Website or Instagram? Where an artisan's time is best spent

“Do I need a website if I already have Instagram?” is the question we hear most from people who open a studio and start offering workshops. The honest answer is that a website and Instagram do two different jobs, and neither of them, on its own, does the third job that really matters: letting people book and pay without messaging you first. Let's look at what each one does well, what not to do, and how to combine them.

What Instagram does well (and what it doesn't)

Instagram is a discovery channel. Its job is to show you to people who don't yet know you exist: the person scrolling Reels in the evening who sees the wheel turning or the loom beating and thinks, “I want to try that”. It works because it shows the process, not the finished piece: the hands, the studio, the mistake that turns into a piece. And it puts people in touch with you in thirty seconds, with no friction.

• People who weren't looking for you find you: that is its big advantage, and no website does it.
• DMs lower the bar: writing to you costs less than filling in a form.
• But the algorithm decides who sees what and when: a post is around for a short while, then it's gone from the feed.
• Someone searching Google for “pottery class” plus your city rarely lands on your profile, and never with dates and prices in plain sight.
• A booking that happens in DMs is one you handle by hand: dates, seats, deposit, confirmation, reminder. Every single time.

What a website does well (and what it doesn't)

A website serves a different kind of person: the one who is already looking for you. They have decided to gift an experience, typed the craft and the city into Google, and want three things: when, how much, where. A site with a page for each workshop, showing date, price and address, answers those three questions while you're not online. And it's yours: no algorithm, no account block, no rules changing overnight.

• It catches active search: someone coming from Google is closer to booking than someone scrolling a Reel.
• One page per workshop, with a clear title, stays findable for months, not for a day.
• But nobody arrives on their own: without content, links and some work on search, a new site is a shop window on a street with no foot traffic.
• It costs time and money: domain, hosting, updating dates, reshooting photos. A site with last year's calendar does more harm than no site at all.

The risk of depending on a single channel

Everything on Instagram means your customer list lives inside an app you don't own. Try this test: if you lost access to your profile tomorrow, how many of the people who took a workshop with you could you get back in touch with? If the answer is “the ones whose number I have”, your business is standing on one leg.

• Blocked, hacked or restricted account: it happens, and support has no phone number to call.
• Site down or domain expired: people searching find an error and move on to the next studio.
• What really protects you is having the contacts of the people who booked, in a place of your own: an email list collected through bookings is worth more than any follower count.

What not to do

These are the mistakes we see most often. None of them is serious on its own; together they lose bookings without you noticing.

1. A link in bio to a form nobody answers. The person fills it in, waits, and two days later has already booked elsewhere. If you use a form, it needs an instant automatic reply and a response from you the same day.
2. “DM me for info and prices”. It sounds welcoming, but it puts the job of answering the same question a hundred times on you, and many people simply don't write.
3. Beautiful posts with no date, price or way to book. The Reel of the wheel creates the urge; if there's no clear next step, the urge passes.
4. A website with an old calendar. A past date on the homepage says “nobody's home”.
5. Bank transfer in chat. Asking for an IBAN in DMs works until you need a refund, a receipt or proof of payment.
6. Three different links in three different places. Bio, website and Google profile must lead to the same page, or you confuse yourself and the person booking.

How to make website and Instagram work together

Once you stop asking “which one” and start thinking in terms of a path, the two channels fit together on their own. Instagram brings, the page converts. Here is a flow that works for a small studio, with no agency.

1. A post or Reel shows the process: a minute of making, one line on what you learn, the city. No selling in the text.
2. The caption always ends the same way: “dates and seats at the link in bio”. Always the same sentence, always the same link.
3. The link in bio goes to a page with dates, price and a book button. Not the site's homepage, not a form, not a DM.
4. Whoever books pays a deposit online and gets a confirmation with address, time and what to bring. You get a notification, and that's it.
5. Your Google Business Profile points to the same page. So people searching for you by name or by craft land where the Instagram people land.
6. After the workshop, a photo of people with their pieces goes back on Instagram. It's the content that convinces the next ones, and the circle closes.

A concrete example. A ceramicist in Bologna posts the Reel of Saturday's kiln firing. In the caption: “next dates at the link in bio”. The link goes to the page for the beginner wheel course, with three October dates and the price. Someone books on Sunday evening, pays the deposit, receives the confirmation. On Monday the ceramicist finds one notification, not twenty messages. Meanwhile, whoever searched “wheel course Bologna” and came through the Google profile lands on the same page.

If you'd rather start from the Google side, the cheapest step is your Business Profile: here are the seven steps to set it up. If your doubt is between selling in chat and selling from a page, we compared Instagram, WhatsApp and Handsome point by point.

The piece both are missing: a place where people book and pay

Here is the point a website and Instagram have in common: neither one is a booking system. Instagram doesn't know how many seats you have left; a brochure website doesn't either. Counting seats, taking the deposit, sending the confirmation, reminding people two days before, handling cancellations: if there's no piece doing that, that piece is you, by hand, in chat.

There are two roads. Build it from separate parts, for instance an external calendar plus a payment link plus hand-written emails: doable, and here we did the maths on website plus Calendly. Or use a bookable page that's already built.

On Handsome the Maker profile is free and every workshop has its own page with dates, seats and price. Whoever books pays a deposit online and settles the rest at the studio; the money goes straight to your Stripe account, with 0% commission on your takings from Handsome: only Stripe's fees remain, and nothing is added on top of the price you set. Confirmations and reminders go out on their own. It's the page to put in your bio and behind the “Book” button on your site, if you have one. If you also want ready-made content, the optional Maker Pro plan (9.90 euro a month or 95 a year) includes a Social Kit with carousels, stories and the month's calendar.

So: website or Instagram?

If you really have to pick where to start, the answer depends on who your customers are today.

• Starting from zero, no website: Instagram plus a bookable page in your bio. The website comes later, when you have real photos and real reviews to put on it.
• People already search for you on Google for your craft and your city: a website, even a single page, your Google Business Profile, and the same bookable page behind the button.
• You have both but nobody books: before rebuilding everything, check where the click ends up. Almost always it ends in a form or a DM.

Website or Instagram isn't a contest. One brings, the other welcomes, and in between you need a place where people book and pay. Sort that out, and every post and every search starts to be worth something.