Madremonteartesanias.com is a small webshop based in Austin, Texas, that sells handmade artisan one-of-a-kind products from Colombia. It’s run by the lovely Erin.

From having lived in Colombia, with her Colombian husband, Erin saw and fell in love with the inventive craftsmanship of Colombian artesanías.

The craftsmanship of handmade products are skills that are often passed down through generations and Madre Monte celebrates those skills as they are at the very core of sustainable and slow living.

My mom was an anesthesia nurse but was a great knitter, cook, and sewer. She taught me the basics of knitting but my patience and temper meant I didn’t learn how to knit sleeves, patterns, and the more advanced stuff. Although our livelihood didn’t depend on my mother’s crafting, I appreciate the importance of passing a craft down through generations.

Working with Erin on Madremonteartesanias.com

Erin came to me, as many of my clients do, wanting help with her creative process for building Madre Monte into a webshop she had as a hobby, and we ended up talking about business and web design.

Erin had already done a great job setting up Madre Monte, so we looked at how to make small improvements to the webshop in a way that was not overwhelming for Erin moving forward.

Website Changes we did on Madre Montes

Storytelling is a big part of sustainable brands, it’s usually a story and personal values that are behind the decision to build a sustainable brand, so even though Madre Monte Artesanias is a webshop that sells handmade home goods and jewelry, it’s the stories of how these products came about that’s interesting.

Erin trusted me to do a few changes to her webshop after we talked about what small improvements could be made.

The homepage

The homepage before was the shop page so you immediately saw products without knowing what the site was about. So, we created a homepage with a header that clearly says what the website is about. I also added sections with text and added text with images that tell the stories of the products.

A challenge for webshops is often to have enough text on pages, both for the audience and for Google to be able to understand what the site is about.

You don’t want too much text, as it’s the amazing products and beautiful images that are the focus, but a little text using keywords that explains what you’re seeing goes a long way.

We created clear links to 2 of the 3 categories in the shop and made headlines with the keywords craftsmanship, sustainable, and artisans.

The About page

The three sections, The Mission, The Beginning, and The Myth, were three different pages that I made into one page. And then I added images of Colombia, like the image of Erin in the hat and the mountains in the background! Isn’t it beautiful?

Erin had these images but had not used them. Adding images of rural Colombia is part of telling the story of where these artisans are from.

The page about the Artisans

We added more information on the artisan page that shows the artisans and their work, so you get a connection to the people who have created the products.

Menu, footer, and SEO

The last bits and bobs we changed or added were a clear menu and a simple footer with privacy and terms of service pages.

Overall it was just a few changes and simplifying layouts that were needed. Erin had all the beautiful images already.

I taught Erin some SEO basics, adding a tagline, and keywords, and how to add titles and alt text on images as well as compress the image sizes.

Website coaching vs. web design

Coaching is about guidance and giving you tools so you can make the changes and improvements you wish for yourself, whether it’s to your website or your creative process.

A web designer designs your website for you.

For Erin and her website, I did a bit of both. We started with some website coaching, and then she trusted me to make some changes as a web designer. Then we went back to website coaching again.

Creating and designing a website is a non-linear creative process, an ongoing process as a website is never really finished. This is why it makes sense for me to give clients the tools to make the best UX and design decisions themselves, so their websites can grow as they do.

I hope you’ll have a look at madremonteartesanias.com and see some of the beautiful pieces Erin has brought home to Texas, and who knows, maybe next time you need a woven basket of necklace, you’ll think of the stories of the artisans.

And if you need help with your website and brand clarity, you can always get in touch with me here.