We’ve designed this site to give you complete freedom to choose where you want to go, decide how you want to get there, and learn what you want to learn and find what you may want to buy. I hate how “buy now” buttons or a begging shopping cart distracts me on so many other web pages, so I’ve asked Max to get rid of them so we can concentrate on content.
Creativity requires freedom to focus on the task immediately at hand; each page should provide easy, pleasant reading and viewing. If it doesn’t have anything for you, the menu at the top provides access to the entire site, organized in a way that we hope will be as clear, transparent, and as useful as possible.
This runs counter to many of the standard commercial web templates, so let us know what you think about it.
– Kiko Denzer
This website is an experiment. It represents our attempt at how a small 2-family business can embrace some aspects of technology to help its goals of reaching more people in more places with useful do-it-yourself and learning-by-doing information while also allowing those of us involved to live rurally, farm, and practice our crafts. We figured that putting energy into this website might save us and others on petroleum resources while enriching communication with people who are interested in some of the same things we are interested in. Ultimately, its success will be measure by the traffic it generates, the communities it helps to strengthen and, of course, the books it is able to sell.
You will see that we have and will put a lot of effort into making this site a useful information source. Hot from the Oven! is the best example of this so far though we hope to further develop it so that others can not only post comments but actually upload examples of the projects that they have done. Working with Children is underway with the video on that page as a highlight. We plan to add an archive about masonry/mass heaters with a natural building flair to it in the near future.
For those interested in the more technical aspects of how this website functions… the site itself is hosted by Dreamhost Web Hosting. The content is “managed” by a WordPress installation on our server which makes it possible for the authors of the content to log-in behind the scenes and create new content which is dynamically published to relevant sections of the site. Our bookstore is powered by Shopp, a WordPress plugin.
If words like “small”, “rural”, “family-run”, “creative”, “farming-based”, “craft-based” describe what you do and you are interested in talking about developing a site for yourself, contact Max.
As Kiko said above, please let us know what you think of our site: what you like about it, what you would change, what improvements you would add, etc.. All feedback is appreciated.
– Max Edleson
A friend shared this site with me. She knew it would make my heart sing…and it does.