15 Minute Craft Website Tips  

How your art website looks is something that all artists want to get right when you're creating your website. But do you take as much care with the words on your website? While design is a huge part of how potential customers perceive your website, the words on it are just as or even more important...yet many artists give their website copy the short shrift. On this episode, I'll talk about why your website copy is so important and 6 ways you can make it fantastic.

How "trustworthy" is your art website? When it comes to marketing and selling your art or handmade crafts, the trustworthiness of your website can make the difference whether you make that sale or not. In this episode, I'll talk about what makes your art website trustworthy in the eyes of a potential customer or art collector and how you can boost trust in your website.

1. Clean professional-looking design
• Pleasing color schemes
• Sparing use of cheesy clip art
• No mis-matched fonts
• Up to date design
• Design looks great on various browsers

2. Great content
• Informative, free of misspellings, grammatical errors
• Graphics, edited and optimized for the web
• Up to date, content is refreshed and updated regularly

3. Functionality
• No broken images and/or links
• All forms, multimedia, and interactive features work properly
• No error messages

4. Legal notices and information you'll need
• Privacy policy
• Terms of use
• Sales policies
• Contact information- email, physical address, phone number, etc

How "trustworthy" is your art website? When it comes to marketing and selling your art or handmade crafts, the trustworthiness of your website can make the difference whether you make that sale or not. In this episode, I'll talk about what makes your art website trustworthy in the eyes of a potential customer or art collector and how you can boost trust in your website.

In the previous post, I discussed some of the basic components that you need in order to sell your artwork directly off of your website and how those components work together. So now, how do choose the right ecommerce system for your website? In this episode I'll discuss what you need to do to turn your art website into a online web store.

1. Know what your needs are
• Are you selling hard goods? Soft goods?
• Do you want to offer discounts? Coupons?
• Do you want to sell on multiple sites?

2. Figure out who will be installing and maintaining your shopping cart
• Do you have the technical skills?
• Do you have the time?
• Can you keep up with upgrades?

3. Think about the future
• Will you be expanding your offerings in the future?
• Can you scale your shopping cart?
• Do you have the ability to add features?

4. Additional considerations
• Marketing- can you integrate your shopping cart with your marketing system?
• Financials- can you easily integrate your shopping cart with your financial system?
• Costs- what are your overall costs in time and effort as well as money?

5. Your ecommerce options
Paypal
• There's no need to get a merchant account, SSL certificate, or payment gateway...Paypal contains all three.
• Doesn't contain some advanced features like customer accounts, email marketing, and customization
• Can be unwieldy for large sites with a lot of different products

Ecommerce software
• Most contains advanced features like customer accounts, coupon options, and integration with financial systems.
• They can also control the look and feel of your website
• You'll need a merchant account, SSL certificate, and a payment gateway
You're responsible for installation and upgrades
• Can be free or paid

Hosted shopping carts
• Most contains advanced features like email marketing, coupons, discounts, and integration with financial systems
• Most require a monthly fee
• There's no installation or maintenance required on your end
• Can be integrated with an existing site
• May require getting a merchant account and/or payment gateway

Need more info? Check out this free guide and checklist on how to evaluate and choose the best shopping cart system for your website. You can download it for FREE here.

In the last episode, I discussed some of the basic components that you need in order to sell your artwork directly off of your website and how those components work together. So now, how do choose the right ecommerce system for your website? In this episode, I'll talk about how to choose the perfect ecommerce system for your website.

If you want to sell your craft or your artwork directly from your own website, there are a number of things you need to put together to make it work. But with all of the different components to put together, how to pick something that's not too confusing or too expensive? In this episode I'll discuss what you need to do to turn your art website into a online web store.

E-commerce sites have all of these components:

1. Payment Service Provider- a payment provider allows you to take payments electronically

• Merchant account- this is a bank account that allows you to take credit card, debit card, or electronic check payments

• Paypal- this is an online service that allows you to take payments via credit card or bank transfer

2. Payment Gateway- a service that passes information from an ecommerce website to a payment service provider. A payment gateway encrypts credit card and other financial information to make sure that it passes securely from your website to the payment provider.

3. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) - this is a way to encrypt or secure data that passes from your website to your payment gateway.

4. Shopping cart- this is software on your website that allows customers to collect items for purchase and then pay for them. Shopping carts calculates sales tax, shipping and handling, and product totals. Many shopping carts can also keep track of customer data, inventory, and many have some email marketing capabilities

• Ecommerce software- this is software that runs on a website. Most often, they're entire systems that also handles the look and feel of the entire website. Some examples include Miva, OScommerce, Zen Cart.

• Hosted shopping carts- these shopping carts are hosted on a shopping cart service instead of your website. When customer add something to their shopping carts, they are taken from your website to the shopping cart service.

How these components work together:

1. A customer visits your website and uses the shopping cart system to choose items to purchase. When they are ready to check out, the shopping cart calculates their total and the customer provides payment and shipping information.

2. The shopping cart sends the payment information to the payment gateway. The payment gateway passes the information to the information to the payment service provider.

3. The payment service provider authorizes the payment and sends the authorization to the payment gateway. The payment gateway then passes the authorization to the shopping cart, which releases the order to be processed by the merchant.

4. The payment service provider then sends the payment to you the merchant.

5. Transactions between the shopping cart, payment gateway, and payment provider are all protected through SSL.

Be sure to tune in to the next show to learn how to choose the best system for you!

Need more info? Check out this free guide and checklist on how to evaluate and choose the best shopping cart system for your website. You can download it for FREE here.