This is an exciting step to get my website up and running this week. Lots of people have asked if I had a website but I didn't get around to it until this week. Actually building a website isn't as daunting as it might sound to a beginner but I was intimidated at the idea, having never done it before.
I got my domain name, jomopottery.com, set up last year through GoDaddy, just to hold it but wasn't sure when I would get an actual site set up. My motivation came from one of my retailers' webinars this week and once I got started, I felt really excited to get it up and running properly. I chose Wix as my platform, which is pretty user friendly and not terribly expensive. I went with the first template I liked the look of and stuck with it. There were lots of little issues to resolve, like how to set up shipping and sales tax, or how to set up the contact form. The fun part was choosing which pieces I would list on the shopping page. Since my pieces are handmade and all unique, I can only have a quantity of 1 for each. I feel like my customers would like to choose a particular ceramic loon, for example, rather than just order one out of an inventory of 10. It feels personal that way. A loon might have a certain feature that might differ from the next and it is nice to know you are getting exactly what was pictured.
I also had fun setting up a gallery page. It's great to be able to display not only pieces that might already be in their new homes, but to show pieces in progress, or pictures from a market for example, or arrangements of pieces that look great together.
I gave the site a trial run and purchased one of my own pieces (lol) to make sure it was a smooth process and to find any remaining bugs in the works. It seems to have worked well, thank goodness. I still need to figure some things out, like what if I go on vacation for a week, do I have some setting that lets customers know that shipping will happen once I return? And figuring out the Google search function algorithm is a whole topic I'm going to need to learn if I want to generate some good search results and find new customers. I hope that the site will allow me to start conversations with people about my pieces and that I can communicate that I have many more pieces available than what is listed. They are welcome to ask if I have other colors or sizes etc.
I'm feeling great that I've got it up and running. It's just family on it at this point so I'm hoping they can point out any bugs or suggestions in these early days. But it is linked to my Instagram page so I might start seeing real customers on it soon! Who knew that an obsessive pottery hobby would teach me all these entrepreneurial skills? If you had asked me a few years ago if I'd be a small business owner I would have just laughed. You never can tell what is around the next corner.