Tuesday 27 April 2010

Expanding the range


My vision for the shop will be eventually a good range of items that combine buttons and / or beads.


Yesterday I made some very simple yet cute note cards using some buttons. What do you think?


I have listed these as a pack of three for £4. The inside is left blank so they can be used for many occasions.


Monday 26 April 2010

Kits






Ever since I was young I love working with things in kit form. I always knew when I started making jewellery that eventually I would like to sell kits of my work.



I have just created my first two kits, and placed one in the shop this morning.
The first kit - memory wire bracelet kit contains my own handcrafted polymer beads as part of the kit which makes it a little more special. These beads will never be recreated so a truly unique piece of jewellery can be created.
The customer can also use their own imagination and create their own design with the beads and findings supplied.
You can go from this


Sunday 25 April 2010

Facebook storefront banners tutorial

The new facebook payvment storefront is causing huge ripples in twitter etc as many of us are trying to set up our own stores over there. Well it is FREE so why not. Customising this page once it's set up is a great free form of advertising for your own online store. You can link your banner to your external store to direct your customers away from facebook and to your site if you choose.

Here's how

My page can be found here

I'll assume you already have your facebook storefront up and running to follow this tutorial. If not you need to set it up here.


- The first thing you need to do is upload your banner to an external host such as flikr. This tutorial will be using flikr as the example. It's free to have a flikr account so if you haven't got one, sign up, it'll only take a few mins.

- Once your banner is uploaded to your flikr account, you need to "VIEW ALL SIZES" This brings up the picture in different sizes on the screen. You want to view it in MEDIUM (500 x 177).

- There is some html code which you can copy onto your own web page which you will need to copy and paste into your facebook storefront.

- Open another window and go to your facebook storefront.

- Storefront admin

- Page content

- Copy the long html code from the flikr page and paste into the box which is titled HOME PAGE WELCOME.

- You can choose to save this now and your banner will be displayed in your facebook store front.


Do you want to link your banner to your external store? Such as Folksy or your own website.?

If so;

- You need to change the html code between the first two quote marks ("). This is the flikr address and will point your banner to where you have it stored on flikr, but we want to take it to your own site, so once the code between the first two quote marks is deleted (don't delete any further), you can then type in your own web site such as www dot buttons and beads gifts dot co dot uk.

- Press Save

When you view your own storefront banner you should be able to click on it and it'll take you to your own external site.


Do you want to resize your banner?


- I have found that if you use the large picture size from Flikr, your banner will come out too large, and the medium banner is just a little too short.

- The medium banner is 500 x 177. You can clearly see this in the html code on your welcome box page. Delete the number 500 and replace it with 750 to resize your banner. I find this size works quite well in the facebook store front. You can of course have it any size you choose.

I hope you have found this tutorial helpful. Please let me know if you find any errors in it. If it's help you please tweet about it. Thanks

Friday 23 April 2010

Facebook

The facebook page was set up a few days ago, and we've already got 33 followers which is great. Thankyou to you all. We had a giveaway at 20 followers and the winner won some lovely puffed heart earrings.

We'll have another giveaway at 50 fans, so please "like" our status.

My blog

I have had a love of making jewellery and handcrafted gifts for a while now. I have recently set up my own website to sell my gifts from and am really looking forward to building it up and making it into something special.