TheSilverHook.ca

TheSilverHook.ca is up and running!  Along with producing a product catalogue for my wholesale and retail clients, updating my online presence has been my main goal for the new year. I’ve had the blog for a while now, but it lacked that professional edge I was looking for.

Discoveries:

• Blogger Static Pages
• HTML searches/Gallery
• Banners
• Domain Names

The first step was to figure out how the website was going to run. Did I want to fork over money to pay someone to design a website for me? Did I want to pay for software? Not really – since in the end those costs would have to accounted for in my products. I wanted my website to be something that I could easily update (user friendly) and not have to worry about cost. Blogger hosts both my personal blog and my business blog, so I began by researching Blogger. At some point in time Blogger started “static” pages – unchanging pages to compliment their blog pages. If you look just below my banner, my static pages are listed. Updating them is similar to making a blog post.

I really wanted to have some sort of gallery on my page. I am in the selling business, and I needed to show my product. I thought it would be simple, but in the end it took about 4 days. I don’t really know anything about HTML. I thought about just putting a link to either Facebook or Etsy, but there are plenty of people who don’t do facebook, and I never have all my products listed on Etsy. I searched online for a widget (but that would put the gallery on every page), and I tried to find a script that I liked. I tried having the page automatically redirect to a Flickr gallery – but none of them quite fit. Then I searched on other websites, and compared their codes (View Page Source in the top bar menu). Eureka! Most galleries, just seem to be tables. After that discovery, I had the gallery up in about 2 days. I’ll continue to add more pictures, and hopefully captions.

Every professional website needs a banner. I tried quite a few, some more complicated than others, and settled for something simple. I created the banners in MS Publisher, convert to 72dpi pdf files, cropped the pdf and saved that as a jpeg, and set the size and contrast with MS Picture Manager.

 

Finally the time came to buy a domain name (thesilverhook.ca). That was probably the easiest part. I have blogger hosting everything, so I just needed the domain name to have masked forwarding to the blog website. I bought the domain name from GoDaddy along with an email address (info@thesilverhook.ca). And here we have it. Welcome to TheSilverHook.ca!