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9K views 100 replies 33 participants last post by  tcaz 
#1 · (Edited by Moderator)
... and tell us how you made it, how you SEO it, what tools you used….

I need some ideas for making my website, doesn't have to be anything fancy, to display and sell my woodworking products, and I'm sure a lot of others here would be interested in this as well. I would like to have a simple gallery and/or catalog, a way to receive payments, such as PayPal or 2Checkout, and a few other pages such as about, contact, and the typical things you would see on a small, home made website. This is not for a large production cabinet or furniture maker, and I'm not really into blogging (but that could change) but I'm sure others would like to know about more advanced websites as well, so pretty much all kinds of websites would be of interest here. Things that would be of interest…

The editing tools you use
How you achieve a unique style
How you promote your web presence
Costs
Hosting and other services you use

Inquiring mind want to know! :)
 
#3 ·
http://chancefour.sharepoint.com

This site used to be the free one run by Microsoft. It costs $6.50 per month after six months free for the limited service I get. I offer a free class to students from special needs divisions of high school that have graduated and have found nothing to do and no one to help them. They find wonderful opportunities to do valuable things with wood and other media if they "want to work." I have eight students now and love the idea of doing it on my own. The students love it and like to show off things they have done and do now. The site helps accomplish that. The need to sell things from the site and advertise to the world isn't necessary. The items made are almost always sold before they are completed. The proceeds go to the students. Last sale prompted the student to say, "Now I can make a payment on my glasses." There are all kinds of valuable people out there that have been thrown away. I think I have found a way to tap into that power.

The site doesn't have a very strong English speaking support staff, but for my needs, I muddle through. I would be happy to learn more.
 
#5 ·
If you are up on Facebook, several LJ's use it. I have been trying to figure it out. It's free if you do. My hosting is $6.00 a month. Serif is from the UK. They are great to work with. But I am from the Monty Python generation so I want to laugh when I talk to them.
 
#6 ·
You have to make a decision on if you would rather be spending your time woodworking or as web designer/maintainer. It is an ongoing project to keep one working and keeping out of trouble with people trying to break into it (especially if you deal with money.)

Two points:

Most Search Engine Optimization is garbage. The search engines explicitly work at filtering out the optimization and will in fact score you down for having. It is seen as "gaming the system". Just good plain text tags and content is enough.

As far as the blogging, It is a lot of work to keep content fresh and interesting. I played with it a while but it was more than I wanted to deal with. Nothing worse than stale content. Mine sucks miserably. Plan on at least a post a week to make it worthwhile. Much longer than that and people wander off. Much less than that and you will be spending all your time blogging and little else. Try keeping one here and see if you like doing it. You are not going to find much friendlier software to start with and you don't have to deal with maintaining it.
 
#7 · (Edited by Moderator)
Hi Ted,

I run a few websites:

My own Don Johnson site - I'm not really sure what it is for - originally I suppose to try to sell my book 'Billy the Bit' (I did sell a few - but it never made the Best Seller lists! LOL), but I add bits to it from time to time. It is also useful as a place to put files for people to download - such as instructional videos created by Jing e.g. Racenite Program

John Smiths site, which uses Paypal for selling. The code for inserting into the 'Ordering' page came from Paypal. John wanted something simple that could be navigated easily by inexperienced web users.

Chedzoy Village Hall

Somerset Woodturners Club

The first three use much the same layout, which I created using Namo Webeditor 2006 - rather old-fashioned now but I'm too lazy to change to a free editor or too mean to buy the latest version!

Regarding 'promoting' a site, I understand that the search engines - like Google - look for links both TO and FROM sites when 'ranking', so it is good to have plenty of links of both types.
 
#9 ·
This is my website…

http://shopngarage.com/

It costs $9.95 a month.

I use WordPress. I shoot my pictures and video with an iPhone4. I process my pictures with Photoshop Elements 8.0.

I took a basic theme and heavily altered it to make it my own. You have to get into the page templates, CSS, and a little PHP to do this.

I don't do anything as far as search engines are concerned. I'm shocked at how many things I find I am on the first page of a Google search for, things like "Fluke Multimeter Repair".

My site is just for fun (a hobby). Traffic varies; slow right now with the nice summer weather.

Product Rectangle Azure Slope Font
 

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#11 ·
Dave, your son did/is doing a fine job on your site. What I like most is the Design Process page, great idea to outline the steps in a simple matter like that. I bet that page alone accounts for a big chunk of any new business generated.

Monte
, I'm on facebook and have made a facebook page (as opposed to the standard profile page) just for kicks. I can see using it as a woodworking website, and for hooking up with other woodworkers and/or customers. But I would tend to point all the visitors to a separate website, under it's own domain.

4, I bet you have a blast working with those young future artisans. It's also a noble contribution to society providing them a good outlet to focus their energies.

David, I see a lot of woodworkers do a lot of projects and maintain a nice website and/or blog. Personally, I'm not really into blogging. I would like to just make my projects and put some of them up for sale in a simple online catalog.
 
#12 ·
Ted

I am not saying not to do it. Just pointing out the gotchas. Many people jump into it without knowing the ins and outs and make some problematic choices in the beginning. There are a lot of snake oil salesmen out there hawking SEO that is worthless for the most part. Creating a website is the simple part. Maintaining it is the long term job. Especially if there is a payment component. Unless you are making a large quantity of small and easy to ship items, you might be better off using it as a showcase for your work more than a point of sale.
 
#13 · (Edited by Moderator)
Hi all:

Mine is http://www.termitecrafts.com

It is really more of a personal site that has opportunity for commercial applications. Free hosting with a $35 for 5 years registration fee. I used Dreamweaver for this design, but I am working on a new layout too.
 
#15 · (Edited by Moderator)
My fun site : http://plans.testsitem3.info.
It sits as a sub domain on one of our test sites until I get the new site completed, Then it will have it's own stand alone tld domain.

It was built and edited from scratch in Microsoft Expression Web 4

All the images, other than the plans images, were built in Photoshop CS5 and Image Ready 7.0 and optimized for the web in both programs. It also has some work done on it in CorelDraw x14 and Corel Paintshop Pro X2.

It's hosted with KVC and has 2 MYSQL databases running behind it.

It also has a CMS attached to it call Content Seed so parts of it can be edited by my wife if I have another set of plans completed and don't have time to upload them myself.

I'm not going to SEO the site until the new site is completed. SEO does work if you do it correctly and have patience. Ted speaks the truth, there are a lot of snake oil salesmen out there calling themselves SEO specialist…run away from them.
 
#16 ·
Hey Ted, Check out my forum www.generationwoodworks.com/forum/. The forum was just completed but click on the banner at the top. I think hands down they have the best hosting and great packages. My whole site is run from them and they have everything on their c-panel.

You could also list your stuff on my site or free. Set up your own store there until you get your site off the ground. A food for thought
 
#17 ·
I'm glad you posted this. I have put off and put off doing a website until now and I have someone lined up to do it in the near future (unless someone can walk me thru posting a site with iWeb which I can do myself).

About a year ago I posted a thread on LJ's asking "Do websites work" - the feedback on that was basically that as a window onto what you can do, then yes, they certainly do, but don't expect sales to shoot up as a consequence.

However, I have spoken to another local cabinet maker and a joiner with websites about how their websites worked for them and the responses have been more than favourable (not many customers, but good customers).

Before I started woodworking full time I was a retoucher and Mac operator so I'm familiar with all the image editing software and graphics packages, I have designed my website (more or less) but just need someone to do the things like slideshows etc. and get it published.

I just have one question for now regarding domain names - if I use a .ie domain (Ireland) will it show up before a .com domain if someone is searching for cabinet work in Ireland?

If anyone has any tips on making the most of a website, I'd be really interested.
 
#18 · (Edited by Moderator)
Google cabinet shops in Ireland and you'll see .ie and .com sites listed. It helps to have your site hosted in your area and SEO it for your area.

We do a lot of local area SEO for mom and pop businesses on the sites we build for them. I plan on giving a show and tell here how we do it successfully just as soon as I get the time.

It also helps to buy not only the .ie domain for your site but the .com too if it's available. The domain prefix that you don't use as your tld (top level domain), just use a URL Gripper and point it to your site tld.

In our business sites and having web sites for them from many years ago we own all the top three domains to help protect our brand.
.com .net and .org. The .net and .org we redirect to the .com sites with the URL Gripper at our domain registrar, but you can also do it in your cpanel if you can add on other domains with your hosting package.
 
#19 ·
Bruce (or anybody), What do you think about .bz .ws .mx and other less popular domain extensions? Of course, they're not a memorable for humans, but do you think it matters to search engine?
 
#20 · (Edited by Moderator)
Renners, I kept meaning to get back to your questions but as you see in my signature.. I'm easily distracted :)

Looks like Bruce already answered your main question, regarding top level domains (.com or .ie). What he says makes sense. Be sure to post any other questions you may have regarding your woodworking website. That's why the topic is here. :)
 
#22 · (Edited by Moderator)
Bruce (or anybody), What do you think about .bz .ws .mx and other less popular domain extensions? Of course, they're not a memorable for humans, but do you think it matters to search engine?

As the world gets more populated so does the internet. Recently there has been a lot of discussions on the three top level domains in some of the developer seminars we attend…..com, .net, and .org. It seems we're running out of those three with the keyword domain names and that's the reason more domain extensions are being brought into play. By keyword domains I'll use a few for an example. bank.com, host.com, sugar.com, etc. Per say each one of those domains is a direct keyword for multi billion dollar industries associated with those products, and the list goes on.

The average internet surfer looks for .com first. Many people still associate the .org with organizations and .edu with education, etc.

We have several clients that had to get a .biz because their business domains were already taken by someone else. SEO for them? We're just getting started with them but feel like they'll rank ok in the search engines after we've had some time to experiment on how we need to present them to be crawled by the search engines.

We use a lot of .info for our test sites. Why, because we buy them cheap and have no intentions of doing any SEO work on them. They're for site test purpose only. We do have several .info small business clients because they could not get one of the top level domains in relationship to their businesses either.

We've been able to get them ranked fairly well in the search engines for their local areas because of how we presented their businesses to the search engine spiders for their given area. As far as international on the .info and .biz I can't give any info because all of our clients that need international search engine exposure have .com domains.

Once again I suggest that everyone buy the three top level domains for their web sites to protect their brand or someone could shoot you down doing some smart SEO. My thoughts are, if you own your three top level domains then you have better control over your business name, products and reputation in the internet.

I own the three top level domains on the name of a large and popular stream where we live. I also have them on WHOIS Privacy. I get emails all the time through my WHOIS Privacy company asking to buy the domains.
They're not for sale and all my neighbors and friends here thank me for that. I'm protecting our beautiful stream and our little community from the thugs out there that could make us look bad here or use them to make greedy money from.
 
#24 ·
Bruce, does your team focus much attention on mobile devices? I see a lot of joomla and wordpress designs include mobile versions, and a lot of 'responsive' designs coming out lately. I'm not sure how important it is for a woodworkers website, probably not a high priority.
 
#25 ·
I created a website a few years back that was very basic in flashiness but worked beautifully. It was database driven with a php backend. There were no limits to the number of items you could list. You could have a small image and a large image that was clickable and everything was setup to use paypal. Worked quite nicely. I am a software developer so the bones of the operation were smooth, but I am not a graphics person so it just wasn't eye catching. I could dig up the code if someone is really interested.

Unlike some people, the money side was VERY easy to maintain. If they clicked to buy something it was added to their paypal shopping cart. So paypal handled all the finance side of things. I would get notice from paypal for the order and fill it. Pretty simple if you let the companies that spend the time and money to specialize handle their parts.
 
#26 ·
Ted we started about a year ago getting ready for the mobile's out there. We have one girl that's working on it full time now. You might be surprised at how many people surf the web now with mobile devices.

I just looked at the stats on one of my woodworking sites and it had 32 hits today from mobile devices.
So, the new toys and gadgets are beginning to make their name be known in the internet would be my thoughts.
 
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