A craft business website: the portfolio sells, the quote closes

A craft business site sells with its portfolio and closes with the quote: someone buying a fitted piece of furniture or a ceramic service wants to see finished work, materials, lead times and a price band before they write. A home page about «a passion for handmade» does none of those four things.

The EneUI catalogue holds 4 gallery blocks and 50 testimonial blocks out of 1,556, measured on 1 November 2026. Galleries are scarce and testimonials are plentiful, which is the wrong ratio for a craft business: proof of the work comes before reviews.

The portfolio: twelve pieces, not two hundred photos

Twelve to twenty pieces are enough, if each one has a real page. A good page answers five questions: what the material is, how big the piece is, how long it took, what it costs and whether it is still available. Everything else is photography.

«Price on request» costs more than it protects

Hiding every price behind «on request» reduces enquiries rather than raising them: anyone unsure whether they can afford it does not write. A stated band, «tables from €900, benches from €380», filters out the curious and lets the funded through. You do not need a full price list, you need a floor.

From brief to delivery: the commission path

Someone ordering a bespoke piece needs to know what happens after the email. Four stages, one deposit and a date, all written on the site with timings, because that is what separates a workshop from a shop.

The path reads well as a four-step timeline such as Timeline 01 from Shadcn UI Blocks. Photos of the work belong in a grid gallery, and reviews, once you have them, in a testimonials block. Order matters: proof first, voices second.

The workshop is part of the product

Address, photos of the bench, tools, real light. People who buy craft want to know where the object is made and whether they can come and see it: «visits by appointment, Tuesday to Saturday» beats an about page written in the third person. If the workshop sits in a courtyard with no sign, publish directions, not just a street number.

# quante schede lavoro sono indicizzate
curl -s https://www.esempio.it/sitemap.xml | grep -c "/lavori/"

# quante immagini carica la pagina portfolio e quanto pesa
curl -s https://www.esempio.it/lavori | grep -o 'src="[^"]*"' | wc -l
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{size_download} bytes\n" https://www.esempio.it/lavori

# dati strutturati presenti sulla scheda di un pezzo
curl -s https://www.esempio.it/lavori/tavolo-rovere | grep -c "application/ld+json"

Shipping, fragility and returns

A vase broken in transit costs twice: the piece and the review. Custom packaging, insured carrier, shipping cost stated before checkout, and collection at the workshop always available. For bespoke pieces the 14-day right of withdrawal does not apply, because the goods are made to the client's specification (article 59 of the Italian Consumer Code): that condition must be written before the order, not discovered afterwards.

On finished pieces sold at a distance to a consumer, the 14 days do apply. Separating the two cases on the site prevents disputes and makes the answer to «what if I do not like it» a short one.

The limitation, stated plainly

A portfolio frozen in 2023 is worse than a small one: it says the workshop stopped. You need three or four new pieces a year, photographed properly, or the site ages faster than a social profile. EneUI blocks are React and Tailwind, the preview is free and the source sits behind Pro; with 4 galleries in the catalogue the choice is narrow, and no block includes a quote configurator.

What it costs and when it pays back

A portfolio site with twelve pages and an enquiry form sits in the low thousands of euro. On a €900 piece with a 40% margin you need about six orders to pay it back: the sum is done on margin, not on turnover. Typical costs are in what a website costs, the minimum sections in what a company website needs, and the platform comparison in WordPress, Wix or React components.