A very good friend of mine is relaunching her seasonal store in San Francisco this fall. It’s a really great non-profit business that sells items made by local artists. I talked to her the other day and was trying to convince her that even though the store is local, she should try to use some free online tools out there to help publicize her business online.

Some of these items are specific to the store I’m helping, but others are applicable to any local store. I’ve listed my recommendations in priority order and I can help you with most of the below if you like.

Cheap and Easy

Blog
Your current website is great, but I bet it is hard to update and may not get updated as often as you’d like. Setting up a blog is relatively simple to do and with your down time through the week, you could use your spare time to write about items in the store. Also, write a little profile for the artists/crafters that you feature (or better yet, ask the artists to do this for you). A blog is a great way to both show off what you are selling in-store, but also a way to attract other artist’s to sell their work as well.

Your blog also serves as a good place for people to ask you questions, for reporters to gather info about your store and best of all, other folks to link to you. Blogs tend to get more Google love, so hopefully, it brings you more customers.

Local search
Make sure that your store has a listing in all the local search engines like Yelp, Yahoo, Google, CitySearch, and Judy’s Book. Asking customers to review your store on these sites post purchase probably wouldn’t hurt. Search engines are devoting a lot of effort into these areas and you can only assume that they (at least the bigger ones) are getting a lot of traffic.

Flickr
Photograph everything that comes into the store and post lower resolution images (ie not printable) of the items that are for sale. I know there may be some sensitivity surrounding artist’s work, so make sure they know (and are ok with) you posting pix online. Tag all the images that you upload with your store name and thoroughly tag what they are and who they came from. This will help folks find either the artist or the work in the future.

Also, use Flickr to post pictures from the launch party, (which is something you would probably do anyway). Encourage other photographers to tag their Flickr images with your store’s name. This will help create a larger pool of pictures.

A little sidebar – a good way to make your products look good is to use a lightbox when photographing them. Here’s a link to make a cheap one.

MySpace
Create a MySpace profile for your store. Add all of the artists that you work with as your friends. Join groups and post on forums that make sense for your business. I know that many of your artists have a presence on MySpace and promoting your store and artists in MySpace will get those crazy teens in your store. Seriously, tho, MySpace has helped many a business get going moving product and it’s not outside the norms of MySpace, nor is it against their TOS. And hey, no web design chops necessary ;-).

A little more work and expense

Etsy
Etsy is a great online marketplace for handmade goods online. Create a store to help sell and promote your artists stuff online. I know that the focus of your store is selling local stuff locally, but ultimately, you are the artists agent, and I’m not sure they really care where it is sold, so long as they are putting food on the table. Etsy just did a great promotion with the upcoming Craft magazine from O’Reilly (another great resource to check out).

Second Life
Build a virtual store on Second Life. Ok, this one is a bit more difficult and might take an actual programmer, but a lot of your locals spend time on Second Life and people are spending real money on Second Life. If any of your artists are virtual, perhaps you could get them to sell their virtual goods in your virtual store. The options are virtually limitless. This is one you’d have to find someone else to help (I know a guy).

In the interest of full disclosure, one thing I would recommend is that you should make sure that artists that sell through your store should know what you are planning on doing with their work. You can decide whether to let them opt out of the program, but ultimately, these recommendations can be great ways to promote both your store and the artists.

Ok, that’s my top level view. Any questions?

A couple of weeks back, I attended the Gnomedex conference to hobnob with the digital l33t and make some techie contacts in the Seattle area. I registered late for the conference and was not completely prepared to go.

I had no business cards.

The cardinal rule of attending a conference (and making people remember you) is to bring lots of business cards. As I’ve been playing stay-at-home dad for the last few months, my company (ok, my 2 year old daughter) hadn’t yet supplied me with business cards.

I’ve never designed or had business cards made, the companies I’ve worked for have always done it for me. Being a fairly DIY kind of geek, I set out to make them myself. I had several criteria:

1. They had to look professional.
2. They had to grab attention.
3. I had to have them in less than 4 days.

Today I’ll talk about the design part of the process and tomorrow I’ll finish with how and where I got them printed.

More after the link.

After a quick Google search, I found a business card designer for OS X called Business Card Composer that had a number of templates and seemed relatively easy to use.

My wife and I flipped through all the built-in designs and settled on one to modify for my own.

BusinessCard Composer integrates nicely with the OS X Address Book and I found my data in the Address Book panel and BusinessCard Composer filled in the blanks. Theoretically, if you were making business cards for several people in your company, it would be a breeze to pull their data into this app.

The next step was to pick the printing medium. There are many to choose from, but I knew my printer was going to be online, so I hoped the first selection was the best one.

And voilà:

Now, I didn’t really like the color and the letter ‘p’ disappeared into the background of the card. I liked the basic idea of the card so I settled on contrasting colors for the logo and background. (I may have been influenced slightly by my last company’s colors, but I digress).

This whole process took about 1 hour, but I much of the process was just playing with designs, colors and presentation. I didn’t really scratch the surface of what BusinessCard Composer can do, but time was of the essence.

Tomorrow, I’ll post about finding a print shop that could turn a small batch of cards around quickly for a decent price.

Sorry folks, I’m still here. Very busy last couple of weeks, but posting should resume soon. And no, I haven’t just been playing the Xbox for the last week.

Marco writes,

“Does plasma pixelate fast moving objects? I’m just wondering because I saw a few plasmas that were doing that at frys and didn’t know if it was the dvd player that may have been messing up, or if it was just the plasma. I also noticed that LCDs go up to 1080 pixels yet they aren’t as bright as a plasma screen. Would you ever go back to LCD, or is the plasma just too pretty?”

Recently, I had to replace the lovely 32″ Sharp Aquos LCD I purchased last year because it was damaged during our move from San Francisco to Seattle. As we had moved into a larger house (dang those SF prices), I was thinking that it also might be time to upgrade the size of display.

Currently, you could get a great 32″ LCD for less than $2k, but once you start moving up in size, you move up in price tremendously. 37″ or 45″ are the next sizes up, but at $2000 and $3500 respectively, I thought I might give plasma a try.

Plasma screens are still expensive, but from a price vs. performance perspective, they kill LCDs at larger sizes. You can find a current generation HD 42″ plasma screen for $2-3k.

According to Sound and Vision’s HDTV Guide 2006, plasma screens in general, have better markedly better color and picture uniformity. LCDs excelled in daylight viewing. But it was a virtual draw when it came to contrast and picture detail. The downside of plasma is they consume more power and if you really want 1080p, it isn’t available in plasma yet.

Now, to answer your questions, screen pixelation usually occurs when there is fast movement on the screen. This makes the Discovery HD channel great for the salesman and bad for the customer. On similarly sized televisions, I’ve seen both LCDs and Plasmas get pixelated, so it really varies depending on the manufacturer and how well their image processor works. Higher quality televisions tend to have higher quality image processors. Unfortunately, this isn’t something you can pick out on a spec sheet.

Here are a few tips for comparing flat screens.

1. Compare similar sizes.
Bigger screens will look more pixelated than smaller ones.
2. Stand back.
At a typical electronics stores, you stand closer to the screen than where you will sit at home.
3. Go to a specialty store.
Big box retailers (Fry’s, Best Buy, Costco) may not have their televisions calibrated similarly (or at all). One television may be set for bright sunlight while another may be set up for a dark room. Specialty stores will either have their televisions calibrated properly or will have someone at the store who has been trained to do so. Specialty retail stores don’t discount as heavily as big box stores, but they will often price match any local store.

And as to your 1080p question, while there are no 1080p sources currently (and none planned by broadcasters), one can assume that video games and computers will increase in resolution in the coming years. That said, while I had my doubts about 1080p, a quick comparison at the local Magnolia Hi-Fi, I have to say that 1080p looks pretty sweet. All images on a 1080p will be upconverted from either 1080i or 720p and we go back to image processing as to how good all of this looks.

Here is some more about 1080p from Design Technica.

Finally, as to which one is prettier, I really loved my Aquos but the color on the plasma is a lot better. 1080p LCDs are damn tempting, but they really break the bank for similar sizes.