We’ve been busy recently with client work, and we’re excited about sites we’ve been launching. But we’re so busy that we haven’t had the chance to link to these new sites from our Portfolio page. So I’d like to highlight some new client sites here:

Northland Public Library Foundation: A site that started small and grew much larger. We hope to work on a second phase of this project, in which we’ll add tools for people to donate to the Foundation online.

Butler County Symphony: We wanted the site to look like a concert hall, so we opted for a rich red and gold color scheme. I love how this came out.

Latin Intelligence Corporation: Maria Velez de Berliner, one of my first web clients, wanted to branch out from the consulting work she has done under Latin Trade Solutions. In this new venture, she offers analysis of security and intelligence news on a subscription basis. The result is a simple-looking site with a lot of complexity behind the scenes.

ButlerToday: This is a new venture of my own: an online news site for Butler, PA. We’re continuing to add to it. I plan to grow it into a community resource that combines traditional journalism with user-generated content, and that takes advantage of new technologies. I’m quite excited about the free classified ads. The challenge for us now — as for any new site — is spreading the word, and as always this means promoting the site offline, in the real world.

Eisler Nurseries: This is a modified online shopping site; anyone can visit the site and explore the product catalog, but you must register and be approved by Eisler Nurseries to see product pricing. We set it up with these extra protections because the nursery sells only to wholesale customers, and they need to avoid confusion in the retail market. But what made this project really interesting, and a bit complicated, was the wealth of product photos we needed to include. The photos are terrific and they’re a great help to customers — but boy, were there a lot of them! Logistically challenging, but well worth the effort.

TWA Clipped Wings: This is the site for an association of retired flight attendants. Once again, a lot of the content is secured so it’s accessible only to members — this is to protect the privacy of the members. But there are some fun features visible to the public, including a photo gallery of classic TWA uniforms.

Another question from the email bag — specifically, from our friend and fellow blogger Susan Courtad:

I have an acquaintance who wants to create a web site to sell her handmade jewelry. But she hasn’t a clue how to put together a site. She needs something really easy to figure out. And she has little or no money to invest in this. What do you recommend?

Susan, your friend has a challenge in front of her if she hopes to make a living selling jewelry. With a limited budget, a custom store is out of the question. Selling through an existing online store is a lower cost option, even thoughsuch stores take a cut of the revenue and can also charge monthly fees or listing fees.

The main store to consider: Etsy (http://www.etsy.com), which focuses on handmade goods. Etsy has a good reputation and looks easy to use. Sharing a store with other sellers who make and sell handmade stuff is especially as you’re starting out because you share their traffic — and thereby raise awareness of your products faster.

An option that’s more complicated: Yahoo Small Business. For this you pay a monthly fee, plus credit card fees for each transaction, but you retain more control of what you make available for sale.

For what it’s worth, it would cost about $3000 for her to have a firm like Big Big Design build a custom shopping site — and that’s assuming she would input most of the product information herself. If she set up her own store she would still have to pay someone per transaction to process payments: PayPal, Google, a merchant bank, etc. But the site would look exactly right for her and her products, and it would be tailored to her customers. She would also have full control over everything and be able to track traffic most closely.

Your friend should also consider selling offline. Trunk shows and parties are great ways to market and sell unique products, or as are booths at street fairs or in places like Pittsburgh’s Strip District. Booths and tables have fees associated of course, and she’d have to give away some product to hostesses to hold trunk shows and parties.

And of course she can approach owners of boutiques that sell to the clientele she would like to reach: clothing or accessory stores, for example. Such an owner can sell the items on consignment, taking a cut of the sales price.

No matter which avenue she chooses, she has to plan to market her wares, to drive people to the website or to tell them about the trunk show/parties or about the shop that selling on consignment. She can make print flyers with a color copier, go to Staples, and they’ll cut sheets of paper or cardstock for cheap, which is much better than cutting them yourself, plus the color quality is better. For postcards, consider Vistaprint.com; for bookmarks, try Printplace.com.

She can also list her items in the free classified ads of Craigslist — or, if she’s local to this area, on ButlerToday.com. (A little plug for a new venture of mine…. )

I’s hard to start up a business like what your friend proposes, in addition to spending money on supplies she’s got to plan for marketing, sales, and all these other things. It would be really smart for her to work out a budget. Then she’ll know at what point she will have paid off the initial investment, and when she can expect to see returns. That point is likely to be discouragingly farther in the future than she probably expects. But it’s critical for her to have a clear view of what’s coming, and to have a way to measure if she’s succeeding in her venture.

Another recent question:

We’re now up at an average of 1,500 hits per day at the blog. Any advice on how I can go about looking for advertisers?

First, congratulations on building and sustaining a solid audience. Many people have trouble reaching those levels.

My first suggestion is that you should put a button or link prominently on your blog that says “Advertise on This Site.” Link to a page that gives a few details about your readers, visitors per day, anything else you can glean from the referrer logs and traffic stats, and that sets out your rates.

(This is a good time to point out that you should start to look for information about your readers. If you can create a simple, friendly survey and ask readers to fill it out, that will help. Make clear how you’ll be using the information you gather and that you respect your readers’ privacy.)

As for what your rates should be, that’s up to you. You might base them on a cost per view, or a cost per click. I’d suggest the former, so it’s not your loss when someone creates an ineffective banner and no one clicks on it. For cost per view, consider $8 per thousand views for a banner, or $6 for a smaller button, pretty standard web ad rates for a site with a targeted audience.

You might want to set up an ads management system that will help you place and rotate banners on your site, and help you create reports for the advertisers. We have been playing with phpAdsNew — now called OpenAds — and it’s working well. Using a system like that requires that you have access to hosting space with a MySQL database, but it’s otherwise not hard to set up and use.

If you don’t get the response you hope for when you invite people to advertise on your site, check out sites that are similar to yours and see who’s advertising there. Then contact them and invite them to look at your site, and tell them about your traffic and your rates. As with all sales: Always be closing.

At BootCamp PGH, Gene Bromberg, Justin Kownacki, and representatives from Spreadshirt talked about monetizing your blog or podcast. There’s an outline of the discussion online, and we may soon have video for that session available. Check out the BootCamp PGH site for updates and other useful tidbits.

I recently received this question from a new blogger:

How do you usually respond to a track back? Do you post another comment on your own blog? Would the author of the track back know it’s there? Do people usually carry on the conversation in the blog?

If someone comments on my blog, I write a comment back, I do this to let readers and potential commenters know that I’m interested in what they say, that I want to sue the blog as a forum for discussion. In my comment, I usually indicate which commenter I’m responding to. If a number of people have commented, I might write just one comment back to several. See the comments on this post for an example: http://www.closkey.com/mybrilliantmistakes/archives/000583.html

Sometimes, if a comment or comment thread is particularly interesting and the blog owner wants people to notice it, he might write another blog post that points out the comments in the previous post. Or he could add an update to the first blog post, but that’s less common, and might be a little confusing.

If someone comments on your blog, they might be using a tool like Christina Schulman’s Convo (convotracker.com) to know when other people respond. Or your blog might provide an RSS feed that they could watch. But ordinarily the commenter just has to come back and check.

If you get a trackback, which happens when someone links to your post from another blog, you don’t need to do anything to respond. You might go to the other post and see what they wrote, and comment back there if it makes sense. Maybe to say thanks or to continue whatever discussion is going on.