Sandvox Website Profile: “Crystaliscious in Motion”

We have an entire crystalsicious community here on our website. With blogs, book reviews, 10 area calendars, lots of fun things to do on the Internet, our favorite rock shops, our favorite publications, practitioner spotlights, featured Authors, Metaphysical information on stones, and much more. Bringing together content and entertainment for anyone who loves rocks.

You might be a rockhound if you hear loud clunking in your dryer and you suddenly check your pockets for your latest treasure....
You might be a rockhound if you meander down a trail, facinated by the rock formations only to look up and find yourself 20 feet underground...
You might be a rock hound if your heart flutters every February - not for Valentines, but for the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show.
You might be a rock hound if you have ever eaten Ramen noodles for a week to pay the installment of your latest 2" thumbnail, now sitting in your window sill....
If you have ever found yourself mesmerized by the bewitching glow of a gemstone, perhaps you are a rock hound.
If you have ever stubbed your toe, looked down and spent the next 3 hours digging a fossil out of the ground, you could be a rock hound...
This website is built by Rock Hounds, For Rock Hounds.

We offer everything from metaphysical information on a variety of stones, to lapidary club information. With information on where to dig stones, field trips, how and where to cut stones, where to buy stones, how to use stones. We also offer information on what people are doing with stones, how they are using them, collecting them, trading them or polishing them.
A one stop shop for all rock hounds.

Joshua and I had just closed down my rock shop. I was pretty devastated and also in need of some income. We planned a class on crystal grids.
The day before the class, we went in to set up the room, with stones for sale, the book we printed on an antique HP laptop, ( that later said it's farewell by smoking on startup - hence the apple), my friend helping us to promote it through her store.
Things seemed pretty bleak, we needed some life, some excitement and a plan. We grabbed coffee and were outside about to leave for the day when Joshua said to me ' Don't worry, we are going to have a simply crystaliscious time'. That was the first time we had ever heard the word. We repeated that word over and over in our class the next day, creating a pretty wonderful finanacial windfall that spilled over for months to come.
A few years later, Joshua and I were invited to another local store to do our talks. We had been working hard at building our reputation and client base, crystaliscious had become a household word that we used to describe everything we loved about life. When the flyers went out, Joshua and I were no longer introduced as ourselves, the local store had introduced us as 'crystaliscious', and we have been called us that ever since.

I liked the simplicity. Trying to bring together all the different aspects of a huge industry is 'busy', I wanted to stay with clean lines, easy graphics, and fast load times.

I used the external page feature to bring in webpages that are relevant to our content.
I also use this feature for spotlights on practitioners,vendors,authors and others.
I really like the amazon feature, it helps to monetize the site without it seeming to be all advertisements.
I also love the html, page code injection and site code injection. Although at first intimidating, Sandvox has made this an easy task, opening up possibilities that I wasn't expecting when I started on this project, like the ability to use an outside source to create a classifieds section just for this website.