You may or may not have figured this out already, but the News section of Golden Maille runs on WordPress software. If you’ve never heard of WordPress, it is a content management system, most often used to publish Blogs. Since being introduced in 2003, it has grown by leaps and bounds, and today over 300 million websites use it. WordPress itself is free, but several cottage industries have sprung up around it. Many folks are gainfully employed designing themes and plugins, some of which are sold, though the majority are given away freely.

I discovered WordPress in 2004 when I added the first News section to my website. Since then, I have installed it dozens of times for myself and for family and friends who wanted to start blogs. As more and more jewelry makers are discovering every day, the internet is a great place to show off, and sell, your jewelry, and WordPress is the easiest way to build a website for that.

I am often asked how the Golden Maille site was built, who do I recommend for a web host, how did I do this or that. I don’t mind answering these questions, I have helped several people get their sites up & running. Since the questions are getting more frequent, I feel like there’s a real desire for more information, so I’ve decided to start a new series of posts designed to help everyone create a website with WordPress and get it set up properly so Google, and the rest of the world, can find you. And once they find you, they can click a button and buy your jewelry right then. To do this, I’ve set up a new website named JewelersWebsiteAssistant.com.  There is actually nothing on it right now, but I’ll be using it as a demo site to show you how to do things as I go along.

The first few lessons will be basic: how to register a domain and change the nameservers to point to your hosting account. How to install WordPress with a couple of clicks. Then I’ll talk about selecting a theme and which plugins you need and how to install them. Later on, I’ll get more in depth about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and why you need it. And how to customize your theme, how to add advertising to your site if you want to go that route.

If you’ve already set up a website, but have questions, send me an email or leave a comment – I’ll be happy to help.

Talk to you soon,

goldie

Sorry folks, but I’ve had to deactivate all Rose Gold Filled 16ga Rings due the annual RGF wire shortage coming early this year. This effects certain Rose Gold Filled Refill Kitpacks, too, so those have been deactivated also. We’re hoping to have the wire back in stock in August, but can’t give you an exact date yet.

We will be closed from December 23rd through January 3rd for holidays and inventory. Of course, you’ll still be able to place orders during this time and when we start shipping again on January 4th, we’ll ship them out in the order they were received.

Today is the busiest shipping day of the year and things are starting to slow down a day or two so please be patient with your mail carrier.

All of the pre-holiday orders are gone, the banana pudding is in the fridge and the pumpkin bread is in the oven: I am as close to ready as I can be.

Charlie & I both wish you a Happy Thanksgving!

We are going to close Thursday for Thanksgiving but we’ll be back making rings and shipping orders on Friday.

Some of you will love it and some of you will hate it but we are going to change our packaging. This week we will ship out the last of the little gold tins. We are switching to cotton filled boxes that are made from 100% post-consumer recycled content and are recyclable, if your community has a cardboard recycling program like ours does. They can also be re-used as gift boxes to put your finished jewelry in or as storage boxes to organize your ring collection. *s*

This is just one of the things we are doing to try to not be such energy/resource hogs: The new office building is double insulated and has a ceiling fan to help lower heating costs in the winter, plus in the spring and fall, I’ll be able to open the windows and turn on the fan many days instead of running the air conditioner.

We have also just had a well drilled in anticipation of next year’s garden and mini-orchard projects. We live in an area where cold, clear spring water is plentiful, so we’ve tapped into it and not only will we be rinsing your rings in it, but we’ll also pipe it to the garden to keep the veggies growing. The blackberries are already in the ground and eventually there will be half a dozen apple and peach trees and about that many raised garden beds. Just enough to keep the 2 of us in home-grown food for most of the year.

Speaking of rinsing your rings, we designed it so that the run-off from that will be used to water a flower bed behind the office. I haven’t decided what to put in there yet – probably roses, since they like lots of sudsy water.

We are constantly trying to “live lightly” and are working on becoming more self sufficient; all of these changes are progress towards those goals.

goldie

I have been so busy that I totally forgot to update everyone after the move. After 4 emails in 3 weeks asking if everything was okay, I decided to catch up with everyone at once: All is well at Golden Maille. We resumed shipping orders the week after the move, working out of the house while the new office was being built. We whittled the business equipment and supplies down to the barest minimum and crammed it (almost) all into 2 bedrooms.  Parts of it overflowed into other areas, like ring-drying racks in the guest bathtub, but it worked out quite well.

The weather slowed down the construction project considerably. There were several weeks were it rained every single day. Once the building was dried in, that wasn’t always a work stopper, but you can’t haul sheetrock in a pickup truck in the rain, so we still had to work around the weather forecast.

And then my own personal contractor (Charlie) got Lyme disease. His case was mild and he’s fine now, thank goodness.

The office is finally finished and we’ve moved everything out of the house. The only things that I haven’t gotten around to unpacking yet are non-essentials like the 30 or so plastic tackle box thingies full of beads.  And I don’t think I’ll be needing them anytime soon. (anybody want to buy a bunch of beads…)

And now for the promise part – lots of changes are on the way. A whole new web site with the ability to set up an account that will save your shipping and billing addresses, along with your past order history is in the works. Some days I make great progress on it and some days nothing, so I won’t even try to predict when it will be ready. I may be asking a few of you to be testers when I get closer to the launch date.

Another project in the works is all new packaging – we’re going green. This one will probably happen in the next couple of weeks and I’ll tell you all about it then.

But the change you’ll see the quickest is one that many of you have been asking for: 16 and 18 gauge rings available in 1/2 troy ounce sizes. I’ll be adding these over the weekend. If they don’t show up for you by Sunday night, try refreshing the page or clearing your cache.

Hope you all have a great weekend!

Hi Everyone!

We have a request from someone looking for maille classes in New Jersey, so if you teach, please leave me a comment below with the wheres and whens. Thanks!

If you are seeing this message – you’ve made it to the new host. If you have any strange problems, let me know.