Blog About Crafts

There are many wonderful crafters and artists who submit to Crafty Tips. The busiest category (and the one with the most listings) showcases the works of Jewelry Makers from all over the world. As you can imagine, I’ve seen a variety of photography styles and techniques. Some do a wonderful job of showing each piece to its full beauty, some are almost there and sometimes the photo is lovely but still fails to explain the piece.

One of the problems is that many pieces are hard to imagine in action. In action? Yep. Think about the action of jewelry - earrings and pendents hang and dangle and necklaces and bracelets drape. Pins are often designed with a specific top and bottom. While some jewelry is designed to wear a variety of ways; many jewelry artisans fail to make it clear how they envisioned or designed the item to be worn.

When selling jewelry online, you can never forget that your customers can not touch the piece and most will not take the time to email you to ask, “So, how do you wear this piece anyway?”

Off all the pieces of jewelry I look at when reviewing jewelry websites, artisans often make mistakes when selling pendents…

I recently happened upon one jewelry maker’s blog where she was discussing a recent email she received from another crafter. The email helpfully suggested her current backgrounds for her jewelry pictures were detracting from her pieces. It was nice to see that the blog owner took this constructive criticism and was rethinking all of her photos as well as creating a conversation among her blog visitors.

From all of the websites that I’ve seen that sell jewelry, it doesn’t take fancy stands or expensive props to make jewelry pictures attractive. There are many ways to show the drape and beauty of jewelry without having fake body parts (can often be creepy), showing someone wearing the finished item (can often be yucky, particularly when earrings are involved) or taking a picture on wrinkled sheets or some other unattractive background. In case you haven’t seen it before, do check out my earlier post on this topic On Wrinkled Sheets - A Photography No No for Crafters.

I thought I might offer some suggestions of backgrounds that other crafters have made work quite well. Hopefully, someone will take them and run with them and create some of their own cheap jewelry stands for photography.

I was looking at someone’s blog today and noticed a conversation on how to advertise a crafting business on the cheap. One of the things mentioned was to ask bloggers if they would be willing to interview artists or review their sites.

I’ve toyed with the idea to review each of the sites submitted and accepted to Crafty Tips Arts & Crafts Directory but my concern was trying to be fair and impartial. I mean, let’s face it not all sites are created equal. Some directory sites have started adding blog entries for sites being submitted but it would seem that could become a real black hole of time and frustration.

In the past, I’ve offered free profiles on several forums. I did ask for a link to this site or one of my other craft-related sites and was disappointed when only two artists took me up on that offer. My thought was that since my blog is not on the fast lane that it was simply a matter of not being popular enough to attract interested folks. The blog I was reading happened to have a comment from one of the editor’s in the jewelry section of a very popular crafting site. She too lamented that she could not find folks who wanted to participate and receive free reviews and profile pieces.

So, rather than try another round in the forums, I thought I would make the offer again here on the site where the profile would reside. Do take heed, that this is free advertising for your business and I take that very seriously. Your site or shop must offer something of value for sale or offer information and project tutorials that would be of interest to crafters.

Participants might also receive a bit of free business consulting advice along the way and when combined with a bit of free advertising both will hopefully bring a some new visitors/customers to your site.

Just let me know if you are interested. The profiles/reviews are free.

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…

Professionals have no fear of me ever taking over their industry. My skills just don’t stack up. There’s just too many settings and features for me to fully understand. I do OK but I’ll never be known for my work.

Many who sell their wares on the Internet have the same problem that I do, their photography skills stink. After all, they are not selling their photographs; they are selling their handmade items.

But, what really surprised me was when a site the was submitted to Crafty Tips Arts & Crafts Directory had photographs that looked even worse than my worst efforts. I couldn’t accept the site because it was not selling handmade items but I thought I would talk about their photos and leave their name out of the conversation to protect the guilty.