EkaBlog - Site Blog for Ekaweeka the Small Business Community

We have a number of developments underway in the labs, unfortunately none of them are of much use or interest until we can actually show them to you. In the meantime however we have done a number of things entirely about what we can show you. From the very first day of our launch last year the question of how images should be displayed on every page of Ekaweeka has been a difficult one.
Should they align to the top? Should they float in the center? How big should they be? One of the biggest choices was if we should crop the photos we display in the main browsing and navigation sections of Ekaweeka. It was our consensus that we would display them as you guys had uploaded them - keeping true to your content, showing it as you had made it.
So here we are 6 months down the road, a little more grown up, a little more proud. With a new perspective we realized the appearance (especially on the home page) of Ekaweeka with the natural shapes of the photos; squares and rectangles, was a little too chaotic. So we played around with the idea of cropping and found that it really freshened things up!

Tell us what you think, we've used the method on the index page, and all the main browsing pages, everything else is still 100% true to form.

The Summer is here and the Art's and Craft Festivals are back! Just last weekend alone there was the: Union Street Festival (San Francisco), Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit (New York City), Pike Place Market Street Fair (Seattle), AVA Arts Fest (Santa Clara, CA), and here in LA was the Los Feliz Village Street Fair to name just a few.

I spoke with some of the vendors at these events. I've always been curious if having a booth at one of these would help drum up some business. I discovered there a few things worth considering before choosing a festival to buy into. For example: know the demographic, the people at your festival should be the people who will be interested in what you have to sell. Also there are the expenses to consider, a booth at these events tends to run anywhere from $150 - $400 (generally $300), on top of that you'll want a way to charge credit cards, and you'll need a pop up tent if one is not provided (many fairs do provide the tent - but be sure if they do). So with all these costs to consider it might help to find another vendor that will share a booth with you.

No matter what - I learned it still clearly pays off to participate. Having a presence at an all day event opens up doors for meeting all sorts of potential customers, local buyers and distributors, and other vendors. Without making one sale these connections alone can do wonders for your business. That being said, if you have priced your items well and brought enough product for the right crowd you are bound to do sales. One vendor I spoke with at the Los Feliz Village Street Fair said he had done around $1000 each day of the two day fest, the booth cost him $300 - so even if he bought a pop up tent and rented the credit card machine he easily made a profit and probably made a new batch of devoted customers and buyers.

As for credit card sales: if you have a wireless aircard - just bring your laptop to the event and you can sell your items directly through Ekaweeka. We are also working on two other methods of credit card charging solutions like a virtual terminal where you could charge any credit card from your Ekaweeka account, and a phone number to call for charging a card over the phone with Ekaweeka.

Either way, like I said the summer is just getting started and, here's a list of festivals coming up in Los Angeles. Many festivals have openings up to the week before they happen and when you're that close to the line many of them will give you a discount since they need to sell as many spaces as possible so don't be afraid to ask for a deal - it never hurts and all that can happen is you might save some costs!

We'll keep you posted on all the events this summer, and don't forget to tell us about your experience. :-)

We've done it again! All sorts of great stuff is being added to the site on a regular basis. This time it's featured items. Point your browser to the edit items page, now next to the item order, edit, and delete options, there is a "add to featured" link. You can add up to 3 items to be featured which essentially puts them at the top of your items gallery. Once an item is featured you can just click "remove from featured" to pull it from the featured section if you don't want it there.

Also in the works are multiple item sections. Once this bad boy system is in place you'll be able to make a special gallery for each type of item you're selling.

We're nearing in on another release, this one helps folks who are listing more then one type of item or have too many to fit on their profile page alone. This new feature will allow the creation of a specific gallery where items can be organized or selected to be on the main page. The new sections will be placed in the wide column on the right side of the user profile pages.

You can already get a peak of these feature - Galleries (or Item Sections) can be created in the item settings page. Once we wrap up the other half of this development you'll be able to add items to a specific gallery and designate where each gallery is displayed.

It's a new feature that we're kind of making up as we go so if you have any suggestions or ideas feel free to let us know.

This is really the week of updates!!! But make no mistake, today's update is by far the most exciting of any for some time now.

Many people have been asking for a way to organize their items (ex: separate paintings from jewelry), and even more have wanted a way to put them in the right side of their profile to draw more attention to them.

In the Eka labs we've been hashing out an AJAX content manager so you could literally drag and drop your profile content to wherever you'd like but that is just taking soooo long! So knowing full well that this was a development which couldn't wait, we went in and drafted up a nifty little section creation functionality and item organization system.

It is very cool and you just gotta give it a try yourself to see what I mean! Here's a little more on how to set it up:

Item Sections Creation and Organization:
First make some sections - go to the "items settings" page (http://www.ekaweeka.com/itemsettings.php), you'll see a field that say's "create item section" just make a name for the new section and click create.

Once you have made the section, go to your "edit items" page (http://www.ekaweeka.com/allitems.php), under the delete and edit links for each item you'll see an "add to (your section)" link, click on the link for each item you want to add to the section.

Now take a look at your profile you'll see the item section in the top right!

Now that this has been wrapped up we can finally get around to adding Google Checkout and Paypal payment options to your method of receiving payments.

It was another excellent weekend of street fairs and festivals. This time we drove up to Ojai. Ojai is a diamond in the rough for many southern Californians. Ojai Valley is nestled 20 minutes inland from the Pacific Coast Highway about half an hour south of Santa Barbara.

We visited the Ventura County Pottery Guild's festival which was taking place in the main park downtown in Ojai. I spent some time speaking with Harry Poliak a local sculpture/potter/ceramic instructor/and kiln repair man. Harry's collection was especially interesting because half was the usual mug and bowl line of ceramics and the other half was a wild sculpture collection with some serious cultural influences.
We ended up buying 1 mug $15.00, and a couple plant like dishes one of which was only $5.00 - both looked like lily pads - awesome!

Its been "just around the corner" for weeks now, but we gaurantee this is the week you will see Google Checkout and Paypal as payment options to add to your seller account this week. We promise!

As the community grows so does our memory use, RAM, and other unimaginable little globs of computer chips, hard drives, and super geeky stuff. Thank god it's a step we have to take! But it also means having those moments where you take a deep breath, flip off one switch so you can flip on another and pray everything still works.

Fortunately technology is a little more intelligent then that and we don't have to take such big risks, still there could be little things. What we're trying to say is... we're moving to a bigger better server, and as we do so we are moving all the database tables, image files, and system architecture. And by moving to a new system there are bound to be little things we have to tweak and change to keep Ekaweeka up and running as you know it to.

We should be performing our migration tonight during the wee hours. Fortunately one of our server consultants is in France and can service the site while all the US Ekasters are sound asleep (well most of them... you know who you are!). So pardon us for any unusual site behavior during those wee hours. And here here!! We're very excited about this step of growth.

As we cruise the events, festivals, shops, and private studios of Ekaweeka users we're always taking pictures and working to show everyone what those folks are doing. We are also hoping to get them some exposure. Naturally many of these businesses/artists/people are doing something original, something they don't want to be copied for fear that their ideas will be taken leaving their potential businesses in the dust.

Copyright can sometimes be the only way to protect an original idea and if you haven't filed a copyright for some of your original work now would be a good time to start thinking about it. Copyright is often overused though, we've seen artists and craft makers claim that their work is copyrighted and they told us they didn't want pictures taken of those creations. This is a perfect example of how your protection can be your enemy, if you have thought about this or even have the same feelings on protecting your work, don't take our word for it but do give it consideration.

Some things to think about:
How easy is it to copy your ideas? If it is that easy, you may not have something so original...
Even if a picture is used to keep a visual of your creation... is that likely to steal all possibility of selling your own?
On the contrary, it could perhaps get you more business as other people discover what you are doing.
We would suggest not preventing pictures to be taken as chances are - they will only increase knowledge about your work but they could produce more buyers. This is just the tip of the iceberg but think long and hard about it before saying "No!" to anyone out there that wants to remember your work. After all if you do tell them it isn't ok, you can count on one thing from those people; they will probably bother speaking to you or about you again except possibly in negative retrospect.

As a final thought think about how much other art influences your art. If someone does try to use your ideas, they are not going to make exactly what you make (not without becoming you at any rate), instead your influence will live on in other work. Isn't that what it is all about?

All a day in the life I guess... So while the initial server migration we just performed went over swimmingly for the most part, a rather hazardous bug revealed itself this morning. Basically any page where a user could type in text and save it which included: message composing, account settings, profile info, interests etc. the whole nine yards; was crashing if an apostrophe was in the text upon submission. Frankly I'm just fascinated how we went an entire day without anyone using an apostrophe!

For all those who like myself might take advantage of astrology to explain the madness of this sort - Mercury is officially in retrograde for the next 3 weeks. Wooo Hooo! For those who don't believe in that sort of thing please disregard any mention of hippy dippy stuff on the site blog.

On another note everyone please wish Ellery a happy birthday.

Thank god - we're pulling in the crafters YAY!

But where do they belong? Crafters are surely artists, and yet I believe more then a few would argue they deserve a separate category. So artists and crafters and anyone else please tell us, would a crafter go under shops? or artists? perhaps their particular craft would identify them under a certain category within the artist section and by way of selling those creations they are also a shop......

Some of the longer running users of Ekaweeka may notice a few cosmetic developments on the site. To name a couple we have added a cute little envelope and new mail counter at the top of the pages. So when you are logged in you can browse around and that little guy will let you know if you've gotten new mail! Such a great little envelope :)

Also with the help of Love Briana's exquisite color expertise we've changed the login cell on the index page from the pointy edged soft blue box to a summer grass green with oh so friendly looking rounded corners.

And for those who have started using the item section tools now a little navigation cell in the left column of your item pages displays every item section and links to a page displaying that section.

All a day in the life here in Ekaweeka Land.

We saw a bunch of great folks venture onto Ekaweeka last week. With the new names came new trades and some amazing stuff to check out. Maura Vazakas a painter and jewelry designer from San Diego, California added a some great charm necklaces and mixed media state bird paintings.

Diana Rajchel joined us from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Diana creates natural perfumes using techniques that predate 1870. She is the first Ekauser to add a fragrance to the Ekaweeka item catalog.

Another San Diego user - Marion Renee a designer/artist inspired by eclectic and exaggerated shapes and beautiful faces has listed a Red Feathered Sac Bag.

The La Jolla Festival of the Arts will celebrate its 21st year on June 23 and 24 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the UCSD East Campus parking lots.
The festival is recognized as the number one art show in San Diego County and one of the top rated shows in California. It hosts over 190 award-winning local and national artists displaying watercolors, oils, sculpture, serigraphs, fine jewelry, photography and more.
The event will have a variety of cuisines in the festival food area along with live entertainment, interactive booths, hands-on games and activities.

So far we don't see any Ekaweeka folks at the event and it is a little too late to jump on the wagon, but if you're in San Diego you should check it out. And if you're looking for festivals and events in the San Diego area to set up a booth at it would be an excellent place to meet some other people who can give you more information on what else is coming up.

For general information about the 2007 La Jolla Festival of the Arts, go to their website at www.lajollaartfestival.org.

As small business owners, we are familiar with the term “one person operation”. So for my first feature as your resident fashion glutton, I wanted to introduce you to an amazing designer, and even more amazing business woman who is not only the sole creator of her jewelry, but also the marketing, sales and PR department in one. Meet Peggy Li.

Peggy, of Peggy Li Creations, is a San Francisco based designer that has been designing and creating her own line for six years. Like a lot of jewelry designers and crafty folk, she started by making pieces for herself and people stopped her in the streets to ask where she had gotten the pieces.

Peggy Li jewelry is clean, modern and effortlessly stylish. She uses materials such as natural gemstones, sterling silver and gold. Her motifs range from nature inspired leaves and birds to futuristic orbs.

The most impressive part of Peggy’s small business is the media attention she has been able to obtain through her own perseverance and hard work. Find out how she did it.

EkaWeeka: Your jewelry line is all over the place! What have you done to promote your line?

Peggy Li: I have contacted the press and gotten into magazines such as Oprah and Lucky. I work with Hollywood costume designers on a regular basis and provide jewelry for shows like Grey's Anatomy and movies such as the upcoming Superbad.

EW: The hardest part is getting your product to the right person. How did you get in touch with the right people in the media?

PL: I was a big fan of Buffy and thought my jewelry style would match the show. I had met the costume designer when I did an interview with her when working as a reporter and sent in samples to the show! I got lucky, not everyone will be as generous as she was, nor should you really send samples directly to folks. But by working with Buffy, I've been contacted by other stylists for other projects.

EW: When you first approached the media, did you have formal pitches and press kits and all the PR stuff?

PL: I created a pitch letter and made sure I got the right names and picked a show that fit my style. I followed up with a phone call. I didn't hear back from the majority of shows; this is why you don't really want to send in samples. The same goes for magazines. Create a press kit, know the publication and give them a reason to use your work. It's like preparing for a job interview with you and your product as the pitch.

EW: Are you still doing your own PR and marketing?

PL: Yes. Except for occasional web design needs, I do everything myself. This route is not for everyone. My business is still a very small one.

EW: What advice can you give to other indie designers and small business owners?

PL: Know your product, know your industry, have a clear vision about what your business is about.

EW: If you weren't designing jewelry, what would you be doing?

PL: I'd be on a beach in Hawaii!

Peter Gurnz asked me to help him get his images to show up in google searches for "Peter Gurnz". I gave some suggestions and you may notice some of the methods used in his images. But this also opened the door for a great topic - SEO!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is increasingly becoming a priority for people who use the web to promote their business. When I started Dog Walker NYC, I didn't know much about websites, or marketing, or search engines. I did however have an idea about what dog owners would be doing when they decided to hire a dog walker. I figured they were sitting at their desk in their office at 6:45pm working late yet again (a very common thing in NYC), and they realized their dog was at home desperately needing to get out, or even worse the dog had given up and decided to piss on their brand new rug... YET AGAIN! What does one do in such a predicament? They google "dog walker new york city" and they call the first dog walking company in the search results.

My goal was obvious, get my website (dogwalkernyc.com) to become the #1 search result for those keywords. Every stressed out dog owner in New York City would call me. So I started researching search engine optimization, I emailed my website host, I emailed my domain host, I bought other domain names like "dogwalkernewyorkcity.com". I bought inexpensive ads on pet related websites that would link to my website. I tried buying search engine optimization services from Yahoo and I paid for adwords with Google.

Many times everyday I would search "dog walker new york city" to see how far down my website was in the search results - and I found that certain practices were improving my SEO more then others. So I focused on them and within about 9 months I was in the top 10. It took 6 more months to get up to #2 and another 3 months to pass the #1 result. That was a serious accomplishment. It paid off though, to this day I still get 1-3 phone calls a day for Dog Walker NYC - and I sold it off over a year ago.

The great thing about this is - now we implement the same strategy used for Dog Walker NYC's SEO on Ekaweeka and improving your own SEO. We do a lot, and we can only do so much. If you want to help your own SEO, start posting links on your website and / or Ekaweeka profile to other websites with content that is related top yours. Send emails to webmasters for related content websites and ask them to exchange links with you. In every link you post add a "title=my-keywords-" tag in the hyperlink. Use your keywords in the hyperlink.

Things that don't help a whole lot: buying other domains with related keywords in them, this seems links a great idea and many companies do it - but in reality you will just have to optimize that domain address too otherwise it is worth close to nothing in SEO value. Want to learn more? Send us an email to info (at) ekaweeka dot com. Tell us your website url and / or your Ekaweeka profile url and we'll take a look, make sure to mention your keywords, there is always a way to improve your SEO. And where these is good SEO there is more visibility to people looking for you in every corner of the planet!

In what could be the beginning of something great, Love Briana will be setting up a booth at the Melrose Trading Post in West Hollywood this weekend. The trading post is a weekly flea market. For the longest time I thought flea markets only carried used furniture and random garage sale type stuff. The more I attend them however, the more I see how much opportunity there is for small businesses to test out their products and make out with some considerable sales.
For those who are just getting started the former might be a great reason on it's own. At a much smaller fee then say Art Fairs and Street Festivals you can set up a table and see who takes a liking to your products and you can get a feel for how your items should be priced.

Vendors at most flea markets now have: clothing & fashion accessories, fine art, crafts, wood work, jewelry, photography and other items that are very common on Ekaweeka. We're going to make a day of it this Sunday - I'll be joining Briana for this flea market (there is a waiting list so we have a small chance of not getting in), assuming all goes as planned anyone in the area should feel free to join us. We'll be broadcasting blog updates from the booth with our insider angle on this possibly super hotbed opportunity for all EkaUsers out there :D

Megocreations sent me a message last night. She missed the old days where the item images weren't cropped after being uploaded. She was right.. why should you have to make your images a square shape to not loose the original look and feel you had gone for? I'm not big on making life difficult, and I'm not big on disappointing the Ekasters :-) So I could not think of anything better to do at 8:30pm on Friday night then to make a switch that would allow users to decide how their images would look on their profile.

As a disclaimer the only images that were being cropped on user profiles were the item images that were displayed in item sections on the userpage and on item section pages.

Anywhoooo about 35 minutes later the switch was made, I went ahead and fixed Megans images as a surprise and wholla!.

You can set what type of image dimension your items will appear as in the item settings page.

Seriously though folks - if you don't like something let us know. We love a good challenge!

As promised we are here at the Trading Post. It's a beautiful hot day in Hollywood, CA. In addition to the live jazz band, hot food and beverages there are over 150 different vendors here with paintings, prints, photography, collectibles, soaps, jewelry, clothing, furniture, hats, beads, fabric, and of course much much more.

Briana has a whimsical booth - she has created an atmosphere complete with decorative ferns and flower bouquets.

We found early on that the psychology of her booth's layout required some serious though. Initially we used a walk through strategy allowing walkers by to enter her area. Shortly after we decided to bring all her tables up front so there would be easy access.

The day is still early, check back for updates as we continue to explore the potential opportunities of flea markets for art and craft vendors.

Our Shopping Cart has been temporarily unavailable for the past 3 days as we install the Google Checkout and Paypal processing services. I am happy to announce that we are done with that part of the installation. We have found a couple other elements in the shopping cart to improve whilst in down mode so we are going to jump on this rare opportunity to implement those adjustments.

Once we are done you will be able to add items to your shopping cart and those items will stay in your cart with the help of a cookie stored on your browser. Cookies get a bad rap but any shopping cart you've used be it on Amazon, eBay, CDBaby, etc. all depend in one way or another on cookies. Yes some sites might abuse cookies by overloading your browser with unneccesary-memory-indulgent data which is where their bad rap comes from. But our cookie will be a nice simple trans fat free (and I mean no trans fats none of this FDA loop hole mumbo jumbo!) semi-sweet chocolate morsel, natural buttery good cookie. Just kidding! No it will be a simple tiny cookie that stores an item ID for each item you've added to your cart. This way you could add something to your cart leave Ekaweeka, come back later and the item will still be waiting for you to bring it home.

We're shooting for 2 days on these developments. Once complete the new and improved shopping cart will be up and kickin EkaButt. We'll keep you posted with any news until then :-)

There was an itsy bitsy little spider in the image uploading page of the setup wizard. Actually it was a bug... which isn't really a specific type of problem as I thought for oh so long. A bug can be anything as simple as a way of saying something isn't working the way I thought it did.

Anywho.... this bug was giving some folks problems if they tried to upload more then one photo in the item creation wizard pages. It also didn't listen when you tried to change one image to the preview for the item. And gosh darn it, that little bug also wouldn't let you delete the image from the wizard pages.

Thank you Laura for pointing this out, we knew something was wrong, but we have been so tied down with this new shopping cart there was no time to try to figure it out.

I stumbled upon the San Francisco Juneteenth Festival last weekend. It was a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon – and not just because of yummy bar-b-que chicken and roasted corn. The crafts at the festival were so intriguing!

Juneteenth is a traditional African-American celebration which originated in Texas – and SF’s celebration is the largest outside of the founding city! There were African arts, crafts, and traditional dress and accessories. There were also kiosks boasting antique and home-made jewelry, as well as knick knacks, and accessories. I spent some time looking at rings – which are always my downfall. Big, wide rings with gaudy, over sized stones – which are sometimes hard to find. But at this fair, there was a pretty good selection – with pretty reasonable prices. The ones I particularly liked were going for no more than $20.

Some of the other accessories show-cased there were less applicable to me, but never-the-less interesting. For example: the hats – which I as a white girl could never pull off. They were mostly wide-brimmed, straw, pastel colored. Like something you’d see at the Kentucky Derby – and that’s probably the only place I could ever wear one!

Booths at Juneteenth go for as little as $30 per spot, per day on a first come, first serve basis as the Junteenth festival is being planned. Which is pretty reasonable, and it seemed like a great way to display something you’d created, acquired or designed.

We've been keeping our audience in mind with respect to what kind of browsers you'all are using lately. Some may remember our post on how many PC & Mac users we have. Well since so many of you are using internet explorer, we've done some extra optimization for IE, good news is - things are getting cleaned up! Bad news is a couple things have changed in the pages and stylesheets that have effected the appearance of your custom profiles.

The biggest one of all is frame widths. Internet Explorer was making everything much more wide then Firefox and Safari so we kind of fixed this by putting a set width in most pages on the content frames. Where this effects you is if you're using your own style sheets in the edit style page. As of our updates you may notice some of your frames are a little more wide or less wide. This is because we have hardcoded the frame with in there.

So in order to fix your frame widths simply remove any width definition in your stylesheets. That would be: take out any thing that says " width:(your width is here); "

Or say you have a style tag that looks like this:
td.rw_heading {
background-image: url('/bgcolors/azure.jpg');
padding:3px 10px 0px 10px;
height:16px;
width:460px;
font-family: arial, sans-serif;
color: #FFF;
font-weight: 800;
line-height:1.3em;
font-size:12px;
}

Just remove the line that says "width:460px;"

by doing that the hardcoded width will take over and your custom width will no longer fudge things up.

By the way all you out there who didn't know - this stylesheet stuff is just CSS which is a method for customization the visual appearance of your webpage/blog/profile etc. It's handy to know, and since you're already doing it you can wipe that "I don't get it!" look off your face. If you want to learn more just search "CSS" in google or my favorite - go to http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp <- w3schools has tons of useful and really easy lessons about CSS, HTML and all that other gobble-di-gook!

If you still have questions please feel free to ask us! We have some seriously awesome profile customization tools coming your way really soon - but until then this is rad stuff to learn.

Not much we can share right now... so so busy getting this darn shopping cart to you in a fabulous new shiny fashion. We've found a couple extra parts to fix and we're still getting them in. Looks like it will be ready on Monday or Tuesday, thank you so much for your patience thus far.

You may also find our new profile organizer of interest - we haven't got it working with the item sections yet but you can take it for a spin by going to this link http://www.ekaweeka.com/profile.php?uid=X&mode=edit

The link is not active on purpose, copy and paste it into your browser then change the "x" after "uid=" to your user id. If you don't know what your user id is, go to your profile page and look in the browser address, the number that follows "http://www.ekaweeka.com/" is your profile id for example mine looks like http://www.ekaweeka.com/4 so my user id is 4.

So to go to my profile organization page I'd go to: http://www.ekaweeka.com/profile.php?uid=4&mode=edit

Go luck, hope those instructions help. If you don't understand what is different when you get to the profile organization page, take this hint: when your mouse rolls over the sections on your profile it will turn into a drag drop mouse icon, you can then hold down the mouse button and move that section to another part of the page.

This is very cool stuff, and very new, and very beta so have fun, it will be ready soon.

Have a great weekend!