TAFA: The Textile and Fiber Art List

Showing posts with label Web Tips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Web Tips. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Intarsia Concept Offers A Basic Online Product Photography Course



by Tara Agacayak, Intarsia Concept Co-Founder

My partner Figen Cakir and I met through our love of art and craft which is ironic considering that our husbands work together - a fact we didn't learn until months later! With two separate businesses selling handmade, culturally-inspired products from Turkey, we naturally began projects supporting local artisans in our community. Figen runs The Knit Box, featuring natural Turkish yarn, handknits and knitting accessories. I started Citara's Handcrafted Boutique to highlight modern home and fashion products reflecting traditional Turkish techniques and motifs.
In building our online businesses, we conceived of Intarsia Concept (IC) as a venue to share our experience and learn from the experiences of others. IC is for people who want to turn what they love into what they do. For us it is our love of Turkey, art, design and culture. For you it might be rugs, quilts, tapestries ... (fill in the blank here).

One of the things we learned working in a digital environment is that selling products online is vastly different than selling them in person where visitors can see and touch our products. In person they get the full impact of color and texture. Because they are handmade, our customers understand the care that goes into each product because they can see all the detail imprinted by the artist.

But selling online is completely different. In this two-dimensional environment your potential customers are people who click away in an instant if there is nothing to keep their attention. So when we started IC, one of the first things we wanted to do was put together a course teaching basic product photography skills. We're proud to report we have finally done this with Diana Brennan from D.S. Brennan Photography. We hope that this course will not only help independent designers and artists like you take good photographs of your projects and products for the purposes of selling, but more importantly that it will also help you present your work in a way that honors the love and care with which you have created it.

Because it's not just about what you do, it is also about how you communicate that to others. Good photography is one way to broadcast your artistic message. Whether you are selling something or not, a well-photographed image speaks a thousand words.

If you're interested in attending the Basic Product Photography Course to learn how to present your work at its best, registration is now open. The self-paced e-course begins Monday, February 22nd but is only open to the first 50 students who register. As a special thank you to Fiber Focus readers, anyone who registers from this blog will receive a $5 refund with the coupon code {prodphoto10}. In addition, for each registration that comes through this community, member Catherine Salter Bayar will donate $5 to Nest, a nonprofit that gives micro-loans to female artisans.



Tara Agacayak

 Figen Cakir


Note from Rachel:  Catherine has contributed several posts on life in Turkey and her business, Bazaar Bayar.  Click here to see them.
Share/Bookmark

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Misconceptions About how Search Engines Find Your Website and What To Do About Them

Search engines are a very competitive environment so how they work is a well guarded secret. Google in particular is so sophisticated and successful that it represents over 80% of all searches, leaving the impression with many that there's a giant elephant in the room.


Six Point Engine Tune Up
1. Get rid of hidden text or hidden links.
2. Flush out cloaking or sneaky redirects.
3. Cut out lines of automated queries to Google.
4. Rout out multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
5. Loosen and remove "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
6. Extremely Important: Rev down (don't overuse) keywords.

Focus on the needs of your users and provide unique and relevant content that influences them to visit your site first.

Here are the basics that you need to know:


* Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.
* Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
* Good website design will prevent web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" linking to your site without your knowledge. (Your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.) Don't be lured by businesses that promise overnight improved visibility, for a price no less.


If you want to improve your website's performance here is a simple set of guidelines for you to follow:

Start with the basics:


1. Have a well structured website .
2. Include a sitemap and register your site. Many people don't know what a sitemap is, or how it is used by Search Engines, let alone how to construct one.
3. If you use Gmail you can get free access to Google's webmaster tools to help you with these processes.
4. In order to stand out your website has to offer information that is useful and rich. There are no short cuts to quality content. It is also the only way to maintain your user's interest beyond the first experience that results from a search, and hopefully return another day.
5. Your information needs to be relevant.

How is relevancy determined? This is a very important question.
Here is Google's explanation:

"Google processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content."

A final bit of advice, be patient. It will take time for you to develop a valued website. It will also take time for your website to become recognized as a valuable website.

Gina
your inspiration zone
www.contemporaryquiltart.org


Gina is a self taught fiber artist. She has developed a traditional craft in unique ways. Color and simple shapes drive the quilt making process. Using her own hand dyed fabrics, she combines traditional techniques and patterns in bright and vivid contemporary expressions.




"New York Beauty", $550
Gina's Quilts are also available on 1,000 Markets.


Share/Bookmark

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails