Spring Cleaning at Crafty Tips

The past few days have brought a flurry of small changes to my craft directory. Some were long over due and others were the result of recent submissions.

Great Blogs By Crafters

Today’s submissions to Crafty Tips brought a great blog, Lenox Knits that is maintained by a wonderful knitter. Problem is that along with knitting, she also talks about life, yarn, SEO, travel, chickens and a whole host of other things. Her posts are quite engaging and while the vast majority are relating to crafting as one of her other visitors said, perhaps we should classify similar blogs as “lives of crafters”.

Buried over on Crafty Tips was a rarely visited category where I had intended to list blogs like that. Looking at the traffic stats, the blogs listed there were not receiving the traffic they truly desired. Changes were in order and while they took a little longer than I would have hoped (doesn’t everything anymore), I moved the existing listings and Lenox’s to a new Craft Blogs category that will be linked to from every page of the site.

Hopefully, these multi-dimensional craft bloggers will now see my URL in their site logs more often.

There does seem to be something about crafters that make us interesting people. I think it’s more than just about being creative - there’s just something different about our personalities too. We seem to have more interests than most people and family seems to be extra important to us.

Jewelry Designers & Artisans

Jewelry also seems to be very important to crafters; it is one of the busiest categories on Crafty tips and the jewelry websites category was the largest of the entire website. Submissions this week would have created the need for a 4th and 5th page in the category; something I did not want to do. After all, the poor folks on those last pages would be unlikely to see many visitors.

I’ve been putting off a listing audit for months now and thought the jewelry category might be the perfect one to start with. So after visiting all of the sites and deleting any that were abandoned or discontinued, I was still left with 32 great sites - still too many to leave all in one grouping.

Last fall I had asked other crafters what they thought would be a good classification for jewelry artists who made the components that they make jewelry from and most considered artisan jewelry as the best description. All these months later, Crafty Tips at last has an Artisan Jewelry category. There are currently three very talented jewelry artists that have shared their jewelry making tips and would love for folks to visit their sites.

The other obvious category choice was Beaded Jewelry. Visiting all of these talented folks websites for a second time reminded me just how much I love beaded jewelry and am in awe of some of the bead artists out there.

A number of jewelry designers create pieces that didn’t really fit in either of the new categories or could have been listed in both of them. Those great jewelry websites remain in the primary jewelry category.

So, I’ve been deleting old non-working links and moving things around a bit. Hopefully, it will make things easier to find and will help more crafters promote their websites.