a ravelry tale

I had an adventure on Ravelry that is still evolving. For those of you who are non-knitters, this is a social networking sight for us fibre obsessed people -- kind of like facebook but with less spam, annoying quizzes and tons of practical information to help you complete your fibre projects.

The adventure started out when I tried to help someone -- after all, who doesn't like to do that? Someone I had never even met, only spoken to online -- a very nice lady named Sasha who runs fibre tours to Peru from her company called Puchka Peru. I am taking one of these tours in late April of 2010. She had never heard of Ravelry, so I told her about it and that it would be a good advertising place for her. When she said that she was technology challenged, I thought it would be super easy to put something together from the electronic samples of her advertising that she sent me. Was I wrong, wrong, wrong.

For starters, the ads are self serve and then there is the matter of getting the pixel measurements just right so they can fit into the pages where people look. I had to read what seemed like a lot of information and wasn't sure that I understood. I created something that looked like this....

I really thought that it would work. I wrong, yet again. For starters, I didn't realize that I was supposed to create an ad that was taller than it was wider. I was trying to create a "notebook" ad and I created a "banner" ad. Uh oh.

Then there was the matter of the pixels. It was supposed to be a certain size, 140 pixels wide x 200 pixels high. I am not a big technology person so that was a bit of a mystery to me. Anyway, this ad was the wrong size and the very nice person at Ravelry told me should could not read the ad. She kindly suggested that I try the Designer Group for some much needed assistance. I must say that the whole art of internet design is something I take for granted. Those ads that you click on when you are surfing the net need to be created by someone, right? It turns out my someone was a very nice person named Susana from Portugal who re-worked the ad and made it fit...
Oh Susana. Thank you for that....

Talk about the global village -- first person from Victoria, British Columbia wants to create an ad but cannot, she is assisted by second person in Oshawa, Ontario, and when second person cannot create ad, she gets help from third person in Sintra, Portugal, so the ad can be placed on a website that resides in Portland, Oregon owned by three other persons. WOW!

Now all I have to do is sit back and wait for people to click on the ad. I hope they will click through too!