If you’re in the midst of building a website or you know that you’ll be needing help with building one, you may be thinking about hiring someone to help you out. But do you really need to hire someone? Or is this a job that you can do yourself?

In this week’s newsletter article, I’m including an excerpt from my upcoming ebook, “How to Hire the World’s Greatest Web Designer“, where I discuss the four situations when your really need to consider professional help for your website. To read the article sign up for the Crafted Webmaster Newsletter for free here: http://www.craftedweb.com/subscribe.html

Ahh…the summer’s almost over (although you wouldn’t know it by the 100 degree weather we’ve been having here in Virginia), the kids are returning to school and before you know it the holiday decorations will be appearing at the local shopping centers and malls preparing for the busiest shopping season of the year.

So why I am talking about this now when it’s still August? Because now is the time for you to start getting ready for the holidays.

Did you know that online spending between November and December was over $24.6 billion last year? And that figure is expected to grow!

You can benefit online holiday sales by preparing now. How? By….

• Creating incentives for “early birds” and “last minute procrastinators”
• Giving your customers a reason to do their shopping on your website and not the local mall
• By making your website a great place to do holiday shopping

In this week’s newsletter article, I list ways you can start preparing your website to capture holiday sales. To read the article sign up for the Crafted Webmaster Newsletter for free here: http://www.craftedweb.com/subscribe.html

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

The subject of artists selling on the web is a topic that’s almost as old as the Internet itself. The subject has reared its head on the American Craft Forum a couple weeks ago an artist described how she eliminated the retail section of her website to ease the concerns of the galleries that carry her work.

The topic brings up some pretty strong reactions on both sides of the issue. Naturally many artists want to use the Internet to promote themselves and perhaps to capture sales from all over the world. Just as naturally gallery owners are concerned as to how this effects their bottom line. Some owners are going as far as to refusing to buy from artists who have an online retail presence. Rick Siegal, a speaker for the Rosen Group’s Buyer’s Market wrote a blog post concerning this issue and got some pretty harsh comments about it. One comment went as far as calling wholesalers who also have an online retail branch as “greedy” and “stupid”. Ouch!

Meanwhile, some artists are skeptical of galleries who don’t want artists to have their own retail site, but will also ask artists if they can include work on their online store…

The problem I have is that stores do not want me to sell online retail…but many times the next thing out of their mouth is “can I put your things up on our website”?

Is this not the same thing in a way? They are competing with other bricks & morter stores that are thousands of miles away. They have no issue with it as long as the $$ is going into their pocket I guess. I find this very interesting.

As someone who blogs about how artists can use the Internet to promote themselves you can guess my opinion on the matter. The bottom line is that the Internet is here, it’s not going anywhere, and it’s already to changed the the arts industry in ways we couldn’t imagine 10 years ago, and it will continue to do so. The next generation of craft buyers will grow up using the Internet to do everything; communicating, making friends, finding a place to live, paying bills, finding a job, working, and shopping…and they are not going to wait for us to catch up. The best thing to do is to figure out how to use the Internet so that it benefits both artists and gallery owners…not to fight against it.

In this week’s newsletter I outlined a number of ways in which individual artists can sell online without negatively impacting their relationship with their gallery accounts. To read the article sign up for the Crafted Webmaster Newsletter for free here:
http://www.craftedweb.com/subscribe.html

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.