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Recently, I was working on a new header for my web site. Well, I don’t mean working on the site itself, my son Michael does the technical part. www.mikejuly.com . I was putting together a few ideas for him to incorporate into the new look and to make my web site more user friendly. I had decided to feature “Custom Woodworking” and support it with a short bio about my business.

Per Mike’s  suggestion, I did a little research on Google Adwords, www.adwords.google.com and found a gazillion references to “custom”. OK, maybe not a gazillion but several hundred million. Listed were thousands of sites for custom cabinets, custom furniture  and custom kitchens ( just to name a few) and at first I thought,wow, there are a lot of people in the business of building custom everything. , Using Google, I dug a little deeper and found everything from custom cars to custom t shirts to custom finger nails and we can’t forget custom nose hair trimmers.  It’s true, you can’t make this stuff up. Is the word “Custom” over used to the point that it’s no longer taken seriously?  Has it  become a tag that’s added to everything without justification?  More specifically, is it meaningful when attached to woodworking?

Custom

(Or “bespoke”) An adjective describing any product that is special in some way, individually created for a specific user or system, as opposed to generic or off-the-shelf. Source:  Free Online Dictionary of Computing http://foldoc.org/custom

How would you define custom woodworking?  Do you think the tag “Custom” is over used?

By the way,  I am reconsidering using “Custom Woodworking” in the title page of my web site.

Keith