Terrible website

I mean, I'm not wrong. I do have a terrible website. I update it once a year if I remember, and looking at the traffic it receives, I am lucky if it gets more than one view a day. Why do I bother?

I'm not actually sure. We have all been told that an internet presence is essential for business in the modern world. It is true that if you want to find somebody, the first port of call is normally Google. My website has clear intsructions on how to get hold of me, so in that respect I guess it is useful. If you google my name, you can easily get my email and my phone number and get in touch, and that is all I want my website to do. I have tried to put some photos of my work on there, but it's just poorly shot phone camera pictures which rarely do anything any justice.

So the website is crap. And I don't care. All the earnest emails I get from website designers telling me how I can improve things are like water off a ducks back. I don't want to improve it. In the last five years I think I might have had 4 jobs as a result of contact through the website, and two of those were nothing to do with woodwork!

I'm am a self-confessed technosceptic - I just have no experience of websites or social media actually being as amazing as they tell me they are. Nearly all of my work comes through recommendation - word of mouth. I have woodwork jobs booked in until 2026. This suits me fine.

Commission work taken through the website is often fraught with problems. Remote clients who struggle to communicate their ideas. Customers who presume that anything ordered on the web will come with the speed of Amazon Prime. Many of us still operate in the real world where having to wait for a bespoke craftsman-made item is accepted and understood. Some of us are now so used to receiving everything the next day by courier that we have lost the link between the instant gratification of mass-produced stuff, and the reality of things made by people to order. My favourite customers are those who want to come and visit the workshop and want to understand what will go into the production of the things they want making. Real people, who know what they want and who want to know how it will be made.

So I'm glad the website is still crappy. I have no plans to improve it, although as a concession to making this page slightly more interesting, I will add a photo of a recent piece of work at the bottom.

Crappy photo of a very nice desk in solid oak. Note the medullary rays in the quarter-sawn drawer fronts, hand-cut dove tail joints, the state of the polytunnel in my back garden, the terrible slopey framing of my photo, etc, etc. Sorry......but not sorry!