Websites for Potters | Kara Leigh Ford | Episode 518

Kara Leigh Ford | Episode 518

Kara Leigh Ford is back for her second appearance on The Potters Cast. Last time she talked about Knowing When to Quit the Day Job. This time, along with giving us an update on her life, she also dives into the idea of the importance of having a website as a potter. Some of the main takeaways that I heard Kara talks about was that having a website of your own helps you to find and define who Your customers are. On all other platforms, ultimately the customer belongs to that platform that you are using as the storefront. On your website they are your customers. Another critical point is that having a website helps to build trust. The world is now associating authenticity with having an online home, a website. Kara has much more to say on this and her insights are brilliant.

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Did you design your own website and put it together yourself?

No, I didn’t. I had a lot of help. In fact I had a lady called Megan, who is my friend, design it for me. I provided her with my branding, my brand colors and the fonts I wanted to use and my photography and the text that was gong on it and then she put it all together. She is Megan in the countryside on Instagram and she is fantastic at Squarespace. She just knows how Squarespace works, she knows how a website works in terms of user experience and she put it together for me.

Why didn’t you do it yourself?

I am a potter. I am not a web designer. I think that you need to know your strengths. I think that you need to pay money to someone who knows what they are doing on really important things and I think that a website is one of those things. It is your shopfront at the end of the day, so it needs to work. And I wanted it to be up and running in a couple of weeks, not months, and she got it done in a two week time period.

What would one expect to pay someone to build a website?

To be honest, it really depends on what you want your website to be able to do. If you want your website to be fully commerce enabled and to take money and to have a shop with multiple products you will be paying more that if you have a website with just one page to show who you are and how to contact you and where to find you. It really depends what you want out of your website. It also depends on the experience of the person who is building the website. So someone who is maybe fresh out of college who did a web design degree may be less that someone who has been a designer for 2 years and has their own creative agency. As a ballpark, I would say you shouldn’t expect to pay less than 500 pounds for a very basic website. That is the lower end, upwards of 5000 pounds for a very high end, bells and whistles website.

Is branding something as simple as good aesthetics?

No, I think branding is a little bit deeper than that. I think branding is a deep understanding of what makes you tick. So branding is your why, why you do something. I think we talked about this before when I was on here first. Branding is more than the colors you use on your website or the fonts that you choose to use. It is about what makes you tick, it is about what makes you make your pottery the way you make it. So my branding is inspired by the Devon coast because I grew up by it. So all my branding depends upon those coastal colors and by the feeling you get when you are by the sea, by the ocean and everything stems from that umbrella point. It is more than the colors you use it is more the feelings that you want people to feel when they are on your website or when they are holding one of your mugs in their hands.

What is more important, a great design or a great experience?

Well, from my perspective, this is something Megan and I discussed quite a lot is that you shouldn’t prioritize design over user experience. So you should never be making decisions purely on the way things look. It always has to work well first. So if you choose a font that is a really beautiful font and you really like it and it suits your aesthetic really well and you are dead set on using it and then when you look on you website and on a mobile, that font becomes really, really tiny and it is one of those hand written ones and you can hardly read it then you just shouldn’t be using it because someone can’t read what you are trying to tell them. It should always be user experience first and design second.

How important is it to consider the functionality of your website on a mobile phone?

It is of utmost priority. Everyone is searching online and spending their time online on mobile these days. If I look at my analytics the amount of people that come to my website from a mobile device is 3/4 so 75 percent of people are looking at my website from a mobile. So it is absolutely a priority if you are asking people to design a website to make sure they are enabling it for a mobile device. It needs to be mobile optimized.