Official Luthiers Forum!

Stuart, the pictures on your site are very nicely done.

My first comment is that, when I read the "features" tab, it focuses a lot on how great CNC is. While CNC may be great and all, I'm not sure that's a "feature" of the instrument. When a website gives me the option to look at a guitar's "features," I am looking to find information about what features the guitar has (eg., what pickups, what tuners, what woods) rather than the construction methods.

My second (and related) comment is that, while you mostly do a good job keeping it brief, there's a loooot of discussion about why you like CNC. I like CNC too (I'm finally taking delivery of my machine next month), so I'm not anti-CNC or anything. But I don't think players care that much how we make the guitars. They just want to know that they are pretty, that they sound good, that they feel good, and that they won't fall apart. While there's nothing wrong with mentioning that you use CNC and why, I think the amount of CNC discussion on your site takes the emphasis away from why players would want to play the guitar and instead puts the emphasis on how you go about building it. For example, when you open the "features" tab, you immediately launch into a discussion of how accurate CNC is. Which is not what I would expect when I click to see a guitar's features. If you want to include a thorough CNC discussion, perhaps you could have a separate tab that describes your construction methods and how CNC fits into it. I think people find photos of the construction process interesting, so that's an idea too, but it should be in a separate tab. The other tabs should focus on what your guitar is like, rather than what methods you used to make it that way.

Which leads to my third comment: The qualities that people want in a guitar are tone, beauty, playability, and durability. The pictures take great care of the beauty part. But I only found three references to tone in all of the pages. (Maybe I missed one.) And they were all short. And some of them were more focused on how CNC enables you to do things with tone rather than on the tone itself. You might consider re-writing the features section to tone down the emphasis on CNC and increase the emphasis on tone. You might include some sound clips with different pickup/tone configurations. (The photos really do a nice job displaying the beauty of the guitars, but some well-done soundclips would be a nice clincher.)

Of course, the main selling point in a website is the photos, and you've totally nailed that part of it.