Craft, Gaudí and Barcelona
A website needs craftsmanship too: 6 digital tips for artisans
Nicola Mostallino, Petit Gaudí’s consigliere digitale, answers
At Petit Gaudí we champion traditional crafts, but we also know that good hands alone are not enough to make a workshop visible today. A website or online shop cannot replace craftsmanship, but it can help explain its value.
After closing our physical shop in the Eixample, petitgaudi.com became our digital home: a place where craftsmanship from Barcelona could grow without the limitations of a physical premises.
During this transition, we have worked with Nicola Mostallino of komuniki.io on web strategy, SEO, user experience, content and digital communication. ‘Komuniki’ means to communicate or share. Being online is not enough: you need to explain who you are, what you make and why it matters.
Nicola is Italian, a digital strategist and a DJ known for sets of Italian music from the 1960s to the 1990s. Perhaps that is why he understands that a good website, like a good DJ set, needs rhythm, order and intention. Here are his six practical tips.
Six practical tips
1. Before touching your website, organise the project
A website does not begin with WordPress, Shopify or WooCommerce. It begins earlier.
Start by knowing what you sell, who you sell it to, what makes it different and what visitors should do: buy, enquire, book, visit your workshop or discover a collection.
Ordering a site before preparing its structure, words and pictures is a common mistake. Then come rushed changes and the familiar ‘we’ll figure it out later’. Better to figure it out first.
2. Think about Google, but write for people
Work on search visibility and SEO.
SEO should not make you sound like a hungover robot. Your website needs to be findable, but it should still sound human.
Explain your materials, process, origins, uses, story, shipping and customisation. Every important page should answer three questions: what is this, who is it for and why is it valuable?
3. Photography should build trust, not just decorate
In a physical shop, customers can touch the product. Online, they cannot.
Show the whole object, its details, scale, material, context and, if possible, how it is made. Beautiful imagery helps; coherent, truthful imagery sells trust.
Polishing handmade objects too much can work against you. Texture, real scale and honest imperfections are part of their value. Like good espresso: straightforward, without unnecessary froth.
4. Make the user experience obvious
Nicola puts UX and conversion first.
Turning visits into purchases, emails, calls or enquiries is essential. A website should guide people, not send them into a maze.
Your homepage is not a storage room. Not everything belongs there or needs equal prominence. First orient visitors, then explain, then offer an action. If people cannot see where to click, they leave quietly. As Nicola knows from DJing: when everything plays at once, you get noise, not music.
5. Open the door to other languages if you have an international audience
Use AI translation with review and a multilingual strategy.
Someone might discover a piece in Barcelona and buy it later from France, Italy, Germany or the United States. For that to work, your website needs to speak a language they understand.
Not every business needs ten languages. But many should ask whether they are missing sales by speaking only to their own neighbourhood. The object may be local; communication does not have to be.
6. Keep your website alive: maintenance is craftsmanship too
A website is not finished on launch day.
Review copy, update products, improve photos, fix links, measure what works, check loading speed and see what actually converts. The invisible maintenance often separates a useful site from a decorative one.
Komuniki compares digital professionals to mechanics, tailors, cooks and orchestra conductors. The analogy fits: like a piece in a workshop, a website needs inspecting, adjusting and polishing. And like a record collection, it is worth checking what still sounds good now and then.
