Web Presence Makes a Professional

This weekends goal was to establish a web presence for myself outside of Etsy and Blogger. Yep - a real website. I first started building one using the free editing system - Weebly. Halfway through playing around with that, I caught wind of a website called Virb - which has an app specially developed to work with Etsy. So, naturally, I started building a site on Virb.

Now, Weebly is free and is easy to use with a great building feature. But, you have the Weebly ad on the bottom of your page. Virb is $10/month (but free for a year if you sign up with a valid .edu address!) but requires no advertisement on your page. I find the user face is a bit clunky and difficult to learn, but better to use once you get the hang of it.

I followed through and completed a rough draft of both sites. At this point, I'm leaning more towards continuing my Virb site and deactivating my Weebly site. But we will see! For now, they are both very basic. They need some color, that's for sure.


Virb Website


Weebly Website

A is for Alphabet

I've been focusing a lot on the different components of my shop because it aligns with my current marketing research project. In my project, I'll be learning what others in the same market from me are doing similarly or differently that makes them more successful than I. Obviously - this is a for-profit shop, and I think a side-project solely focusing on the business aspect opposed to the artsy aspect will be extremely beneficial.

A few days ago I was experimenting with an art referred to zentangling. It is essentially just a fancy term for doodling, but it sound much more prestigious than "doodling". There are a bunch of different patterns, and of course you are welcome to create your own. This is what I drew up in my sketchbook:



It gained a bunch of likes on Instgram (just a doodle - imagine that!) so the other day I started the painstakingly annoying process of turning it into a vector image. I suppose if it were easy it wouldn't be considered an artform...



I have toyed around with the idea of making an alphabet series. But honestly, I have so many unfinished projects that I want to complete before I present this on MAY FIRST! It is definitely imperative that I sit down and make a list of all the things I want to finish and decide which ones are most important.

Tea Series

I had to draft a rendering of a tea kettle for one of my classes. Being the savvy, resourceful business woman I am, I threw a quote into it and post it up in my Etsy shop. The final result was this:


Tea & Books Typographic Print
I sold one the day after I posted it for sale, so that's a good sign! I'm in the process of making it into a series, with the idea that I could sell them as a group. If I can sell prints in multiples, I could easily boost revenue. Since my overhead cost in this business is fairly low, adding multiple series would be a great idea.

Here's an idea of the next print I'm working on to go into the series:


I'm thinking of adding an option where customers can order multiple prints at a time and get a discount.