March 15th, 2007 at 4:49 am
A successful web site for your jewellery business
The information here is priceless. There are secrets that the web companies won’t tell you.
Mark covers areas such as SEO, web design, stock photography, creating a banner and your first steps to starting a website from scratch.
There’s a lot to take in here so use the titles below to jump to the questions that interest you
I am a jewellery designer with a limited budget. I have great photographs of my work already in hand. I want to sell my goods online - should I pay someone to make a web site, and if so how much should I spend? What are my first steps?
How do I design a great banner or logo without expensive graphics packages?
What should a modern website look like?
What are the easy ways to make my site stand out from all the others?
What’s your top tips on search engine optimization and what is it?
How long should I spend marketing my site per day to start generating sales & where are the best places to do so?
Is using MySpace / Blogging a good alternative?
I am a jewellery designer with a limited budget. I have great photographs of my work already in hand. I want to sell my goods online - should I pay someone to make a web site, and if so how much should I spend? What are my first steps?
This depends if you have any skills or knowledge at making web sites, the time and funds you have available, and if you’re prepared to undertake this job. There are systems and software out there enabling you to create a web site very easily without any technical knowledge whatsoever – but you’ll pay for this ‘turn-key’ functionality. On the other hand, you can design and create something very personal to your style – but you’ll have to have the technical expertise. Assuming limited technical knowledge, the options are:
- Pay for a ‘turn-key’ solution – generally, these will include the domain name, hosting, sometimes even some promotion, a shopping cart and all that entails, your e-mail addresses, etc. You will often have to pay for anything ‘outside of the box’ that doesn’t fit within their package, and this could include paying for technical support – so shop around. You won’t have to deal with the dirty business of domain registration, hosting, editing files, etc – but you will be paying for that privilege
- Register the domain yourself, find hosting yourself, and find a decent package that is geared up for what you need. This will typically involve an open-source (free) package such as the popular OsCommerce shopping cart system. It is relatively easy to get going – but does require some basic knowledge of the Internet and web sites, and can be slightly daunting to a complete beginner. You will have to sort out hosting and a domain name – although you can often purchase these together. It will be cheaper than a ‘turn-key’ solution, but you’ll pay for it in time. If you’ve got Internet experience then this is a superb choice – just give yourself plenty of time, shop around for good deals, and read the small print – for instance, if you purchase a domain/hosting package and decide to leave at any point, are you tied in? What will they charge, etc? A domain usually costs around £3 / year for a .co.uk and £6 / year for a .com – hosting usually around £30 - £60 a year, sometimes with relatively cheap extras such as shopping cart. If you’re putting an open-source package on to your site, make sure your host supports it: most OS packages are written using PHP and MySQL, so make sure these are both supported!
- Pay someone to do the entire site for you. This will cost the most, but require you to do the least. The best part of this is that you can get some good solid advice from professionals, and they can guide you through any problems you may encounter. Prices vary enormously – from a small one-man business/hobbyist/designer offering web sites to a large international company. They have advantages and disadvantages; a small business will most likely give you a better deal, will go the extra mile to help, and be more personal; the bigger company may be more reliable, have a good reputation, and perhaps offer some powerful software as part of the package. Again, shop around – but you’re looking for a very small to medium sized company for this. It doesn’t cost thousands of pounds to create a web site – in fact it can be done from as little as £150 – but allocate a budget higher than the quoted cost in case something goes wrong. Typically £300 - £1000 for a small company is the norm
How do I design a great banner or logo without expensive graphics packages?
Well, there are free programs you can use – the most well known and fully-featured being G.I.M.P (http://www.gimp.org/) but this can often be tricky to learn how to use, and unless you’re prepared to put in the time I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this. If you’re willing to do the actual graphics creation side yourself then you needn’t spend a single penny – there’s plenty of graphics programs released as either freeware or open-source (totally free) or shareware (limited features and/or time limit) that can do all you will need. http://www.google.com is your friend here – search for freeware graphics programs, but be careful to download off reputable sites – a good way to help protect yourself is to find a program that looks appropriate and do a search for it before downloading. For example, if you find a program called “Coolest Graphics Editor” search in Google for it. If you see lots of reviews stating “Avoid this! Virus!” or the common “Adware” / “Spyware” – avoid it! If the reviews are good then at least you’ve done your best to avoid any nasties – but make sure your Anti-Virus is good if you go downloading programs. (http://free.grisoft.com for a free Anti-Virus if you don’t have an up-to-date one!).
Also have a look at http://www.sxc.hu – this is a site containing plenty of royalty-free images (always check the licenses if you use them commercially, usually they’re very usable however) and often of extremely high-quality. Simply visit and do a search for what you’re looking for – it’s full of stock photography covering all different topics.
If you want someone else to design your logo, a good source of designers willing to work for reasonable (read as often extremely cheap) prices are ‘out-sourcing’ sites – for instance, you can post your logo/banner project to http://www.getafreelancer.com/ and get designers to bid on the work. If you are happy with any of the proposals you can accept the bid, pay, and have the work completed. These kind of sites often have rating systems much akin to eBay, where previous work is what dictates if a designer is reliable / high quality / etc.
What should a modern website look like?
Obviously this depends on you – and can be influenced by the styles of the work you produce, company colours/theme (if you have one), etc. However, there are common features in all productive web sites – they are clear, concise, easy to navigate, intuitive. Often “little is more” – just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Today’s modern sites are geared towards finding information quickly and easily – design should be unobtrusive. Many people argue that artistic sites should be just that – but examples such as Purlsoho and Passionate Absolute show that a site can be both individual and clean.
Always a good suggestion is to post your design (before it’s live!) on to web design forums – some of these can be (at best!) brutal, but honest. If you are looking for a professional looking site be prepared to have your work trashed if it’s over the top – if you want more of a personal, home-made look then perhaps you can accept some criticism in this area.
What are the easy ways to make my site stand out from all the others?
This depends, and can be hard if you’re merely trying to sell a particular product. There are already a million sites about every type of product-selling site – be it art work, jewellery, etc. If you’ve got quality content, that will instantly make your site one notch above the average – and this can be a great way to draw traffic in. If you’ve just got a product to sell then try the following:
- Make sure the web site is clean, easy to navigate and stylish, and the user is immediately aware of what you are about and what you produce
- Good photography on your product is an absolute must – just do a search for some competitors sites and you’ll notice that some of them use photography that’s very low quality – in this era a good quality digital camera is not at all expensive (£100 - £150 buys you a very nice camera! Buy Online, do your research!) and spending some time to look up the best ways to take photography will pay off very quickly. Look at what you’re displaying, does it truly sell your product? If not, do it again
- Don’t oversell the product – a tasteful gallery of your products is more likely to have your visitors browsing than a clinical online shop – but they can both sell your goods
Ultimately your product is what you are displaying and that is what needs to stand out – so research your competitors to find out if you particular product is unique in its area or not. If not, perhaps you need to think about something that sets you apart from the others – there’s good articles online about how small variations in your designs can become a very personal and distinctive selling feature.
What’s your top tips on search engine optimization and what is it?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the ‘Black Art’ of getting your site listed prominently in the major search engines (Read as “Google”). Appearing in the search engines for your company name – such as a search for “Kate’s jewellery making blog” is all well and good, but it won’t drive new customers / visitors your way. Appearing for “jewellery making”, on the other hand, is a superb feat – and you can expect a steady and probably quite substantial flow of traffic for such keywords.
SEO is largely dependant on (amongst many other factors):
- How many incoming links you have to your site (Links for well-known sites, and sites that are in the same field as you, are the best to get)
- The use of keywords on your web pages – if you don’t mention “Jewellery making” on your site, how is Google to know that you are in the Jewellery field?!
- The quality and quantity of content – lots of valuable, non-repetitive content is priceless. Google knows this better than you would probably think a Robot could know
- A working web site without missing pages and links, and also a site that doesn’t employ shady tactics such as hiding keywords from visitors and only displaying them to the Google robot (A.K.A. cloaking)
My top tips would be:
- Keep your site updated with relevant information
- Post articles on your site if you can – valuable content, most likely containing useful keywords, will drive traffic your way
- Get lots of inbound links, but don’t pay for them – at all. Paying for links will more than likely only buy you links from sites that specialize in sending you links – called Link Farms. Google doesn’t like these, and can penalize a site for doing it. Incoming links from sites in the same field as yours are the best
How long should I spend marketing my site per day to start generating sales & where are the best places to do so?
As long as possible! You cannot spend too long marketing – although consider carefully how you use your time. Also, be wary of web sites and schemes that claim to guarantee sales /visits / links – they are almost always flawed, and usually counter-productive – with many even being scams.
The first thing to remember is that it takes a good deal of time for your site to become listed in the major search engines – especially Google. It will take a minimum of a couple of weeks just to be listed, and many months at best until you are listed for any relevant keywords. So do not despair and give up – your efforts will pay off.
Obtaining incoming links is the single most effective way to achieve greater traffic, rankings in the engines and sales. Find places where your target customers / visitors frequent – forums discussing your topics are a superb place. But be careful not to try and spread your new site too liberally – many people will see this as spam and you could be deleted / banned from sites for this. The key here is to join communities and provide useful input – people will respond to this and your contribution will become valuable. If you have a genuine passion for your subject make sure this is clear – people will be interested in what you have to say and more likely to want to investigate your site.
Find web sites that allow you to link – even if they require a reciprocal link (That is, for you to also link back to them). Contrary to some belief – it does not harm your PageRank (Google’s indicator to how popular your web site is) to link to other people. Find sites that are appropriate and ask them to link to you for a link back. Create a links page to store these links, and try and organize them if possible. This will keep things looking smart and people will be more inclined to get a link to and from your site.
More Incoming links = Higher PageRank = Increased Rankings = Increased Traffic
You will also get traffic from the links themselves, but it is the long-term plan (Google) that we are mostly interested in. These tactics are free – and you should always look to get in as many links as possible without paying anything. There are places you can pay for a link – for example, if you are in crafts, “Craft Fair” allows one free link and subsequent links at £13 / year. We run a few craft-related sites and so have had to pay for a couple of links – but have found this extremely valuable. Why this site? Because it’s prominent (Search for “uk crafts” and it’s second – “bead supplies” it’s fourth, etc.) and that makes it very busy. If someone is trying to sell you a link on their site / advertising, research the site. If you’re an artist, then you want their site to be prominent in this area – think about variations on keywords. Check out http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ for suggestions. If the site is high in the search engines for words relating to your profession that’s a great start. But if there’s millions of sites listed on their web page and they’re badly organized, how likely is it that you will be found / clicked? When I refer to “Search Engines” I mean Google only – Yahoo, Ask, AOL, etc are all good engines, but the real traffic will always be at Google. Ask yourself all these questions and you’ll avoid paying for something that won’t get your money’s worth back.
Is using MySpace / Blogging a good alternative?
MySpace - absolutely not. Not because it’s not a good service - and in fact, if you have good content, it can be extremely good - but it’s also frowned upon by many. A recent report suggests that MySpace users tend to be older than the ‘kids’ that people thought were the main users of it - but that still doesn’t affect the fact that it’s not regarded as a professional system as much as perhaps it deserves. However, as a social networking site it is very powerful.
Blogs are extremely useful - if used correctly. Again, with social-networking techniques (that is - joining community sites where exchanging links to each others blogs is the idea, and talking with others interested in the same topics) you can expect a steady - albeit not always great - flow of traffic. And it also is great for content syndication of feeding - where people’s browsers will inform them of new content. But, when you try to sell things on a Blog, people can be less interested as they would be if it were a content-only Blog. A good compromise is using a Blog for articles / tutorials / discussion / etc on your intended topic, and also referencing another location where you can buy your goods or services, but not pushed in to peoples faces. Too many blogs also suffer from too much advertising - don’t think too heavily about monetising your Blog before you’ve got it very popular.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 4:49 am and is filed under Articles, Interview.
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Was realy useful.
Wanted to ask about oscommerce, does it give full / resonable control in our hands? so that we can modify the frontend as we want to built.
Thanks for your co-operation.
Best Regards,
April 6th, 2008 at 11:29 pmMukesh Patel
Hi Mukesh,
OsCommerce has quite a few variations, and you may find that each particular flavor gives you more of what you want. But in general, all the open-source shopping cart systems are very full-featured; which can be detremental if you’re not too familiar with computers. With too many features it can be hard to achieve the simpler tasks - but, the flip side is that virtually every situation has been catered for so you’ll rarely find something that absolutely cannot be done without some standard method or modification available from the OsCommerce community.
As it’s free, you can give it a go without any risk. Either look at the OsCommerce demos available online (that show you the admin control panel in a fully-working version) or download it your computer and run it alongside some Windows server-software like WAMP (it’s not extremely easy to set up, however, so it may be worth looking for people who can help with this).
Regards
April 10th, 2008 at 8:35 pmMark
Thanks Mark, this is a brilliant article! I’ve recently set up a site selling online jewellery and I’m spending a huge amount of time on marketing. I feel I’m getting nowhere but, having read your article, I’m reassured that I’m doing all the right things so the time isn’t wasted - it’s just a matter of chipping away and being patient!
Regards
Jane
June 27th, 2008 at 8:33 amWhat a great article!
December 14th, 2008 at 4:51 pmAs far as websites go, I tried streamline.net for hosting, and they’re not that great - cheap but not great - so I went with theartistsweb.co.uk, who are more expensive, but pretty cool.
Getting noticed in the sea of jewellery shops has to be the most difficult task, there I was initially thinking that the jewellery was going to be the hardest thing to get right. Social book marking sites are certainly popular but again very difficult to get ones voice heard. Any tips on marketing?
September 9th, 2009 at 6:46 pm