How to sell on-line, Part one.
First of all let me give you my background, I run a on-line store and on-line auction for a transportation memorabilia art gallery, around 80% of our items are sold online. I started out in graphic arts for print, so when I made the big jump to websites there was a major learning curve.
I wasn’t lucky enough to get any formal training from school about websites, because when I started out in this business and went to school we didn’t have the world-wide-web, we bought printed mailing list and printed catalogs and send them out USPS bulk mail, and then waited for the phones to ring. And they did, and we sold stuff, and packed them in boxes and send them to people all over the world.
Things have changed a lot, and they have also stayed the same. We still compile e-mailing list, and yes we still send out printed catalogs, and we post items on the website, and sometimes the phones and faxes still ring, but more people just click on buttons on our website, and the end result is we sell things! We pack them in boxes and send them to people all over the world.
How do you make the jump from the brick and mortar company to a on-line store?
When I started trying to make the change, I couldn’t get much information from the web people that I ran into!
One of the first things I noticed it was mostly younger people who were creating web graphics and websites and it just seems to be second nature to them. I knew that there were programs out there like Adobe Dreamweaver to create web pages with, and I thought since I had been using Adobe Creative suite products like InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator and for many years, that Dreamweaver should be simple. So I was pretty surprised the first time I opened Dreamweaver up, unlike the print oriented programs I didn’t have a clue. (I’m over 50.)
I keep asking people I ran into who built websites how to get started, and one older lady told me, just start by learning HTML, she said “It’s not that hard.”
Well I had been trying to avoid that for a long time, It really looks like programing, and I’m a artist and a marketing person not a programmer.
Well I gave it a try, I found a site called W3 Schools, http://www.w3schools.com/ and I spent a few hours on it and the next thing I knew I was hooked. The next thing I knew Dreamweaver started to make some since, I started taking classes on an online tutorial site http://www.Lynda.com, and things started to become a little clearer.
The next thing I knew I got this job at the on-line art gallery, letting them know that I had no real website experience under my belt, I guess they were desperate and they hired me, that’s when the learning curve started.
The next thing I knew was I was in the frying pan, as I started working on the two websites platforms, and hundreds of pages of HTML, that had been managed and mismanaged by more than a few previous webmasters, I knew I would either sink or swim.
I ended up treading water for a few months, thank God for the nice older lady who prompted me to “Just learn HTML, it’s not that hard!”
So until next week I say very simply “JUST LEARN HTML!” It is the language you got to know if you want to get started selling online. Yes I know that there are some people out there claiming you can get by with some WYSIWYG program or you can buy a cookie cutter site that doesn’t need learning any code to run, but just get over that YOU WILL NEED TO LEARN HTML, or at least hire a teenager.
Next week we will look at what kind of sites work for what kinds of business.
I wasn’t lucky enough to get any formal training from school about websites, because when I started out in this business and went to school we didn’t have the world-wide-web, we bought printed mailing list and printed catalogs and send them out USPS bulk mail, and then waited for the phones to ring. And they did, and we sold stuff, and packed them in boxes and send them to people all over the world.
Things have changed a lot, and they have also stayed the same. We still compile e-mailing list, and yes we still send out printed catalogs, and we post items on the website, and sometimes the phones and faxes still ring, but more people just click on buttons on our website, and the end result is we sell things! We pack them in boxes and send them to people all over the world.
How do you make the jump from the brick and mortar company to a on-line store?
When I started trying to make the change, I couldn’t get much information from the web people that I ran into!
One of the first things I noticed it was mostly younger people who were creating web graphics and websites and it just seems to be second nature to them. I knew that there were programs out there like Adobe Dreamweaver to create web pages with, and I thought since I had been using Adobe Creative suite products like InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator and for many years, that Dreamweaver should be simple. So I was pretty surprised the first time I opened Dreamweaver up, unlike the print oriented programs I didn’t have a clue. (I’m over 50.)
I keep asking people I ran into who built websites how to get started, and one older lady told me, just start by learning HTML, she said “It’s not that hard.”
Well I had been trying to avoid that for a long time, It really looks like programing, and I’m a artist and a marketing person not a programmer.
Well I gave it a try, I found a site called W3 Schools, http://www.w3schools.com/ and I spent a few hours on it and the next thing I knew I was hooked. The next thing I knew Dreamweaver started to make some since, I started taking classes on an online tutorial site http://www.Lynda.com, and things started to become a little clearer.
The next thing I knew I got this job at the on-line art gallery, letting them know that I had no real website experience under my belt, I guess they were desperate and they hired me, that’s when the learning curve started.
The next thing I knew was I was in the frying pan, as I started working on the two websites platforms, and hundreds of pages of HTML, that had been managed and mismanaged by more than a few previous webmasters, I knew I would either sink or swim.
I ended up treading water for a few months, thank God for the nice older lady who prompted me to “Just learn HTML, it’s not that hard!”
So until next week I say very simply “JUST LEARN HTML!” It is the language you got to know if you want to get started selling online. Yes I know that there are some people out there claiming you can get by with some WYSIWYG program or you can buy a cookie cutter site that doesn’t need learning any code to run, but just get over that YOU WILL NEED TO LEARN HTML, or at least hire a teenager.
Next week we will look at what kind of sites work for what kinds of business.
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