When we stumbled upon artist Melanie Green’s website, we noticed right away that creativity was her niche. Her website is creative, functional and helping her business be successful. Melanie makes felt animals from wool and sells them online. She fell in love with Feltmaking while studying Textile Design and opened her first Online Store in 2007.
“Feltmaking is an almost magical process, especially needle felting, you take a pile of raw fluffy wool and shape it with a special needle. You can turn it into virtually anything you can imagine. When the wool is unfelted, it just looks like fluff. I love the idea of making something from almost nothing,” said Melanie.
Melanie knew the importance of an online presence from day one, and started her Yola journey on the Free level. As her business grew, so did her website. Melanie upgraded to the Yola Silver subscription coupled with the Online Store, giving her the independence of her own selling platform and being in control of her sales as well as the premium features Yola Silver delivers, such as premium templates, mobile publishing and removing any Yola branding.
“I enjoyed how easy it was to build my site using Yola and how quick and simple it was to find help when I got stuck in the form of tutorials and in the forums. The process was very intuitive, I’m not the kind of person who reads all the how to’s and then starts building, I like to just dive in and start clicking things and playing with buttons and seeing what they do. Yola’s widgets made it very easy for me to do this and still get a great looking site.”
Showcasing her creations was Melanie’s main focus with her website, and she achieved this using the Column Divider Widget and several Picture Widgets.
On top of receiving positive feedback from her friends and continuously improving her website (Melanie blames it on being a perfectionist!), her website is already opening the door for exciting new opportunities for her business.
“The main impact my site has had on my business is that it’s the portal through which magazines and publishers have found me, as a result of my website. I got featured in two books recently, which I never even considered happening when I first set it up.”
We are so proud of what Melanie has accomplished using the Yola Sitebuilder and look forward to watching her business and success continue to grow.
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Thanks Yola for featuring me, since we did our little interview I had some sales in my shiny new web shop… And some lovely people have seen the blog and come to say hi on my social media sites!
Absolutely, Melanie – we’re happy to hear you’ve gotten more traction!