Alright, I am so excited to see that our summer bootcamp is up and running! We had a great time at the first meeting where we went over the basics for the summer sessions. Now, we are going to talk about specific elements people get stuck on. For July, we have two meetings.
July 10th: Setting up your online presence/Microwave Crafts: When I was getting started, I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to get a website, store, blog, etc. and made a TON of mistakes. Some of what I did was good, other pieces were problematic. We will be going over how to do the website portion of your online website ($10-20 year annual cost): registering a domain (dreamhost, godaddy), using a web platform (weebly, ipage, wordpress, google, big cartel, shopify, etc.), starting a blog, making a facebook page, and linking it all together so it functions smoothly as a whole. This can be done easily barebones in a night, but it takes time to build up a website persona. Blogs often require several hundred or thousand posts to get a following over several years. Please bring your laptop if you have one as we will be doing this in real-time. I will have what has and has not worked for me and others. We will also be doing papermaking/stamping art with the shop microwave. Because paper is just so cool! Above is a stamp I made for my fabric from a really great blog for the Animazement talk in May. Look forward to seeing everyone there.
July 24th: Banks, Accountants, and Jewelry Kiln Making: There are two really good banks in the area for small business owners: Harrington Bank and Federal Coastal Credit Union. SCORE recommends Harrington Bank. I have more experience with Federal Coastal as you can open a business account with them for free if you have a $25 checking account. We will also discuss the other big players: BB&T (bad rep), Wellsfargo (new local player), and some of the others. With Charlotte being so close the good news is small business owners have the ability to shop around. I will also be handing out business cards of local area accountants we know: pricing tends to break down by gender. Men tend to ask for monthly retainers and women charge hourly rates. I'm partial to using female accountants as they seem to be more detailed oriented and charge me 1/2 a year what a male accountant wants to charge a month for the same percieved work. This is probably a lack of understanding on my part, but it can often add up to a couple thousand a year which is significant savings. I meant to do this back in April for tax season, but we ran out of time. Lastly, we will be using the jewelry kiln to do some beginning metal casting. This is a scaled down version of the free weekly pours Evan does at Techshop geared towards making jewelry specifically.
Look forward to seeing everyone this coming month. It's going to be a great time.
July 10th: Setting up your online presence/Microwave Crafts: When I was getting started, I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to get a website, store, blog, etc. and made a TON of mistakes. Some of what I did was good, other pieces were problematic. We will be going over how to do the website portion of your online website ($10-20 year annual cost): registering a domain (dreamhost, godaddy), using a web platform (weebly, ipage, wordpress, google, big cartel, shopify, etc.), starting a blog, making a facebook page, and linking it all together so it functions smoothly as a whole. This can be done easily barebones in a night, but it takes time to build up a website persona. Blogs often require several hundred or thousand posts to get a following over several years. Please bring your laptop if you have one as we will be doing this in real-time. I will have what has and has not worked for me and others. We will also be doing papermaking/stamping art with the shop microwave. Because paper is just so cool! Above is a stamp I made for my fabric from a really great blog for the Animazement talk in May. Look forward to seeing everyone there.July 24th: Banks, Accountants, and Jewelry Kiln Making: There are two really good banks in the area for small business owners: Harrington Bank and Federal Coastal Credit Union. SCORE recommends Harrington Bank. I have more experience with Federal Coastal as you can open a business account with them for free if you have a $25 checking account. We will also discuss the other big players: BB&T (bad rep), Wellsfargo (new local player), and some of the others. With Charlotte being so close the good news is small business owners have the ability to shop around. I will also be handing out business cards of local area accountants we know: pricing tends to break down by gender. Men tend to ask for monthly retainers and women charge hourly rates. I'm partial to using female accountants as they seem to be more detailed oriented and charge me 1/2 a year what a male accountant wants to charge a month for the same percieved work. This is probably a lack of understanding on my part, but it can often add up to a couple thousand a year which is significant savings. I meant to do this back in April for tax season, but we ran out of time. Lastly, we will be using the jewelry kiln to do some beginning metal casting. This is a scaled down version of the free weekly pours Evan does at Techshop geared towards making jewelry specifically.
Look forward to seeing everyone this coming month. It's going to be a great time.
When is the weekly pour event?
ReplyDeleteIt's on Thursdays. It is in hiatus right now due to the heat. Hopefully we will have a couple of days of cool weather the end of the month for our jewelry class. :-)
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