10 Tips to make building a website for your handmade business easier.
1. Start with a plan
2. Brainstorm how you want your website to look and feel
3. Map out the structure of your website
4. Learn the basics of SEO (It’s Not as Scary as It Sounds)
5. Get beautiful Images of your handmade products
6. Keep Information succinct
7. Organise your images and copy
8. Make your main menu really clear and focussed on your products
9. Show the process, story and value of your handmade products
10. Check the mobile view of your website
If you’re a handmade business owner, you already have alllll the things going on. You’re designing your products, making them, posting them, ordering supplies, marketing, accounting, so many more things and sweeping up the studio floor too! And now, here I am, asking you to add one more hat to your collection: website builder.
Hi, I’m Michaela, a handmade business owner, former Etsy team captain and general small biz nerd. I built a website for my own handmade business but because I’m a nerd and a bit weird, I like to understand everything and went down the deepest rabbit hole for 2 years learning everything I could about web design, SEO and even CSS (you don’t need to know anything about css) and applied it to building my handmade business website.
So much website design info out there is really geared towards service based businesses or big ecommerce brands and we don’t quite fit in to that do we? We’re small businesses who design and make our own products usually in small quantities. So, grab a cuppa and let me lead you through some of the things I learned whilst building my own handmade business website. You can benefit from my 2 years of nerdiness without needing to go down rabbit holes of your own.
Having your own website to sell your handmade products is important.
Why Your Craft Business Needs an Online Home
So why should you even bother making your own website? It’s so easy and cheap to sell handmade products on marketplaces like Etsy and even just on social media. Why not let them handle it all? Well, Let me tell you a cautionary tale.
Etsy is (was? - things have changed a lot) a great platform when you’re just starting out and that’s exactly where I started!
I saw amazing success over there and sold thousands of products all across the world. It’s super easy to use and they handle a lot of behind the scenes stuff so makers don’t have to think about it.
However, the trouble with only selling on Etsy is that I had no real control over my business. My customers were not my customers, they were Etsy’s customers.
Building brand recognition and loyalty on someone else’s platform is tricky. And the ever changing algorithm along with a huge influx of poorer quality shops who simply resell mass produced items, meant that my Etsy bubble burst - well, slowly deflated. I was ok, but not riding that high any more.
I knew that having all of my eggs in one Etsy basket was not good business sense but I was too busy fulfilling orders to make the time to build on the foundations that Etsy had given me.
I hear this story over and over in forums and sadly some sellers have had to close their businesses entirely as their Etsy sales dwindled.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not Etsy bashing, I still love the platform and still sell on there. What we as handmade sellers have to realise is that Etsy, is Etsy’s business. They will always do what they think is best for their overall growth and profit.
Sometimes their actions go in our favour, but other times it goes in the favour of another shop. Etsy can’t and won’t nurture each individual business on their platform. That is our job as handmade business owners. Etsy does what is best for them and we must do the same for our businesses!!
So, If Etsy is Etsy’s business, then where is YOUR business? Well it’s on your website. That is a corner of the internet that you own. Where you can meet and nurture your customers You get to decide what it looks and feels like and you have complete control over the user journey and experience.
How to DIY a great website for your handmade business
So, now that we’ve established that having your own website to sell and showcase your craft is a good idea here are a few things that will make your website shine.
1. Start with a plan
It’s all too easy to pick a website builder and just get cracking on a blank page, but as with most things, taking a bit of time to think about what you want your website to do and how you need it to be structured will get you off to a much better start than building out from nothing. Adding things willy nilly as you think about them will not make for a coherent website or user experience which means that your lovely new website probably won’t make sales and we do not want that.
2. Brainstorm how you want your website to look and feel
If you already have branding and brand guidelines, then refer to these to guide you, but if not and that’s not possible for you at the moment then think about how you want your business and therefore your website to look and feel. Choose colours and fonts that speak to the overall aesthetic and feeling that you want for your business and that your ideal customer will feel is familiar. You could also consider going through a course such as Liz Mosely’s ‘Design Your Own Branding’ as a halfway house between pro branding and doing it yourself.
3. Map out the structure of your website
I know this sounds boring, but future you will thank you and so will your customers when your website is easy to navigate and leads visitors easily to find something that they love and give you their money.
Decide on the categories and pages that you need and how they will link to each other. Think about the easiest way for a website visitor to get the information that they need and get to the checkout.
In this planning stage, I also like to do some keyword research and assign keywords to each page and category. These are words and phrases that I want Google to take notice of that tell it what each page is about.
4. Learn the basics of SEO (It’s Not as Scary as It Sounds)
I’m not an SEO expert and you won’t be either but we do need to know enough to give our websites the best chance of wooing google into loving us and showing our products to as many people as possible. All google really wants is to know exactly what it is that you sell and who would be the best people to show your website to and it does that by crawling your website and looking at the content.
If you sell sterling silver botanical inspired jewellery made from reclaimed silver, (and that is what it says on your website in various different ways) Then google won’t show your site to people searching for gold boho style statement earrings (which is fine, because you don’t sell them) but it will consider showing your site when someone searches for botanical inspired silver jewellery and that’s exactly what you sell so awesome!
Remember that keyword I talked about earlier? Sprinkle those keywords liberally around and make it clear to google what each page is about.
As I said, I’m not an SEO expert but I’ll tell you two wonderful women who are. Aime Cox from Studio cotton and Menekse Stewart of Hey Menekse. They really know their SEO onions and specialise in talking to small businesses so their content is more relevant and actionable to handmade businesses than a lot of SEO info that you may find swimming around in the internet (trust me, I’ve trawled through a lot!)
5. Get beautiful Images of your handmade products
If you’ve been seeing some success online anywhere then you probably have decent images, but I cannot stress enough how important it is to have the very best photography that you can afford to have. As soon as you have the funds for a professional shoot, get one booked in is my advice. I made saving profits for a pro shoot a priority, before the launch of my new website and although I am proud of the site design, the images that Georgia De Lotz took for me, absolutely take it to another level. On the way to affording a pro shoot, spend time (and maybe money) on educating yourself in how to style and take great shots.
6. Keep Information succinct
We want to get a lot of information across to website visitors to keep them moving towards that checkout. Avoid long sections of text. Keep it clear and focused. Where you’ve got more to say, break it down into smaller chunks to make it easier to read and digest.
Remember that some people are quick decision makers and read nothing but the headlines, whilst other people like to read alllll the detail. Some people just want the facts and dimensions, whilst others really need the story and emotion before they pull the trigger. You need to cater for all buying styles (as if you don’t have enough to do!) You can do this by breaking info down in to smaller chunks with great headlines for the skimmers.
7. Organise your images and copy
You’ll have a much easier time building your website if you have all of your images and even your copy (text) all in one place. I’ll be honest, I like to write my copy as I go, but I always get my images organised in a folder. Resize all of your images so that they are the optimum size for the website builder that you are using, the correct aspect ratio and as small a file size as you can manage whilst still looking good. Also be sure to pop some keywords in to the file names with a - between words.
8. Make your main menu really clear and focused on your products
You want to help visitors to find a product that they like and buy it as quickly as possible. Break your products down into categories and have those categories on your main navigation. Also have plenty of products on your home page to entice visitors to click through and buy. The user experience on your website can be the difference between checking out and making a sale and stumbling around, with too many confusing clicks and losing a sale.
9. Show the process, story and value of your handmade products
As this is your own piece of the internet, you get to showcase the story behind your handmade products. Buyers love to see the process, the skill and love that goes into making craft pieces. Letting website visitors in behind the scenes, conveys the value of your items.
Bluntly, it shows visitors, why it costs more to buy from you than from a similar product elsewhere but it also leads them to become more invested in the product if they’ve seen the stages and work that goes in to it.
The website visitors that really value that connection will buy. Some people don’t value that and won’t buy, but that’s ok. They are not your customers, let’s just focus on the people that DO value your products and can afford the price you need to charge.
10. Check the mobile view of your website
Because Everyone’s on Their Phone. Shopping on mobile is getting bigger and bigger each year. It’s so important that your site looks great and is easy to shop, even on such a teeny tiny screen There's nothing worse than pinching and zooming just to read product descriptions.
“Mobile commerce sales are expected to account for 62% of all retail sales by 2027”
My thoughts on website platforms for Handmade Business Owners.
There are a few common platforms that I find other handmade business owners using. They all have their pros and cons and most offer a free trial so you can sign up and have a play with them to see which you find most intuitive. Asking amongst any handmade communities that you’re in will also bring lots of feedback on what people love or find challenging about particular platforms.
Wordpress is so powerful, If you know what you’re doing, it can do pretty much anything, but I know many a maker who had a site built for them on Wordpress but now who daren’t touch their site, for fear of breaking it, so I’m not convinced about it being great for diy website building, especially if you’re not keen on learning new tech. Wordpress is probably best if you have it built for you by a good company who make sure to hand you a user friendly site that you can update easily yourself (another shout out for Studio Cotton here)
Shopify seems to be the go to for ecommerce and was certainly built for it, but as we’re mostly indie designers and makers, not huge ecommerce stores with complex needs I don’t think that Shopify is necessarily always the right choice for small handmade business owners.
I love Squarespace because it was built for small businesses toDIY their website and beautiful design is always at the forefront with Squarespace.
As Designers and makers, aesthetics are really important to us. Squarespace makes it easy to build a beautiful looking website that showcases your products, tells your story, conveys value and sells your products for you. I wrote an article about why I love Squarespace so much. you can find it here.
If you teach your craft as well as selling products, you can also sell workshop tickets really easily, sell subscriptions, and even sell online courses. So if you’re looking to diversify your streams of income and having multiple ways of making money in your business you can probably do it easily yourself on Squarespace. You can get a free trial with Squaresapce here.
