Keeping Control of Your Website…lessons from San Diego

It’s great to be back home from San Diego…although I wish I could bottle up the weather and bring it back here…90+ degrees with 75% humidity here today in Virginia…yikes! On my last day in San Diego, I got to walk around in the Gaslamp district with all of the great sidewalk restaurants and neat little stores.

As luck would have it, one of the shops I walked into was owned by leather artist, John Allen Woodward. He makes some of the most beautiful leather belts, wallets, watchbands, and other leather accessories. In addition to the shop, he also has a small studio in the back of the store and he spent some time showing me some of the different types of leather he worked with; lizard, calf, and the more exotic sharkskin and stingray leathers. If you’ve never seen stingray leather before, you should check out his website. Stingray leather has one of the most fascinating textures I’ve ever seen.

While we were talking we got on the subject of building websites. John had previously had a design company make his first website, but ran into a problem when it came to maintaining his website. He would have a picture of new work that he wanted to post on the website, or maybe he needed to change some copy or some prices and he would have to go through the design company to have those changes made….and they were very, very slow. They were often busy with other clients and didn’t have time to get to the changes done quickly or other priorities kept getting in the way. So that changes that should only take a couple minutes could take days to get done.

John is now currently in the process of building a new website and he told me that the most important lesson that he learned from his first site is to always keep control of it. One mistake that a lot of artists make, he told me, was thinking that they can hire someone to build the website and then they can sit back while the sales roll in. They don’t make any updates to their websites or their web designers are too busy to make the changes they request. They don’t promote their websites. Then after two, three, or four months, they’re wondering why their sites aren’t making any sales.

You took the words right out of my mouth, John!

Remember that a website is always a work in progress, and like your artwork you’re always improving it, keeping it up to date with new pictures, new products, more information about yourself and your work. Most importantly, if you hire a web designer to build your site, have them build it so it’s easy for you to make updates yourself. Like John discovered, once your site is built, your designer may not always have the time or the inclination to make updates to it when you need it. You should always have the ability to make changes to existing pages, the ability to add new pages to your website, and the ability to upload these changes to your website. These three skills will give you the power to have total control over your site. Don’t let your website be hostage to someone else’s priorities and schedule.

Thanks to John Allen Woodward for letting me talk his ear off in his shop. If you’re ever in the San Diego area, check out his shop at 431 J Street in the Gaslamp Quarter. And even if you don’t make it to CA, you can check out his website at: http://www.johnallenwoodward.com/. You can buy some of his fantastic leather pieces online.