Angela's Cool Web Site of the Day...

Today's site is a great one if you are a maker, or a buyer, of anything handcrafted. The site launched in 2005 and has since registered over 100,000 members.

There's enough just on Etsy's home page to keep an easily distracted person busy for, well, maybe forever!

The first thing that catches the eye on the Etsy home page is the display of items from various sellers, handpicked by an Etsy member. Usually these items follow a theme of some sort, like cat items or items of a particular color, and they can vary widely from loose beads to jewelry to felted sweaters to amigurumi to anything you can imagine. Below that section is a featured seller with a display of some of his or her products and a link to an interview with the artist.

On the left side of the page is an array of choices by which you can browse items by color, location of the artist, or a number of other criteria. You can also search, using the convenient search bar at the top of the page, through item tags, titles, descriptions, and/or materials, or for a particular seller.

Below the handpicked items is arguably the most hypnotic feature of all, a rolling display of the most recently listed items for sale. I can spend more time than I really want to admit just watching this stuff scroll by, clicking on the occasional thumbnail to open a new window showing that item in greater detail in the artist's own store.

If you can tear yourself away from the scrolling new items and scroll down just a bit more, you'll find a rotating display of "Storque" articles. The Etsy Storque is a sort of online multimedia magazine devoted to all things Etsy: articles, how-to's, videos, interviews, plus the always-popular "even more!" The Storque can be an invaluable resource for advice on how to make your Etsy store a success.

One of the neat things about Etsy is that is about as close to free for sellers as you can get without actually being free. You can list an item for a whopping 20 cents, and there is a fee of 3.5% on the selling price of whatever items you have sold. You must use a credit card (or a debit card posing as a credit card). Your Etsy bill comes due on the first of each month, and you can either proactively pay it or, if you don't, Etsy will automatically bill the credit card you have on file on the 14th or 15th (I forget which) of the month. Your store is free! No monthly fees! Yay!

There are community forums on Etsy for help with the site, posting your ideas for improvements to the service, and just general chitchat.

Honestly, there is so much stuff on Etsy that I am completely overwhelmed with the task of trying to enumerate all its features, so I'm giving up. All I can do is tell you that Etsy is awesome and you should go there and check it out, whether you are a shopper or an artist in any medium you can name.

Access Etsy here: Etsy rocks!!!