This past weekend was the first annual Pickn' Plantn' & Plowin' festival at Treasures of Appalachia (serves as our storefront as well as an outlet for the works of almost 50 other artists) and that consumed most of last week and all weekend. Now that it's over I can get back to work.
During the festival one of our two drawer tea chests (in hickory) was auctioned off via e-bay and the Treasures web site as a fund raiser for Treasures, which is a non-profit corporation. It sold for a disappointingly low amount, but that's life on the auction block I guess.
We are also building another two drawer tea chest, this one in walnut for Lauren. It's almost done now. I haven't been taking and posting photos partly because we've already done that with a previous chest and partly because I just don't want to take the time to do it again.
Between rebuilding the new Treasures web site (www.treasuresofappalachia.com) which crashed a while back, destroying the database that drives the product catalog, and working on the new version of the Smoky Mountain Woodworks website AND building furniture I don't have much time to spare. But it's going well and we're getting great comments on the Treasures web site. The new SMW site will be a while yet before it's ready to go live -- VERY complex and needs quite a bit of custom programming.
It is my goal to get this new SMW site to a point where it will allow our visitors to play 'what-if' with our products. By this I mean that as they select the various options like type of wood, hardware choices, stain/no stain, the site will offer updated pricing based on the cost of the materials involved. By tying this function into our materials inventory database we can automatically keep the pricing on each product accurately updated. This should ease the number of e-mails we get from people saying, "I like this piece. The price you show is for oak, how much is it in cherry?" etc.
Of course we will still be dealing with the folks who find us listed in a directory somewhere, never bother to look at the web site but e-mail us with a flurry of questions -- most of which are answered by the web site. But that's life.
Till next time...
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