Craftgawker

I recently discovered an amazing online showcase of handmade products called, Craftgawker. Craftgawker.com is a spin off from their wildly popular food site, Foodgawker.com. (WARNING: Visiting Foodgawker will make you silly with drool, so be sure you are sitting far enough away from your keyboard and computer to avoid liquidy contact. This is for your own protection.)

Craftgawker is interesting. The site has a clean and simple, elegant design that reads almost like a high-end magazine or catalog. And that's because their submission based content has a fairly stringent acceptance criteria. Submissions are moderated and only well designed, well balanced and well photographed images are included. All items must have direct links to content about the product (Etsy, Artfire, Flickr, blogs, etc).

Craftgawker not only allows a crafter to have another venue to showcase their handmade product, but the site also serves as an excellent source of inspiration and motivation to take better, well designed photographs – a very important part of having a handmade business. You may have noticed some appealing products down on the left hand side of this blog. That's the handy Craftgawker widget which is an easy, elegant way to spruce up your website while spreading a bit of handmade love. 

And one last thing to mention… I'm excited to share that my Sapphire Blue Rose Shimmer Ring made the cut! It's currently on the front page and I couldn't be more honored to have been accepted. Check it out… Craftgawker is another incredible tool that helps make handmade a special experience.

Cr8tivity

Who couldn't use a little help with their Etsy shop? Thankfully there are several amazing sites out there to lend a hand. There's Craftopolis and the awesome Treasure Clock and Treasure Hunt features that make snagging Treasuries a breeze. There's also Craftcult and their Heart-o-Matic that shows you how many hearts you have, how many items are loved by viewers and other fun stats about your shop.  And now there's a new Etsy tool on the scene - Cr8tivity.com.

Developed by a fellow Etsy artist, tronaHUE, Cr8tivity displays stats on your shop such as who hearts you, if they are a seller, when they made you a favorite and where they are located. Pretty neat. Like Craftopolis, there is a breakdown of your hearted items, however Cr8tivity also allows you to Twitter the information, jump directly to the item on Etsy or post a link on Facebook.

There are also handy-dandy pie charts to break down your shop's statistics and another fun feature called Shop Helpers that contains a downloadable Excel file designed to help manage your store. Another Helper feature in the works is a "product flyer maker" to assist you in creating instant marketing tools to promote your shop.  Very, very cool.

Check it out. Bookmark it and if you feel the work is beneficial drop a little donation their way to keep the creativity flowing. It's shops like tronaHUE that help everyone in the Etsy community.

tronaHUE.etsy.com
www.tronahue.com