David Condon Finds

Choosing satin ribbon for a wedding sounds simple until you actually have to do it. Then suddenly you are looking at different widths, different colours, different uses and wondering whether the ribbon that looks neat on a roll will actually work in real life. I had a customer ask me recently about cream satin ribbon for a wedding. They wanted something “not too wide”, possibly 3mm, to cordon off an area. It was a perfectly fair question, especially if you have never had to decorate a wedding car, venue space, invitation bundle or gift table before. But 3mm ribbon is much narrower than many people realise. It is the kind of ribbon I would use for hanging ornaments, tying small tags or adding a fine detail to a craft project. It is not the width I would choose for anything that needs to be seen properly at a wedding. So this post is a practical guide to choosing satin ribbon width for weddings, based on what you are actually using it for. I stock a range of satin ribbon in different wid...

Cheap imported goods have quietly changed how people see handmade products. Many shoppers today are used to mass-produced items that cost very little, and that can make the price of handmade craft seem shocking at first glance. I see this reaction regularly when I sell my woodturning at craft fairs. One moment people admire the piece in their hands, the next moment the price changes the conversation entirely. If you have ever stopped at a craft table, picked something up, admired it, and then quietly put it back when you heard the price, this post is partly about that moment. I don’t say that to criticise anyone. I understand why it happens. But I also think years of cheap imported goods have changed the way many of us judge handmade work. My woodturning table at a craft fair in Manor West, Tralee in 2018 with handmade bowls, pens and small turned gifts on display. A quick note: This post was originally published on my main website, David Condon Woodcraft, but I have moved it here bec...

I launched my first website David Condon Woodcraft back in 2017 . At the time I knew my craft fairly well, but I knew very little about websites, SEO, or how Google actually finds and ranks content. Like many small business owners, I jumped straight in and learned everything the hard way. Over the years I made plenty of mistakes. Some were small, others probably slowed the growth of my business by years. The good news is that a website doesn’t have to be perfect to work. Mine eventually started generating sales and enquiries, but looking back there are several things I would do differently if I had the chance to start again. Here are the biggest lessons. I Would Still Choose Wix The first thing worth saying is that I would still choose Wix . Before settling on it, I tried several different website builders in the very beginning and quickly realised that many of them were far more complicated than I wanted to deal with. Wix, by contrast, was simple drag-and-drop design. For som...

Starting a new blog is exciting in a very particular way. You’ve written your first proper posts, and hit publish with the quiet hope that something will happen fairly quickly. Your heart and soul is poured out in those first few lines, and your words feel as honest as you can make them. Those first few posts usually feel great too. They’re often better written than you expect, more thoughtful, more structured. You add internal links where they make sense, you avoid fluff, and you genuinely feel like you’ve put something useful out into the world. I have already written a broader post about my blogging journey from complete beginner to a slightly more experienced writer . This post is a little different. It is more of a one-year check-in: what has improved, what still feels slow, what I have learned, and what it is really like trying to keep a small blog moving when Google has not fully decided what to do with it yet.

I use Amazon affiliate links on some of my blog posts. Not on everything, and not just for the sake of it, but where a product fits naturally into a post and may be useful to someone reading it. Over time, Amazon affiliate reports used to give me one very useful piece of information. They showed me what products had actually been bought. That might sound like a small thing, but for a small blogger, it was extremely useful. It helped me understand what real people were buying after clicking through from one of my links. Not who they were. Not where they lived. Not their name, email address, full basket, or private details. Just the product. And losing that kind of information makes Amazon affiliate reports far less useful than they used to be. What Amazon Affiliate Reports Used to Show In the past, if someone clicked one of my Amazon affiliate links and later bought something, the report could show the product that was bought. That did not always mean they bought the product I recommend...