Giving control of your site to a professional developer may sound great, but you will need constant updates, excellent images and a consistent marketing program to bring your website to the top and keep it there.

Dilemma 1 - Develop Your Site

Setting up your website can seem almost overwhelming. If you take it step by step from planning to publishing, you can publish a great website.

Plan the goals for your site carefully. Many people have only the goal of selling from the site. A website can be used to aid in customer service, public relations and image enhancement or to introduce new pieces, introduce your work to new people, provide information to your customers and much more. Choose and secure your domain name. Be sure that you are the administrative contact for the domain name you secure so you can access your choice of website hosting. From goal setting to securing a domain, you will find a site host that can further your goals, chose your HTML editing software, develop content, photograph your pieces, edit your images, design the site, test and retest your links forms and publish the site.

Dilemma 2 - Market Your Site

After your site is online and you are sure that it is functioning correctly and all of the "bugs" have been found, you need to attract visitors. Be sure you have done all you can to provide the best search engine optimization (SEO) for your site in the form of keywords, alternate text, meta tags, clean code and good content. Introduce the site to your online groups, post the site on directories, submit it to the search engines, write articles and develop a solid linking strategy. This is an ongoing task.

Dilemma 3 - Maintain the site

A website is a living document that is never done. Repeat visitors become customers and if you have something new on your site for them along with a subscription to an email update, you can get those return visitors that are so valuable. You will need a consistent program of updates and additions in content as well as maintaining an updated catalog of your products. If you are having problems finding new content for your site, check some of article marketing sites for content that you can use free just for the inclusion of links and information about the authors.

Dilemma 4 - Images

For an artisan or craftsmen, this is the deal breaker. You are working with one-of-a-kind or limited edition items that need the best of images. They need to accurately represent your product. Showing the piece from several angles is helpful for your site visitor. People at an art show will pick up a piece and turn it over in their hands. Turn it over for them. You need good lighting, a camera with a macro and white balance control, a tripod and lots of practice and learning to get those images, but it is all worth it. You will also need image editing software to crop and resize your images and correct color as needed. This is a job best done by you. A graphic artist may be able to make your images sing, but he might also change your pastels to neon in one click of the mouse.

Dilemma 5 - Time For It All

You are an artisan - not a website developer. Your main work is to create your pieces. A website can and will take over your time. It is like a child. It always needs something. Setting up a task list for your site and a time block to work with that list can go a long way to helping you get your products created as well as maintaining your website. You know when your best creative time is. Use that for producing your work and try to limit your website maintenance and marketing to other times of the day.

A website is a large project, but if you approach it step by step, you will soon have a site that works for you in may ways. You will probably find that the development of the site is about 25% of the work, maintenance is another 25% and marketing the site is the other 40%. If you produce just a few pages at a time you will soon have a full site.

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