For more than eighty years, Shelburne Craft School has been a place where people come to make things with their hands — to shape clay, bend glass, join wood, weave fiber, and discover something about themselves in the process. Our buildings at 64 Harbor Road have had many uses over the years: railroad bunkhouses, bowling alleys, a harness shop. They're drafty in winter and warm with sawdust and laughter year-round. They are, in every sense, handmade.
Our website, for the past eight years, has been handmade too.
In 2018, board member Jonathan Harris built us a website from scratch. At the time, the Craft School was still largely a paper operation — course listings photocopied and pinned to bulletin boards, registrations taken by phone, donations accepted by check. Jonathan, a designer and artist who had recently moved home to Shelburne, volunteered to bring us into the digital age. He built us a beautiful, thoughtful site that could gather crafter profiles, process course registrations, publish news, support gallery sales, and — perhaps most importantly — tell our own story through a historical timeline stretching back to Lyn Smith's first woodworking classes in the late 1930s.
That site served us beautifully. It carried us through a pandemic. It helped us double our programming. It introduced thousands of new students to a place that, as our Executive Director Heather Moore likes to say, has been "saturated in pure joy for 80 years."
But a lot has changed since 2018.
We've grown — a lot. We now serve over 1,500 people a year across nine disciplines. We've launched partnerships with Age Well, Champlain Housing Trust, the South Burlington Vet Center, Shelburne Farms, and Shelburne Museum. We've added fiber arts, photography, and expanded our youth and summer camp programming. Our community has gotten bigger, more diverse, and more active than at any point in our history.
And the technology that runs a modern nonprofit has gotten more complex, too. Behind every cheerful course listing, there's a registration system, payment processing, scholarship applications, instructor scheduling, and a dozen other invisible tasks that our small staff manages with enormous heart and limited hours. Jonathan's original site handled all of this through a custom-built backend — an incredible feat of volunteer engineering, but increasingly difficult to maintain as our catalog grew from dozens of courses to well over a hundred.
"With increased numbers, we would often get overbooked–the last thing you want is to tell a new community member, sorry you can't come, our website didn't add you."
– Craft School teacher
We are, at our core, a place that believes in working with your hands. But we also believe in using the right tool for the job. And it was time for new tools.
So today, we're excited to share something we've been building quietly over the past several months: a brand-new website for Shelburne Craft School.
The new site is faster, easier to navigate, and designed to grow alongside us. You can browse courses by discipline, learn about our instructors and studio managers, read about our history, and — most importantly — sign up for a class in just a few clicks. Course registration now runs through CourseStorm, a platform built specifically for schools like ours, which means a smoother experience for students and far less behind-the-scenes wrangling for our staff. No more distress signals to a board member's kitchen table.
"Jonathan's original site was a gift to this school, and it carried us further than any of us imagined. It regularly receives comments about how beautiful it is. This new chapter isn't a replacement — it's a continuation. We're building on the foundation he laid, the same way a woodworker builds on the skills they learned in their first class here."
– Katie Natale, Board President
A few things you'll notice
It feels like us. We wanted the site to reflect the warmth and character of our campus — the yellow buildings, the courtyard, the light pouring into the studios. This isn't a corporate website. It's a craft school website.
Courses are front and center. Our classes have always been the heart of what we do, and now they're easier than ever to find, filter, and register for.
Our people are visible. From our instructors to our studio managers to our board, you can now see the community behind the Craft School — the faces and stories that make this place what it is.
It works on your phone. We know many of you are browsing between kiln firings or during your kid's soccer practice. The new site is fully responsive and built for how people use the web in 2026.
We want to take a moment to thank Jonathan Harris, whose vision and generosity gave us our first real digital home. The site he built in 2018 wasn't just a website — it was an act of love for this community, and it reflected the same care and craftsmanship that defines everything we do at 64 Harbor Road. We are deeply grateful.
We also want to thank the board members, staff, instructors, and volunteers who contributed feedback, ideas, and patience throughout this process. Building a website, it turns out, is a lot like building a chest of drawers: you measure twice, you make mistakes, you sand things down, and eventually you step back and think, not bad.
"Lyn Smith used to say that education is a process of opening doors and keeping them open. That's what this new website is — another door. A wider one. Come on in."
– Heather Moore, Executive Director
We hope you'll take a few minutes to explore the new site. Browse a course. Read about an instructor you haven't met yet. And if you see something that could be better — tell us. We're crafters. We're always refining.
Welcome to the new shelburnecraftschool.org.
— The Shelburne Craft School Team
