Ok, you have come by early and there is not much here and you turn to leave. But wait!
I am on, 22 Jan 2013, just a new born baby and have many more crafty DIY tales yet to tell! The purpose for me coming to life is I need a place to write down my diy handmade notes. Hence, after 4 days of deliberation, this Blogger blog called "DIY Clearly Helena", is tacked together after a full day's relentless work. It is made up of Google's Blogger and Ecwid's magnificent cataloguing system.
Q. But come on, surely you have other websites already where you have collected and collated many, many notes relating to crafts, jewelry, and if I am correct ... one or more focused in detail on Swarovski and their impeccable brilliance?
You are right. I do. I have (at this time) sites like:
- JEM Library - a gem of a library of some handmade jewelry and crafts as well as some Swarovski information.
- Jewelry Making Beads Library - the long standing collection of terms and basic techniques on jewelry making and the like. Plus the main repository of Swarovski Product information.
And other sister sites that are unrelated to the topic at hand and also retired sites.
However, none of them truly met my needs and I have been thinking and searching forever to find a place where I could:
- EASILY blog without having to go through endless structural hoophas that just me off posting my finished creations (or even work in progress).
- catalogue handmades in an easy to manage, easy to find system
- look good and easy on the eyes
- NO SYSTEM MAINTENANCE and no unending patches to apply nor versions to upgrade to
In the last few days, I have been seriously looking into and trialing Squarespace which have truly beautiful templates. However I don't believe that their system is set up to take hundreds of catalogued items and be able to easily manage and find each piece over time. (Current pricing on Squarespace is USD$16 per month, paid annually).
Ecwid does a perfect job on cataloguing; automatically creating easy navigation; easy, smooth, and clean images presentation; and very easy to manage. Plus one of the biggest pluses with Ecwid is that there is no backend system maintenance to worry about. Each version change, upgrade, and fixes are automatically done by Ecwid themselves. A big BIG headache saver!
That is why I use Ecwid for my online handmade and jewellery store ClearlyHelena as well.
Ecwid however is a paid system (see Ecwid Current prices) which, at time of writing, ranges from Free to USD$99 per month.
I would have loved to combine Squarespace with Ecwid for my purposes however the dual payment would have been too much for me, given especially that this is a free site to share.
Ok, enough first round natter for this new born baby! Just wanted to welcome new visitors as DIY Clearly Helena goes live!
