After spending a delightful day with my son on the eve before his 30th birthday, and my dear hubby, at our favorite Sushi/Chinese Restaurant (Jimmy Chen's Hunan's Restraurant, Alpena, Michigan), my son held his mom's hand and guided (more like drug me) into the world of the internet and building webpages. Arrrrrggggg!!!
I tried to avoid it, but he persisted in nagging me until I finally relented and I now have a webpage. It has very little on it at the moment and will be another 24-48 hours before it's viewable by the general public, but I am now an official website. When it becomes operational (waiting for the webhost to finish loading it) the web site will be drakesneststudio.com! This is a scary step for me as I felt that it was too soon for a web page and that word of mouth, business cards and flyers would work for the time being. WRONG!! Dear son said I needed a web page even if I had nothing more than photo's to show that getting people curious about me and what I do is a big step in to getting them to come back for more and if they like what they see, then I have potential customers or my name gets passed along to someone else who may want to order something.
So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go faint and take a deep breath before I start fooling with the web page again. This is going to be a loooooooonggggg project, I can see that now. Hopefully, it will be worth the effort.
Terri at the Drake's Nest where feathers are flying in an effort to organize the website into something that makes sense
Comments
Theresa -- dump Vistaprint -- it is your url, not theirs. If you are unhappy with their service take your url and run! A good place to get advice on what to do about a website is actually my son's blog, www.scottfoxblog.com. Take a look around. There is a lot of sound free advice there. His specialty is small business online marketing.
Terri, the sooner you have your domain name registered and even a holding page online for your site the sooner you will get indexed by Google. It is surely beyond me why every artist doesn't have at least a splash page with an image of their work, a description of it (for key words) and their show schedule. Sure maybe you only want to sell at shows, but wouldn't it be great if people could find out if you are coming to their neighborhood?
You can also ask questions about this in our web wizards group. There are some very knowledgeable people there.
Don't forget to add your show schedule on your website. I have lots of people that come to my website just to find out where I will be next so they can come and buy from me in person.
Best of luck Terri.
I am so proud of you for taking this step. Our children are correct in guiding us to take the leap. I would love the carthric nature of a blog but have not pulled the trigger. I will watch you and maybe I, too, will be brave and adventuresome and join the 21st CENTURY.