Behind the Workshop: What It Took to Bring Fynn's Woodworking Online - our new website
There's a moment every small shop owner knows: you've built something good with your hands, and now you have to explain it to a screen. For us, that moment arrived this year, when we decided it was time to move Fynn's Woodworking off our old storefront and build something that actually does justice to the work — a new home at fynnswood.com.
We wanted to pull back the curtain on what that actually involved, because "we redid the website" undersells it by a wide margin. This wasn't a coat of paint. It was closer to moving a workshop full of hand-tools, half-finished pieces, and years of institutional knowledge into a new building — while staying open for business the whole time.
Why we moved at all
Our old storefront did its job for a long time, but it had a ceiling we kept bumping into. It couldn't carry a real product description with a table in it. It auto-generated image alt text and wouldn't let us touch it — which matters more than it sounds like, because alt text is one of the ways search engines and shopping assistants understand what a photo is actually showing. It had no way to add structured, reusable information to a page: no per-product specs, no shared care instructions that update everywhere at once when we learn something new about a material.
Wix gave us all of that, plus a few things we didn't know we needed until we started building: reusable "Info Sections" for care instructions and shipping policies that we write once and attach to every relevant product, editable URLs with automatic redirects, and native product feeds for Google, Meta, and TikTok. In plain terms — it's a platform built for a catalog that wants to be found, not just hosted.
The part nobody sees: getting the data right
Before a single product page went live, every item in our catalog needed a hard look. Two hundred and thirteen products, spanning drinkware, cutting boards, knives, keychains, clocks, bags, and more, each with its own combination of colors, sizes, and finishes — all of it had to be classified, weighed, and organized in a way a new platform could actually understand.
That meant:
Tiering the whole catalog into Hero, Core, and Accessory items, so the pieces that deserve a full showcase — specifications, care instructions, the works — get one, and nothing gets lost in the shuffle.
Backfilling weights on hundreds of products, because shipping rates depend on knowing exactly how heavy a boxed tumbler or cutting board really is. Get that wrong and either we eat the cost or a customer gets a bad surprise at checkout.
Building a real category tree designed around how people actually search — groomsmen gifts, corporate client gifts, Father's Day gifts — instead of how we happen to organize the back room.
Standardizing color names across the whole catalog into one dictionary, so "Charcoal" means the same thing on a tumbler as it does on a hat.
Linking the right photo to the right color choice, one by one, across hundreds of color options, so when you click "Red" on a hat, you see the red hat — not a placeholder or, worse, the wrong one.
None of that is glamorous. All of it is the difference between a store that looks finished and one that actually works.
Writing what the old site couldn't hold
The biggest unlock wasn't a product page — it was the ability to write things once and have them show up everywhere they belong. We built thirteen reusable sections covering care instructions for wood, leather, leatherette, powder-coated drinkware, blades, slate, brass, and more, plus shipping, returns, and personalization policies. Attach a section to a product family once, and if we ever refine the wording — say, we learn something new about how a whiskey stone should be cleaned — it updates on every product that uses it, automatically.
On top of that, every single live product got its own dedicated specifications section: capacity, dimensions, material, finish, weight — sourced from real vendor data, not guessed at. If we didn't have a solid number for something, we left it blank rather than invent one. That's a small rule with a big consequence: everything you read on a Fynn's product page traces back to something real.
The search-engine work happening quietly in the background
Here's something that surprised us: our old platform never actually wrote a meta description — the little snippet that shows up under our link in a Google search. It just let Google guess. Every single product page was shipping blind. We fixed that across the board, along with the title patterns and category page copy, so that when someone searches "custom engraved groomsmen gifts," there's an actual, honest answer waiting for them, not an auto-generated fragment.
We're still working through the deeper layer of this — structured data that helps AI shopping tools and search engines understand exactly what's for sale, what it costs, and what our return policy is — but the foundation is live and verified on the real site.
What's still ahead for our new website
A launch like this is never really "done" — it's a series of honest milestones. Right now we're finishing up shipping configuration to match what's already published, working through a small batch of products that are waiting on missing photos or pricing, and getting ready to connect our Google, Meta, and TikTok shopping feeds so the catalog shows up where people are already browsing. Etsy is next on the list, and this blog will be part of that ongoing story.
If you've made it this far — thank you for caring about the unglamorous parts as much as we do. We think good craft shows up in the details whether you're looking at a hand-cut dovetail joint or a website's search results, and we wanted this new site to earn that same care.
Take a look around at fynnswood.com, and if something looks off or could be better, we genuinely want to hear about it.
— Fynn's Woodworking
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