Featured Seller: xmissamyx

I've meant to start doing features on this blog for a while now, so here we go with number one!

I found this amethyst and peridot bracelet while Pouncing for undiscovered Etsy shops (meaning shops who have not yet made a sale).

It's from xmissamyx and is priced at $46. She's a recent graduate who has been making jewelry for three years now. When she's not making items for her Etsy shop, she works at a part-time job (which she loves), spends time with her pets (a ferret called Merlin and two gerbils called Flea & Squirrel), and teaches jewelry classes. She's also a fan of superheroes!

With beautiful jewelry and alluring photographs like these, she won't remain sale-less for long.

My tummy hurts.

I just ordered a thousand full-color glossy two-sided business cards and also a thousand glossy two-sided hangtags (which are actually 500 business cards that I will cut in half). The best part is, I got all of them for less than $50, including shipping, from www.gotprint.com.

So why am I feeling nauseated at the thought of spending the money? I'm excited to get them and I know I can't do business without them (in addition to the fact that they will save me buckets of expensive printer ink), but I have such a hard time spending money! I think it's a combination of not being used to having $50 to spend, and also the uncertainty of when or if I'm going to make more money. Business is going okay and ought to pick up even more in coming weeks and months, but every sale is still a surprise to me. I wonder how many other Etsy sellers feel like this, getting cold sweats at even the minor expenses?

Wow, was I wrong!

As mentioned in a previous post I've been working on building jenhintz.com. I did order Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML & CSS by Ian Lloyd. It was published in 2006 as opposed to the book I first learned HTML from (circa 1997), and the title really does say it all. I'm coming to understand just how messy and simply wrong most of the html I learned back then was. No wonder I could never build great pages!

This book teaches the new XHTML and CSS all as one entity, and it makes a ton of sense. It's written so that even a total beginner can follow it, but it's not too dumbed-down for those with some base knowledge (however misled we may have been). Each lesson is broken down into manageable bites of information, and there are plenty of examples both of the markup and of what the resulting webpage looks like.

If you want to make your own website but don't have approximately $400 for a program like Dreamweaver, I think this book is a great jumping-off point.