Blog About Crafts

I know I've talked about my art site before but I am so excited about how it is growing. The search engines are finally starting to send me some traffic and a few other crafters have started adding links to it from their websites - Thank you, thank you, thank you.

In case you missed my earlier posts, the website I'm talking about is Reusable Art. Reusable Art celebrates old illustrations, pictures, and photos from books and magazines. These wonderful pieces of art have fallen out of copyright and are now in the public domain. Crafters, website designers, and anyone who's stick figures need subtitles like mine do can find a growing collection of Free Downloadable Images.

The newest category on the site is Insects, Bugs & Other Creepy Crawlies. The category is quickly expanding due to the wonderful works or art that I found in a book published in 1873 entitled Our Common Insects. What makes this collection of bug images extra special is that most of them are line drawings that are just waiting for an artistic hand to colorize them.

The most popular category on the site has been something of a surprise. Little did I know that so many people were searching for Fancy Letters to use with their arts and crafts projects. I wish I could find more images for this category but for the most part they are coming from books that were published over 120 years ago. The 120 years part ensures that the images are truly in the public domain as many of the Fancy Drop Cap Letters were created by the publishing houses and they retain a longer hold on the copyright of those images.

If you haven't already done so, I invite you to check the site out, bookmark the site (I keep adding new pictures as I find them), and perhaps even link to it from your own blog or website.

I've never felt the need to post a Privacy Policy on Blog About Crafts. After all, I don't sell anything here and I don't have a newsletter. And besides, I know I'm not going to use and or abuse the email of anyone leaving a comment - I suspect many bloggers and commenters have not really given it much thought as it just seems so against what blogging is all about.

But, we live in a litigious society and well, if I want to keep participating in a certain contextual advertising program I have little choice. So, rather than try to get the static page feature to work and otherwise make a bunch of changes to this site I thought I would create a post on this topic and put it in its own category. (I have no clue how I did it before and quite frankly don't have the time to fuss with this - wow, has it really been since 2006 that I've had this blog?) This way it can be easily found by anyone who may be looking and I keep my advertiser happy. Anyway, here it is...

There have been numerous studies that claim a website has only a scant few seconds to grab the surfer's attention and keep them on your site. I have unfortunately noticed a trend with many crafting websites that use shop software to run the site - the sites take forever, I mean like 5 minutes or more to load.

I ran into this once again the other day. You know when you use a digital camera and the photographs are like 1100 pixels wide? Well this site owner used those original pictures on her site! No wonder it took around 8 minutes for her site to load on my stupid dial-up connection (yes, there are some of us still using those things).

I have brought this issue up on crafting forums and have even emailed some website owners when they have submitted to Crafty Tips and have made this mistake.

I think I finally have come up with an analogy for this...