out even figuring out what pages they really need and how they are supposed to connect to each other. This is just like building a house without putting in a sturdy foundation. Everyone knows that if the foundation isn’t right…the rest of your house is screwed up. It’s easier to create a good structure for your website at the beginning than it is for you to fix a messed up one. Why? Two words…”search engines”. Remember that people aren’t the only visitors to your website. Once search engines find your website and list all of the pages of your site in their databases, any change you make in how you name your pages, how you link to them, and what pages you have on your site can cause confusion when your site comes up in search engine results. So one day when you decide to fix a badly structured website any links you may have from search engines or from other websites may disappear if you’re not careful.

So if you’re building a brand new website…get the foundation right the first time…and stay away from that flashing text.

Be sure to read the read of the “Build a Better Website” post at the “Try This At Home” blog.

For the past couple months, I’ve been working with this artist and his girlfriend on rebuilding a website for his artwork. Progress on the site has been pretty slow, which has been frustrating for both the artist and his girlfriend. It’s frustrating for the artist because his girlfriend is constantly pushing him to get things done so I can proceed with the rebuilding of the site. It’s frustrating for the girlfriend because her boyfriend’s busy with trying to get everything done “perfectly”. He has to figure out the perfect price for each piece of art, he has to Photoshop each image so that everything lines up just so, and each description must be flawless.

In a nutshell, girlfriend wants the artist to just “get ‘er done”. Artist just wants to “get ‘er perfect”.

And there I am…stuck in the middle.

Did I mention that this site’s been in flux for about 2 years? Did I mention that I’m the third designer to touch the thing?

I’m blogging about this situation to bring up two points…it’s obvious to me that this guy could care less about this website or about selling his work. (I guess my first clue was when he leaned over to me and whispered “I really could care less about this website” after his girlfriend stepped out of the room) He’s being pushed by his girlfriend who out of love for him and belief in his talent is harassing him into building a website he doesn’t care about. I desperately want to tell this lady to back off. The website was doomed before it even began. If her guy doesn’t care if the thing is built, does she think he cares if it’s promoted…or even maintained?

Point #1- If you don’t care about selling or promoting your work, a website is a waste of time and money. Don’t let anyone talk you into building a website if you’re not willing to do what it takes to maintain it and promote it over the long haul. If you just want a place to show your work, get a free blog…get a free account at MySpace or IndiePublic…use the free web page that your ISP gives you with your internet access. Don’t take the step of paying for a website or hiring someone to create it.

It was also obvious to me why this artist isn’t interested in selling his artwork. Dude’s a raving perfectionist. His work must be perfect and if he has to do this stupid website…by God it will also be perfect so he never has to touch it again…which brings me to the second point…

Point #2- Striving for a perfect website is a good way to never launch it. This man was sweating bullets because he was trying to crop pictures of his work so that everything lined up perfectly (pictures he took himself…for someone so concerned with getting perfect alignment I was amazed that he didn’t get a photographer to shoot his artwork). I tried to tell him tactfully that the only person who really cared about his painstaking efforts at precise symmetry was himself. At the end of the day, his average customer could care less. They’ll be too busy looking at the work itself to notice or care if the pictures lined up perfectly.

Now of course, this could just be his passive-aggressive way of pushing back against building the website…but I run across a lot of artists who get stuck in this “It has to look perfect” trap. I’m certainly not suggesting that you shouldn’t care about getting your website right the first time. But there’s a difference between being thorough and being obsessive. Carefully checking over your website to make sure that there’s no spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, broken links, and making sure that your images are the highest possible quality is reasonable. Taking two to three weeks to write and rewrite your artist statement is not. At a certain point you have to say “good” is “good enough”.

Remember that your website is not like a business card or a brochure where once you print it it’s set in stone. If a typo manages to get past your proofreading, you can fix it…just like that! Got newer and better pictures of your work? Swap out the old ones for the new. Your website is a constant work in progress and you will always be adding to it and improving it.

One of my current clients told me that learning that the design of her website was not all about being perfect was one of the most expensive and time consuming lessons that she’s learned. Make sure that this is a lesson that you don’t have to learn.

I’m writing this post to keep from whacking myself in the forehead with a mallet. I just spent about an hour troubleshooting a problem with a client over the phone. After one solution after the other failed to work, at the 60 minute mark, I finally called a timeout until this afternoon. My client naturally wanted to keep going until the problem was solved, but I just said, “Tim (not his real name), we’re not getting anywhere. It’s time to step away from the computer.”

Building and maintaining a website can be somewhat tedious and frustrating at times. Computers crash, files get corrupted and deleted, and tech support may not always be useful. Clients are always asking me if it’s normal to get overwhelmed and frustrated with their websites. It is normal to run into a problem or two that makes you wish that you’ve never heard of the Internet…the trick is to not to let it drive you nuts or discourage you.

Recently, a client of mine called me up after she’s had one problem after the other in getting her website going and asked me what to do about her latest difficulty. First thing I told her is to take a break from her computer for awhile so she could calm down and clear her head.

“I can’t take a break!”, she practically shrieked, “I have a deadline! I have to get this done and I’ve wasted too much time on this problem already!”

I pointed out to her that she was now so frustrated that she couldn’t see straight and that anything else that she does probably wouldn’t solve the problem any faster and may actually make it worse. But if she took a break for an hour or so, she could come back to the problem with a clear head. Chances are she’d solve the problem much more quickly than if she just continued to plug away on it. You know how your old clunky computer runs better after you shut everything down and reboot? Well, your mind works the same way. Sometimes the best solution to a problem that’s driving you crazy is to just walk away for awhile.

So the next time you run into a problem that makes you want to toss your computer over a railing, turn it off and go for a walk…eat lunch…eat dinner…get a massage…do some yoga…create some artwork…or leave it until tomorrow. Take some time to shut down and reboot…

…and stay away from that mallet.

Got a couple interesting comments on the Convert PDFs for Free post and one reader, Melissa, made this suggestion for another free PDF converter software:

Another option is PrimoPDF (http://www.primopdf.com/)- It installs as a print driver and enables you to convert anything that you can print. I have used it for a couple of years and love it. And it’s free.

Thanks for the tip Melissa!