Welcome to the first season of our new podcast. Help- I started a business, now what? At the beginning, there are so many decisions to make and so many things to do. It can feel like everyone else has their business figured out. It can also be really easy to compare your brand new starter business to others that are well established. In this podcast, we will talk about all those hairy first big steps that come with starting a business. Establishing a web presence is one of them.
Our second episode features Erica Martin of Pixel Jam Digital. She will share key things to think about when establishing your web presence. More importantly, how to not overthink it in the beginning. Find her here on Instagram. Check out the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, or read the transcript below. We’ve even included timestamps in case you want to zero in on one part of the show.
Episode 2 Transcription
00:00.00
Amber
Hello and welcome to the help I started a business now What show. Otherwise known as the now what show. We are here to demystify the 0 to 3 year Mark of business and start talking about all the things. So I want to welcome today’s guest this is Erica from Pixel Jam Digital. So welcome Erica and why don’t you introduce yourself to the audience and tell a little bit more about yourself.
00:20.93
Erica
And yes, my name is Erica Martin I am the owner and lead developer with Pixel Jam Digital. We’re a website development and design company where we build custom websites with heart and code. Always like to put heart first because our passion is so strong. But yes, the code is equally important too. I also have a side business I share with my mom where we sell crystal accessories jewelry, raw crystals and stones very similar to what so many other small business artisans do as well. But my main passion all day every day lies in being an extraverted developer and helping people build websites.
01:03.92
Amber
I love that you also come from the industry as well. You know for us, it’s it’s really important to be able to say you know we’re not bringing outside experts. We’re actually bringing other people that do this and so as an artist that also does that on the side as well as has your has your main hustle. I love that that you do both of those so our topic today for our audience. A lot of people are talking about should I have my own website? What should I have, should I be selling through my own website?
So we brought Erica on to be able to start to talk about how do you even begin To make that journey toward building a website? What are some of the main platforms that you can choose from? This does not intend to be comprehensive. We’re not going to cover every platform- we’re going to talk about some of the main ones. She’s going to share her perspective on what she’s seeing so why don’t you start to do a little bit of an overview of the main players for building out some ecommerce and websites for artisans.
02:07.35
Erica
Yes, and we work with so many different sized businesses both in the for-profit and nonprofit space. At the end of the day I will always say yes you need a website but a website is better than no website. So a lot of times people will say oh gosh Erica I did this myself at two am one night because I know I needed a website presence please don’t judge me for it. There is no judgment if you took the time to build something and create something yourself that is fantastic! Kudos to you.
Now when it comes to having websites. There are so many options. Very easy to be overwhelmed by everything especially when you start looking at all of the tech jargon and terminology related to certain things. You might look at oh yes I need to buy a domain I know what that is but I don’t know what a who is privacy is though- I’m out.
Or you look at hosting and you think yes, I know I need somewhere for my website to live but I don’t know what memory allotment means so I’m out. It can just become very overwhelming with all the different options out there. So again, any business should have a website but don’t think that it has to be some grandeur piece of art. From the get-go the main point of having a website is to provide the information on whatever it is. You’re doing so if you’re a service provider saying how you can ah how you can be contacted. How people can get a hold of you and what services you provide if you have a brick and mortar. What is the location?
If you are selling items. What do you sell? So you can think of it as a very basic almost like a business card that’s digital and then grow it out from there.
03:48.90
Amber
Oh I like that approach too especially when you’re brand new. You might not even have the whole ecommerce side of it up and running even as an artisan but just to have that presence to say how do they find me past that craft fair?
04:02.23
Erica
And it definitely creates legitimacy. You are a legitimate business doing this thing. Whatever that thing might be but you are legitimate and so it was very helpful for people to see. Okay, yeah, they are someone who makes Handmade things- jewelry. Ah, they sell Crystals. They know you’re a legitimate business business similar to how only so many people look on social media sites too.
04:28.36
Amber
And that’s a great point of it aiming that legitimacy at your business as opposed to it’s 1 thing to use only platforms where you can’t necessarily own the domain and then use a free Gmail account and other things. But when you have say like. Pixel jam as your url. That’s completely different than being on so under somebody else’s url and I hadn’t really thought about that. It is that- no this really is a business. Even if that website were to only say here are the craft fairs. You find me at…..
05:04.76
Erica
Exactly.
05:07.51
Amber
It’s still a legitimate business. So I love seeing that building block. What kinds of things do you usually see if someone’s just getting started. Just getting their first page up what kinds of things do you usually see people put on that website?
05:21.50
Erica
Usually what I will say we like to see best practices- because that’s not always what happens but best practices- logo or some type of visual branding for your identity. So it’s very easy for people to recognize like oh yes, this is indeed the person that I visited at the booth at this pop-up, not too long ago or this maker’s market.
Because if you don’t have that there could be a misconception and they’re looking at it ends up, they’re looking at the wrong website. And it’s another seller who’s in a totally different state.
So having that visual recognition is definitely helpful like you were saying even if it’s a free gmail address but some type of email address or social media contact to provide that contact information. Is extremely helpful as well. I’m sure you’ve talked about the sales cycle. We can all talk about the sales cycle all day long and how many touch points it requires so making it really easy for people to follow you on social media so they can stay at the top of the funnel and you’re not having to reattract them just at makers markets.
That’s also extremely helpful- then again at bare bones bare minimum some type of either mission statement organization statement what it is you do because I’m guilty of getting on a website not knowing a hundred percent what someone does and then leaving because I think maybe this isn’t the right business that I was originally looking for. Um I say similar things looking at print ads or a radio ad. At the end of the day I’m like who is this for what are they doing I don’t know what they’re trying to sell to me right now so making it very clear what you are offering is also very important.
07:05.88
Amber
I love that that it’s basically like a tagline to say I make Xyz. I’ve even started amending some of the Handmade Seller things as well to say we’re for artisans building thriving businesses like – look – we’re for a certain set of people. It’s like oh if you’re not learning and growing. Well you’re probably not that interested in what we what we have. But again, it’s very specific about who actually is buying and and who this is for, and what the thing is because they don’t know all the things you do. You know they could have several things.
07:40.75
Erica
Um, right.
07:43.40
Amber
And so you want to be super explicit in that initial messaging now.
07:46.49
Erica
Well and in full transparency- It took us 4 years to come up with our slogan that I am just in love with- custom websites developed with heart and code. Now it’s really simple. You would think I could have come up with it much sooner. But I didn’t.
08:02.76
Amber
Oh Absolutely it the same for the magazine when in changing it was more like oh this is what this thing is about. It’s not very action oriented. It doesn’t tell it who who comes, who wants this. How do we go about doing what we do.? It’s so hard to come up with. That tag on I think that’s actually one of the harder things to come up with because you have to condense it down. It did can’t be a small novella. It has to be something short and simple that normal humans can digest.
08:24.11
Erica
Definitely.
08:31.61
Erica
Yes, that’s where that brand messaging becomes so important and invaluable.
08:36.15
Amber
Absolutely so now let’s shift gears a little bit. Let’s talk about kind of who are some of the main players in your experience that you see a lot of Artisans use for some of those kind of initial websites. So you want to talk about that a little bit?
08:51.61
Erica
Yeah, so talking about the big platforms listing them off. We have WordPress, Squarespace, Square- which yes is different from squarespace, and Shopify. Then there are some others kind of in the background like Weebly, Wix, Bigcommerce that are fairly important. Webflow also fits into that but I wouldn’t consider them as big as some of the others just because either when it comes to limitations of the features those platforms offer, or the frequency of how often we see people adopt those other platforms.
So let’s take Weebly. For example. Not trying to get too technical but like Weebly is very inexpensive- but also very limited. So it is a get what you pay for situation I believe their initial plan is around $10 or less per month which I understand is extremely attractive if you’re trying to get a basic web presence going. And again I say go for it use that inexpensive plan put something on the web figure out what you want your website to do for you. How you want it to be working for you and then upgrade later. Invest in it later.
Wix is really similar to Weebly. In that it is somewhat limited but they have been really developing out their platform more the past couple years and it is starting to rival Squarespace in that you can easily drag and drop components to build out your website so not to throw out too many geek terms.
But there is something called a wyziwig editor – which is what you see is what you get. If anyone uses Mailchimp for email marketing. They’re going to be very familiar with that because it’s drag and drop so you can say I want a headline here and put a headline there I Want an image here and you put an image drag it across your computer.
10:27.11
Amber
Okay, yep.
10:43.89
Erica
Wix is very similar to that is a little bit more expensive than Weebly, but ah, they’re definitely developing out more features then I am going from here. Let’s jump to Squarespace so Squarespace has been around for a long time. Just within the past year and a half they switched over to a style called fluid engine to make their designs a lot more diverse and aesthetically pleasing that something Squarespace has always prided itself on is it’s pretty by default. It’s kind of hard to make a Squarespace site look ugly because everything about it is so aesthetically pleasing already. So with this fluid engine. They just enabled more features and more elements that you can add to keep things equally pretty so Squarespace is great as well.
They’re also really pushing on ecommerce where they’re trying to capture this maker’s market literally of people wanting to sell things very simply on websites. But people who don’t really know how to build out a huge ecommerce site compared to let’s say we might talk about when we talk about Shopify. So. It’s very simplistic and like I said it’s nice to look at so whenever you go to Squarespace website I like to joke that I know it’s a Squarespace website just on how it looks already then we have Square.
So like I mentioned Squarespace and Square are different. Square is the old fashioned dongle where we had the little puck and people could do a credit card charge which is where it all began Now they’re building it out to be more of a robust website platform. With the emphasis on E-commerce and this was something they really pushed hard on after the pandemic.
I think there were a lot of smaller retail ventures and even Ghost kitchen popups because they really leaned into restaurant business to offer more of a robust point of-sale solution. And an ecommerce solution that we’re all intertwined the nice thing about Square is that it’s fairly inexpensive now with any of these Platforms. You can add on all day long and it becomes more expensive but Square wanted to make it really simple to integrate ecommerce and having a website platform that way.
Fun fact, the technology of Square. Those websites is built upon Weebly so every once in a while I get into a spot on Square and it says powered by Weebly and I’m like oh yeah, I Always forget that because I see Square branding everywhere. Then we have Shopify. Shopify is what I consider to be the bread and butter of ecommerce anymore because it is built for ecommerce by default not necessarily the sexiest website platform out there. There is a lot of room for custom development but it makes it really easy for customers to place order.
13:31.30
Amber
Yep.
13:41.57
Erica
And for website managers to like fulfill those orders send out shipping notifications, do email automation if someone has an abandoned cart- that is what it was made for and they’re slowly adding more automation into it so that it makes it really easy to run an ecommerce business.
Then there’s WordPress. WordPress is my personal favorite because I am a super nerd and I love to have access to all the code and the database I also understand I am one of the few and most people probably do not want that so much. WordPress is less out of the box compared to the others because You really need to have some sort of either education and knowledge about website building or be connected to the right people like a designer or developer to build out a wordpress website that is robust, has the ecommerce built in and all that stuff. So while I love Woocommerce and wordpress I know that’s not for the average business owner who’s getting started.
14:45.72
Amber
Absolutely and so why don’t we talk about with our little artisan businesses right? So I do pop-ups a few times a year with an artisan food business. In addition to running the magazine as well and I use Square for mine. And the reason I chose Square is what first I just needed something to accept payments and well then I had to set up the rest of the point of sale system so that I could actually just sell and take payments and I did that only.
After I Had done other events where I used someone else’s point of sale system and then we just kind of netted out the payments right? So that first phase was use their system. They just give me the money that was actually the easiest but I knew that wasn’t really gonna work as I moved to other pop ups and events. So I stood up Square for that.
Because I only paid when there were sales right? So then the fees you know the fees kicked in once I had sales because I was trying to be economical with it. I didn’t want to invest a ton of cash upfront and so I built a very rudimentary website.
15:38.21
Erica
Right.
15:53.91
Amber
Didn’t even get a custom url yet because it’s such a new little business. It’s under it says it’s square site. Not that’s all good, but it gave me something. What did you do for Gemstone?
16:03.75
Erica
So Gemstone we started because I am a website developer- I thought we needed the biggest flashiest fanciest website out there! It was also a side project that I was doing while on maternity leave with my second born who the business is named after so you know.
What do most moms do? They start another business during maternity like right? sure. So what I wanted to do is build out a really beautiful robust website. We started with Stripe as our Payment Processor not Square at all. We were using Woocommerce so I had to set up Woocommerce- I had to set up product shipping. Local pickup and delivery options I had to integrate Stripe in because Stripe is it’s nice and it works great online. But you have to invest a little bit more for a face-to-face sale -so we had to purchase Stripe card reader. I had to program it in such a way so that it works with our website. Now I have the knowledge to do that.
But it was a lot of work and my mom would just look at me and be like- pass! I’m not getting into that and then fast forward 3 years we are now switching over to Square as well because. Just like you. It is not my primary business. It is more of a for fun. We do it on the side together. We do maybe 5 to 10 makers markets or pop-ups a year. So it’s more very much on the side and I wanted to simplify things. So first we switched our payment processing over to Square.
I’ve slowly been moving all of our inventory into Square as well and honestly probably within before the end of the first quarter I’ll move the website all over to Square. It keeps things more simple and I don’t have to invest as much time and money into maintaining the fancy website which when this is meant to be a side business.
17:58.90
Amber
Absolutely yes and I have found that that Square is is strong in that and that’s that’s kind of their sweet spot. Although from all the advertising I’m seeing Shopify Point-of-sale is I think going after Square. We we were talking about this a little bit before we hit the recording. Based on what I’m seeing with the advertising but it’s definitely something you think about if you’re brand new to this business. If you are like me- I’m going to do a few craft markets. It feels like Square is often a pretty good solution to get started.
18:28.74
Erica
And it is what we recommend to a lot of makers who are in this similar space because it’s very inexpensive to get started in Square. I Think the Free plan you pay a little bit more in processing fees. But you can still utilize the free plan and have a full ecommerce website. It makes it easy. It makes it simple – I don’t remember how much the little card readers are but they’re very inexpensive. Yes.
18:55.41
Amber
They’re inexpensive. They’re very inexpensive to get started. So for anybody listening we talk about there’s a variety of different pricing models that you run into when you kind of look at all these different providers. The way that a lot of the Square initial stuff is set up is is something we’d call consumption pricing. As you consume and you use it they get paid.
There’s a variety of different platforms that are this way as well. It’s really all about the consumption where some of the other platforms say no, this is kind of an overhead or part of your cost of running business and so they expect you to pay a monthly fee. They may allow you to do monthly or they may do an annual fee and so they’re they’re kind of 2 different types of models and so really depending on what you’re wanting to do with the business that will help drive what you should pick for that presence as you get started.
19:51.30
Erica
Yes, and even some platforms like Squarespace are a combination of the two because with Squarespace you know you can either pay the monthly or you can pay it annually. But then depending on the level of ecommerce you have is going to based on what the processing fees are. So the lower cost plan is going to have higher processing fees compared to the higher cost plan.
So a lot of times I’ll ask clients to take a look at what they’re selling and what they predict their average monthly sales are going to be to try and weigh out that cost benefit analysis of it. In the long run is it cheaper if I go with the more expensive plan that has the lower processing fees or vice versa because depending on the platform. There’s going to be some tipping point where it’s more cost effective to switch over to the more expensive monthly plan.
20:42.13
Amber
And that’s that’s great words of wisdom. So you’re you’re in your early years you run your first markets or you start selling online. You may start with 1 plan but then periodically you should come back and just take a look and say okay where I’m at and my trajectory whether good or bad. You know who knows businesses go all over the place when we first get them started. You can then look back again and say okay is this the plan I want to choose.
You can upgrade you can move up usually comes with lower processing fees once you sort of move up because the more they’re getting a guaranteed revenue from you the more they give you a break on the processing fees. So all interesting sorts of words of wisdom. Do you have any last advice as we wrap things up here for people as they start thinking about establishing their web presence?
21:30.46
Erica
Yes, I would say that is with domain names. So one I always encourage people to buy the domain name as soon as they can even if they have an inkling that they’re going to be starting a business because domains are so inexpensive anymore. And yes, there are some good platforms and some not as great platforms for buying the domain name you can always transfer the domain name but as long as you buy it.
Then a lot of these platforms also offer a free domain name when you sign up with them. Squarespace and Shopify are both 2 examples when you sign up for one of their plans. You get a free domain I like to tell people and encourage people to use that as a marketing opportunity to get something.
If maybe you have a business name that you notice people misspell on occasion and they misspell it a very particular way by that as a domain name and then you can have it. Link back and forward to your main domain name to just trying to help now I’m not the best person to ask because I probably own at least 50 domain names! I have a business idea, I have a project idea I just go and buy the domain.
But the nice thing is you can always sell it again. You don’t have to renew it after the 1 year so you’re looking at between 12 to $ 20 a year for a domain name. It’s a very minor investment that helps keep everything on brand and then when you’re ready to do more customized things, you always have that domain name. Another factor is which this could be a totally different podcast episode but search engine optimization.
How long you’ve owned that domain name also matters. So it also becomes very critical if you’re looking at where you’ve just purchased a domain or you’ve had it for the past three years because you knew you were going to do something with it.
23:15.46
Amber
Wonderful! All right Erica so that kind of wraps up our episode for today where can people find out more information about you and about Pixel Jam Digital.
23:25.27
Erica
We are Pixeljam Digital everywhere. So our domain is pixeljam.digital instagram Facebook you can come find us online and I am always online as well. Obviously it comes with the job. So you can feel free to reach out on any of those platforms.
23:42.57
Amber
Wonderful! All right? Thank you everyone for listening today and thank you Erica for joining us.
23:46.58
Erica
Thank you Amber! Thanks everyone.
We hope you enjoyed this episode on establishing a web presence!
Want more of the Now What Show? Check out this previous episodes:
Episode 1: How I got my first large custom order with Lindy of apothecary 19
