Why Having A Standalone Website Isn't All it's Cracked Up To Be

NOTE: I received many comments on this blog article from fellow Etsians but unfortunately, the comments made were lost when I migrated from Wordpress to Blogspot. Sorry folks! Your thoughtful remarks were great food for thought.

I continually see sellers on the Etsy boards make a particular comment that I wanted to share some ideas on. Typically the comment runs something like this: “If I have to do all this promoting and other types of work for myself, I may as well have my own website where all the traffic I get will be mine alone.”

Each time I see this statement (or some variation of it) I feel like answering back….and telling my experience.

A few years back, after I had been blogging for a while, I started thinking that I should have a ecommerce site as well, for my perfumes. I bought my domain name and decided that I was going to put up my own site complete with shopping cart. I thought it would be a relatively straightforward process like my blog was. It seemed likely that in a weekend or two, and the help of a few web-design books, I’d be off and running. I had made some simple HTML based sites in the past. How hard could it be?

As it turned out, pretty damned hard. Blogs are different from websites---very different--and times had changed since I had made those simple web pages. HTML had given way to CSS and XML and all kinds of things I had no experience of. I soon realized that coding the thing myself was as simple and painless as doing my own wisdom tooth extraction, and that I really had only two options: cheap, easy template sites or slow, expensive custom design.

I started with template sites but quickly realized that most of the choices available on do-it-yourself sites are cheesier than a can of Velveeta and not really all that simple, either. The 793 hosting sites I looked at all seemed to have variations of the same ten ugly templates. I also discovered that template sites gave me little to no control over the overall design. Sure I could choose the pictures and colors, and place the toolbar where I wanted, but bottom line they they all screamed “Someone made me in a weekend!” I made and deleted about 20 sites, each blander than the last.

For a long time I wouldn't give up hope that somewhere out there, the perfect template was waiting for me. I would see other sellers raving about such-and-such host and how easy it was to put up a site and how good it looked, or bragging about their page Cousin Willie made, and then I would visit their sites and (bless their hearts) see pages that looked like carbon copies of everyone else’s OR even worse, a site made in Y2K style by a friend of the family (frames, trailing cursors, and all). Bottom line is that I learned that very few people make good sites from templates or through the good intentions of relatives. The sad truth is that most people think their site rocks because it’s there and functioning, but to be honest there are a lot of dreadful homemade (or friend-made) sites sitting there wasting bandwidth. The fact is that easy doesn’t always equal good in web design. A lot of people who are thrilled to have a site at all are kinda out of the loop when it comes to what good design is.

So I gave up, and paid for good design. I found an incredible designer, who designed a site that fit the image I had in my head. She was (and is) truly visionary and skilled at what she does. She created a site for me that looked great and worked well, with a shopping cart, etc. It had good SEO and tags and content, because she knew about such things. Finally I had done it–and I thought my worries were over. I couldn't afford to pay her for regular updates to the site, but I wasn't too worried. I reasoned that since I had the basic outline the way I wanted it, I wouldn't have to change it often.

However, I soon realized that I had overlooked a key point: updated content. My beautiful site was beautifully static. Customers came, and ooh and ahh’d, and yes, bought–which was great–-but they didn’t stick around long because there was nothing to do except look and buy. For repeat sales they were just as likely to email me or buy based on my newsletter reminders. It slowly dawned on me that the sites *I* go back to are the ones that are always changing, and that having an online business required more than just a great site and fabulous product: it meant keeping people’s interest and commitment to return by having content that was updated from week to week and day to day—and I don’t mean just adding new products.

This was a bottom line truth I hadn’t prepared for. I have a busy day job, and a life full of other things that take up my time, and adding new products each week was hard enough. Now I needed to create content, too? The stress of trying to keep the site updated became just one more of many tasks, and eventually, when I had to choose which parts of my business were most worth my limited time and energy, I gave up. I switched to a simple one-page site announcing my email and phone numbers, and left it at that.

I did business strictly through shows and word of mouth for a while, and then in 2007 I found Etsy (cue angels singing!) I realized that the hassles of keeping up a site would be largely eliminated by having a shop on Etsy. If I provided the PRODUCT (the easy part, for me!) then Etsy could handle the cart, the bells and whistles, the constantly updated content and all the other sticky stuff that keeps buyers coming back…..for a bargain price of .20 a listing and a minuscule percentage per sale. Whoo-hoo!

That's pretty much how it's worked out, and I'm pretty happy. Etsy is not perfect and has many irritating little quirks and non-working things that I would change if I could, but it enables me to have a relatively worry-free, elegantly minimalist platform to sell my goods on, while I spend more of my time creating. It’s a tradeoff….for me, a good one.

I have to ask those people who think it’s easier to strike out on their own—-do you have a) the skill and/or finances to have a well-designed site with good SEO and b) a plan and sufficient time to create regularly-updated content that will keep people coming back? Because without those two….you’re kinda toast.

P.S. For those that asked...my Etsy site is scentbythesea.etsy.com and it’s empty right now until I come back from vacation, but feel free to convo me if you see something in my sold items that you like. :)

It's a sad day in Dodgerville.

What can I say? Even with Manny’s magic, we just didn’t pull it off.

Damn.