I’m not consistently any type of innovator in my business. How quickly I jump on a new piece of equipment, process or software is predicated on how much time I have when I see the improvement. A lot of the time, I know I could just do something more quickly if I would just take the time to learn how to do it smarter. Working smarter and not harder is something we all should be doing in our arts and crafts businesses.
To that end, I’ve gone through Time.com’s 50 best websites. Heading the list is Flickr. Many well-known names are on it as well such as Amazon and Etsy. Here are two of the 50 websites you may not be familiar with that may be of use for your arts and crafts business. Both have free versions.
Issuu
This digital publishing platform has a very well known customer base from the United Nations to MTV. You might be scratching your head wondering why an arts and crafts business needs digital publishing. What I like about Issuu is their Smart Look feature. You insert code on your webpages to automatically make your webpages look like a book or magazine with pages you can flip.
This may not be appropriate for all your webpages, but it would be an excellent way to create a catalog within your website or make instructional pages (like your FAQs) look like a book. If you don’t have a website, upload your paper catalog and any other promotional literature to the Issuu website and give your customers the link to your info.
Unless you tell Issuu to make your content private, Issuu will optimize it with every word inside your publication available from search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Issuu has a free version and a $19/month professional version. Smart Look is available for both free and pro accounts, at no extra charge.
Photosynth
If your arts and crafts products are three-dimensional like a piece of furniture or sculpture, you can use Photosynth to create a three-dimensional image of your product. This gives your customer the ability to ‘walk around’ your product via the internet just as they would in a gallery. This is done by clicking and dragging arrows to rotate around the image. The arrows disappear once the rotating starts.
Doing this correctly is an art and requires you snap quite a few images. For expensive arts and crafts items, I can definitely see the value. Also, it may be a great marketing idea to have a ‘synth’ (Microsoft’s abbreviation) of your shop or workroom on your website so your customers feel they have a more personal connection with you.
Most Photosynth use is free as long as you allow public viewing of your synth. The synths can also be embedded on your website at no cost - up to 20 GB of storage, even if your synths are commercial in nature. As this is a Microsoft product, it only works with Windows. You must have a Windows Live ID or Passport account to use Photosynth.
Find Out More Information About Issuu and Photosynth
Interested in using either one or both for your arts and crafts business? Check out the links below for more information about each!
