Backyard Silver

October 12, 2009

Update on wire-wrapped jewelry

Filed under: "How-to" articles,Jewelry,Uncategorized — admin @ 10:44 am

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Get Chitika eMiniMalls

I mentioned, a few posts ago, that Jacqui was building a business making jewelry – with a focus on delicately encasing semi-precious stones with sterling silver wire. Her work is now for sale on an Etsy store and we maintained the Backyard theme by naming it BackyardArtisan.com! It is interesting to learn how best to make use of these stores – the search engine seems to favor newly entered items, and they are also displayed for a time on the landing page of the site. We found that the items got more page views in the few days after they were added for sale, and that slowly drops away over time. We made the mistake of entering all the items at once when the store was first set up, but now we add one item a week to maintain some status in the search process. The current plan is to try to get some traction on the site before Christmas.

The activity – which has since evolved to creating ornate and intricate bracelets – has led to an interesting opportunity though. Jacqui has been invited to become a teacher of wire-wrap jewelry at a local craft store. We will see how that develops.

Update on my on-line Photography site

Filed under: "How-to" articles,Stock Photography — admin @ 10:30 am

A couple of weeks ago,  I started work on displaying and offering my best photographs for sale using a web site created using a Smugmug Pro Account. That site, www.BackyardImage.com, is now 90% complete and I must admit that configuring the site does allow a lot of flexibility – certainly much more flexible that I was able to do with my own web site designs. I have the menu structure in place, have the basic design of each gallery straight, and have sorted out the pricing structure. Although the site is reasonably easy to use, each step did take a bit of research to get the right look for the website. I have tried both the available printers from SmugMug, and got good results from both. The site allows you to intercept a print order and create a properly sharpened and finished photograph to send to the printer, which is a great time saver – you can create images that look good on the web site and only work on those that actually sell to create a final, ready to print, image.

I want to do more on the site, but for now, it is public and available. All I now need to solve is how to get people to find it and buy some prints!

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