Web site?

[Paul Downes]

I'm looking into taking the plunge into a web based business. Woodworking of course. My question is for you folks that have a web site; What web design software are you using? How do you like it?

[Dennis Peacock]

Just be ready to put a LOT of hours into developing and then maintaing your web presence. Web base businesses come and go like your local stores do, except a lot quieter when the web presence goes away.

You need to make sure you can "beat" any other price for the same product on the internet or you don't have a customer. An up to date web site always helps and it needs to load quickly for any possible web browser that may find you out there.

All that said....do you have staffing to support "customer support calls"? Customer service AFTER the sell?

I wish you a lot of success in your venture for a web based business. But to compete with the "big boys" will be tough.

[Todd Burch]

Paul, I have a web site, but it is not a shopping-cart type of site (that may change later this year though...). It's more of a gallery of past projects and reasons and positioning on why someone might want to hire me.

As far as software... Notepad, Corel Draw & PhotoImpact. Corel Draw 10 and PhotoImpact are both marketed, advertised and sold as being "web design studio" type software packages. However, I use none of it and just code the native HTML in Notepad.

I architected my site so that adding a new project is simple enough - I copy a template, add my content, and link to the new item from an "category" type page. You'll see what I'm talking about if you go to my site.

For a shopping-cart type site, you could use the same format I would suspect.

[Ian Barley]

Paul

Speaking as somebody who gets 50-60% of his sales through a website I don't believe that there is such a thing as a web based woodworking business. To me web based businesses sell stuff and then deliver it electronically (software, music, etc). The rest of us have businesses that use the web as ONE of our marketing avenues.

Todd's approach is good. He has a comprehensive site that not only shows some of what he can do ut also makes the case for why his customers should choose quality hand made pieces. I suspect that he builds it from scratch for the same reason he builds such great furniture. Because he can.

I can't (or more specifically am too lazy to learn how to) so I use frontpage. This helps me to organise the page and make amendments easily. I don't use too many bells and whistles because I'm not selling my customers fancy websites - I'm selling them chairs.

I run an ecommerce site on a shared secure provider. They give me templates which I can push around a bit (in frontpage) and a database tool to create XML files for the product content.

The most important thing about your website is whether people find it. That means search engine rankings and if you are going to get good visitor numbers you need to be in the top 10 at least - ideally the top three. That means finding the keywords you want and designing your content and presentation to get placed as well as you can.


Good luck if you do take the plunge but bear in mind that there is a lot more
to making a living out of wood than a good product and a good website.

[Paul Downes]

Thanks for the replies. Yes I understood that a web site is just part of a business marketing plan. I have thought about owning a business for many years and came close to buying one, once or twice. I have been turning a bowl or two and started making pens. Some of my wealthy relatives have been clamoring for a web site to order from, so I have been exploring the possibilities of making the hobby pay for itself and perhaps more. I have some good assets (9 kids), that need to have busy hands and are interested. I also have access to premium figured maples. Getting raw lumber is not a problem, just finding the time to cut down and process the wood. If sales escalate, then I will work at conventional marketing and establish a web pressence to accellerate sales. I just want to be prepared for that event should it occur. So I am investigating, and may build up a web page to be launched at a later date. What I have in mind is something similar to Todd Bruch's approach. Marketing and selling yourself and your product is sometimes more than half of the value of what you actually sell. In plain English, it's very, very important. I know people who produce very high quality goods but do poorly because they don't market themselves and their product very well. I also know some whose product is o.k. average but do very well because they have a well thought out marketing plan. Some web sites I have visited seem to sell a good product but the photograghy is done poorly or the pictures are so small you need a magnifier to tell what it is. Some sites are just hard to navigate. I hope to avoid as many of these pitfalls as possible.

[Jamie Buxton]

My web site (www.jamiebuxton.com) is a portfolio of past projects. It is simple enough that I could write it myself. I built the site using GoLive, Adobe's WYSIWYG page editor. For non-power-users, a WYSIWYG page editor is a very good solution; you can build a respectable site without ever seeing a bit of HTML. If you don't mind dealing with the Evil Empire, Microsoft's Frontpage is more popular, and is functionally equivalent. I use Photoshop to mess around with photos.

[Daniel Rabinovitz]

Paul
You asked for the program or editor that is used for the website page design.
I used to use "Hot Dog" and now use "AceHTML 5".
They both worked very well.
Why switch from one to the other.
Hot Dog had a browser that fought with Microsoft and Netscape and occassionally crashed the sysytem.
Daniel ;)
ps I run a big website 600 pages and about 1200 photos but not woodworking.

[Chris Padilla]

A good place to learn about HTML is: www.htmlgoodies.com (http://www.htmlgoodies.com)

I'm always referring back there when I update my web site stuff.

[Tom Sweeney]

I design web sites for a living. I've used Hotdog, Ace, CuteHTML, metapad & MS FP. I do all my photo editing in Ulead Photoimpact. From the sound of your posts I think I would recommend MS Front Page. Purists will tell you it is junk but that is incorrect. Yes it renders pages using bloated HTML but if you learn a few tricks it still produces fast loading pages. It's kind of like when you post a picture of a bowl & us bowl turners will say well the foot needs to be 1/3 the diameter of the widest part or there should be slightly more curve in the bottom third. But then you put that same bowl out at your craft show stand & someone picks it up falls in love with it & buys it for $150. Yes webmasters will know that FP produces bloated results but 95% of the viewing public won't know it. They even have some decent looking templates though I haven't used any in years.

Other WYSIWYG editors are the aforementioned golive, & dreamweaver generaly gets high marks - but they are more expensive than FP & do the same thing - just a little bit better IMHO.

Bottom line - it's cheap, easy learning curve & it CAN produce good results. You want to turn & sell bowls & pens not design websites.

Todd, as always, is the exception to the rule - he has a great web site that he codes by hand - he knows how & must like doing it.

[Rich Konopka]

I design web sites for a living. I've used Hotdog, Ace, CuteHTML, metapad & MS FP. I do all my photo editing in Ulead Photoimpact. From the sound of your posts I think I would recommend MS Front Page. Purists will tell you it is junk but that is incorrect. Yes it renders pages using bloated HTML but if you learn a few tricks it still produces fast loading pages. It's kind of like when you post a picture of a bowl & us bowl turners will say well the foot needs to be 1/3 the diameter of the widest part or there should be slightly more curve in the bottom third. But then you put that same bowl out at your craft show stand & someone picks it up falls in love with it & buys it for $150. Yes webmasters will know that FP produces bloated results but 95% of the viewing public won't know it. They even have some decent looking templates though I haven't used any in years.

Other WYSIWYG editors are the aforementioned golive, & dreamweaver generaly gets high marks - but they are more expensive than FP & do the same thing - just a little bit better IMHO.

Bottom line - it's cheap, easy learning curve & it CAN produce good results. You want to turn & sell bowls & pens not design websites.

Todd, as always, is the exception to the rule - he has a great web site that he codes by hand - he knows how & must like doing it.

Front Page is great because it is easy to learn, widely supported by ISP's, inexpensive, Large developer community, and quick to deploy. I have used it for a couple of volunteer groups and their websites. It is quick and easy!!

[Jim Becker]

I originally worked with Microsoft FrontPage, but switched to Macromedia Dreamweaver MX (now upgraded to Dreamweaver MX 2004) a couple of years ago. It's much more "browser friendly" and built to support the newer standards for web development including CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). For photo preparation, I use Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0.