AvantiShops.com

It took 9 months of planning, research and development. Most of the features are things you don’t even see, they are worked into the design and administrative functions. There are still some things I would love to have, but these can be implemented as AvantiShops grows.

People who know my work will notice that there is not a great deal of it on the site. This is only temporary. Within a year most of what I make will be available online. Now that the site is launched, I will have the time to make new work, with fresh ideas born from the 9 months away.

I am thrilled to have the fabulous artists that have joined me in this venture, and am looking forward to hearing from others who are interested.The artists on board are:

• Audrey Sidnick of Hillcroft Design, whose jewelry is not only high-quality and beautifully made, but well-researched and classically-designed.
• Ulrieke Benner of Art You Wear, who designs and hand-crafts luxuriously soft, unique accessories: scarves and necklaces are here now, and more of her designs are coming.
• Lori Davies of Lori Davies Textiles, with her handwoven tableware that is so soft (silk and cotton) you would not imagine it could be so durable. That is something!
• Mark Lauckner of the Mayne Island Glass Foundry who has been casting his glass starfish for years, and the world has finally caught up to him…. now they are the height of style! And available here! The cast glass abalone shells are exclusive to AvantiShops.
• Valla Eiriksson - me - of Avanti Glass Studio. If you are not familiar with my work, you can check it out at www.avantiglass.com, the link is over on the right.

My support team is incredible. Two brilliant women from different backgrounds with different skills, each essential to the work I’m doing.

• Linda Steel, my gallery manager, takes care of the myriad small details of the day-to-day business of Avanti Glass, freeing me to work on developing this new business. Thank you, Linda.
• And Cindy Jacobsen, my web developer par excellence, is the one person without whom AvantiShops would not have been so finely-crafted. Every step of the design and development process contains many small ones. Cindy’s years of experience and skills in web design and development are what sets the technical aspects of this website apart and make it unique. It is “la creme de la creme”. Thank you, Cindy.

I know…. I’ve extended the deadline half a dozen times! If you know me, you know that I am a bit of a perfectionist. Website design is more about what happens behind the screen…… you can have great graphics and images, but if the site doesn’t work properly, you might as well have never even started. Everything needs to be planned and mapped out to the nth degree…. And tested. Each time a change is made, test. One of the things you will notice if you are in the market for an e-commerce website is the proliferation of ads claiming “easy template… be up and running in (and here the times can vary from 5 minutes to 2 weeks) with our easy content management system!” These types of ad are very misleading. A good e-commerce site can take 6 months or more, from your initial planning to execution. Of course, if you have only a few items, are using a template that is not being customized or are only interested in selling on E-bay or Yahoo Stores or PayPal Shops, then it really doesn’t take that long to set up. Once you get started with the Big-3, though, you may find that you need extra features that just don’t come with the package. Check out their pricing very carefully. Do you really want to pay a percentage of every sale in addition to your monthly fees? More on this later. In the meantime, I need to get back to editing photos for my catalog.

I am so grateful for all the tremendous help I have in getting this project launched. My web developer Cindy is an absolute Wonder Woman, and my gallery manager Linda is a treasure, I would be a long way away from the goalpost if it wasn’t for their help. I am very thrilled with all the work that is being presented by the AvantiShops artists, and particularly because some of it is not available anywhere else. I am truly blessed.