My husband just helped me use Weebly.com to create a Joelle's Dolls website, www.joellesdolls.com. I'm so happy to have finally accomplished this after years of thinking about it, getting frustrated and procrastinating. I've really needed a separate website and blog to drive traffic to my Etsy.shop, where I sell my art dolls.
We registered a domain name, joellesdolls.com, on godaddy for $5.99 per year, and then followed the directions to change the dms so that traffic would automatically go to the new Weebly website.
All in all, Weebly was not too difficult to set up even for us, and we're not very geeky. There were a few frustrating moments, but that could be because we didn't bother to read any instructions or watch any demos.
I recommend Weebly for other artists/crafters who need a website.
Now I'll be able to blog, link to other artist sites (and have them link to me), and hopefully give my doll business a much-needed jolt.
If you have time, please check out my site and let me know if you have any suggestions!
Replies
Congratulations, Joelle. It's great that you got this done. Good job! My goal is for all artists to have websites -- as you have said, cheap and easy, and just one more tool in their marketing plan.
If you add a link to this site (ArtFairInsiders.com) I'd really appreciate it, or www.ArtFairCalendar.com. You can pick up a cute link here: http://www.artfaircalendar.com/art_fair/link-to-us.html. We have badges for AFI also that you could add to your site, look at the very bottom of this page and click on "Badges." As I'm sure you know having links is one of the ways Google finds sites, and I already have your links here on this site.
Connie:
Thanks for the advice. I just added the ArtFairInsiders Badge to my site!
- Joelle
Congratulations! The site looks great :)
Hey Joelle,
This is a HUGE first step. Congratulations.
Glad that you found Weebly so easy to use - and the price is right!
My suggestion is to get an email collector installed on every page. You don't want to miss the chance of collecting email addresses from everyone who goes to the trouble of find your site.
Best,
Scott
Scott,
Thanks for the encouragement. How do you install an email collector?
- Joelle
Hi Joelle,
You'll need to join an email list management service. There are many of those to choose from but once you do, they'll provide you a small snippet of HTML code that you can paste into your new site.
That will create a signup link or box for your visitors to use to give you their email addresses.
It's critical to capture that email contact info from as many visitors as possible so that you can remind them later to come back and visit you again (and hopefully buy stuff!).
Popular email services include Aweber, Constant Contact, MailChimp, and more. All have free trials to get started. MailChimp has a nice free plan that is based on number of subscribers rather than time, however, so it's free for small lists.
I hope that's helpful!
Scott
I wholeheartedly agree about weebly! I'm a bit of a geek, and I've worked with a bunch of websites using stuff like drupal, sharepoint etc. and if you are looking to create your first website and get it up as quickly and painlessly as possible, weebly.com is a great way to go. It's easy to include features using a drag and drop tool bar, everything from basic stuff like photos and text to more complicated things like contact forms and video without needing to know anything about code. Even if it's your first site you can probably have it up and running in an afternoon. If you've made a website before you could probably have something up and running in half an hour. As your site matures, if you find weebly doesn't meet your needs or offer as much customization as you'd like I recommend giving Wordpress a try.
Your site is super cute. I think you may build more of a fanbase if you put the social media links in the footers of each page rather than on the Links page alone.
-Kate Ricklin
Kate:
Thanks for the kind words. I'll work on adding more facebook links to my site's pages.
Best of luck in 2012 to you.
- Joelle