As summer turns to autumn, backyards, gardens and patios are in high demand for gatherings, cookouts or just quiet moments to oneself. We’ve gathered a selection of outdoor accessories that will help your customers beautify and personalize their at-home escapes.

Laurene Hunt left a powerful position in corporate advertising with good reason— to launch a line of tableware that is seemingly alive with color and movement. At Laurene Hunt Designs in Ashland, Mass., she uses acrylic paint and silk screening to create bold graphic designs on her ceramic trivets and wooden lazy Susans. Hunt brings Pop Art to the table, sure to enliven any gathering.

“I really wanted to create something that could be hung on the outside of the house,” says Chris Austin of Kiwi Studios in Solana Beach, Calif. That’s why she created her Geo White, Black and Silver recycled steel-and-glass wall art designs. Austin launched her studio in 2002 after leaving a successful career as an event planner. Today, she creates everything from personal accessories to tableware and wall art.

Ben and Kate Gatski of Gatski Metal create the perfect art for outdoor spaces: each bird feeder, shelf, table and sculpture is crafted from reclaimed farm machinery in their small studio in Pennsylvania. The Gatskis maintain the machinery’s vibrant colors and unique wear marks when handcutting and welding each piece, connecting the work back to its rural roots.

Prairie Dance in Sioux Falls, S.D., started miles away while owner Terri Schuver and her husband were on vacation more than a decade ago. Attracted to metal sculpture that would be difficult to transport home, he suggested they try to make it themselves. Schuver committed them to show their work at a local festival—andafter months of work (and many patina recipes), they sold out of several designs the first morning. Today, Schuver crafts sculptures and planters for the garden, as well as tabletop accessories.

Bonnie Greenwald and Jon Tury put a spin on wind chimes more than 12 years ago when they created their first solar chimes, powered by a small chip. The partners have since expanded their Manchester, Mich.-based Sunblossom Solar Gifts to include silent, ever-moving mobiles and “SoulMates,” calming figures that hold a spinning, bouncing flower, powered by a solar micro motor.

Corey Silverman and Horace Marlowe of C&H Glassworks in Lakewood, Colo., designed their popular line of hummingbird feeders to imitate glass flowers. The resulting work—which comes in an array of pleasing color combinations—is perfect for the garden, but is so beautiful many customers bring it inside to enjoy the glass year round. The team also creates an array of blown-glass work, including ornaments, vases and decorative figurines.

Sandra Webberking of Sandra Webberking Originals in Springfield, Pa., has been a metal sculptor since she graduated from Moore College of Art & Design in 1997. “I found a kinship with the process of bending, heating, hammering and welding,” she says. It’s natural that the avid gardener gravitates to outdoor sculpture like her popular pair “Peter Peacock” and “Penelopy Peahen,” along with “Filamina the Flamingo.” Her line also includes lanterns, sculptures and candelabra.

One of the greenest—and smartest— ways to amp up your marketing strategy this year is to create an online presence, or improve your existing one. Electronic marketing will cut down on your paper trail and increase your return on investment for each dollar you spend. We asked Thomas Harpointner, CEO of e-business solutions provider AIS Media in Atlanta, Ga., what small retailers need to know before developing an online strategy this summer.

Q: Why is it important for small businesses to have an effective online strategy, especially in the current economic climate?
A: Operating efficiently is the objective of every business owner today. Taking into consideration that six out of 10 consumers use the Internet as their first choice to research items prior to making their purchases, small businesses must focus their attention on consumer behavior.

Q: How should a small business looking to create an online marketing strategy get started?
A: Small businesses need to first understand that online marketing takes time, patience and expertise. The biggest challenges with online marketing are keeping up with the latest technologies and making the right decisions. If Internet marketing development, deployment and monitoring sounds too complicated or time-consuming, or there are simply no internal resources to manage a campaign, working closely with a professional Internet marketing consultant may be the most cost-effective solution.

Q: What easy steps can a business with a small budget and limited staff take to improve or create its online presence?
A: Start an e-mail database. This can be as easy as placing a fishbowl near the register and encouraging customers to drop their business cards or customer satisfaction cards that ask for e-mail addresses. Once the Internet budget increases, the business can invest marketing efforts into an e-newsletter that highlights the latest promotion or the newest product.

Q: What common mistakes do businesses make when creating their online marketing strategies?
A: A lot of businesses take an “all-or-nothing” approach with their marketing strategies. This prevents many businesses from going online. The best approach is a multiphase strategy. Rolling out an online campaign in several parts, measuring and improving upon success, and following consumer trends closely is the remedy to the common mistakes businesses make.

Q: Can e-mail, e-newsletters and websites take the place of a direct marketing campaign?
A: With postage rapidly climbing and green initiatives taking foothold, electronic communications and sales are the future of business. More relevant to today’s economy is the cost; e-mail and online marketing are easy to measure, modify and distribute with a cost that’s far less than the traditional marketing channels, and a return on investment that far exceeds them.

Q: How has the current economic climate changed the way that small retailers are doing business online?
A: Small businesses are keeping a close eye on their marketing dollars as they tighten their budget belts. Internet marketing is the perfect solution because it provides a very precise way to measure results and to attain them at a cost that is significantly lower. Return on investment is king online. In this economy, businesses make two mistakes: they either stop marketing, which will save money in the short run, but allow the business to wilt long-term; or they continue sinking money into traditional advertising where they only have a 50/50 chance to recover their investment.

Q: How can a brick-and-mortar location and a strong online presence work together and benefit each other?
A: Studies show that the Internet influences more than $3 of in-store sales for every dollar spent online. Consumers are already shopping both online and in the store, so the key is to promote your website in the retail store and promote your brick-and-mortar location on your website. Retailers can divert their customers from fleeing to competitors by promoting and selling their product through multiple channels, whether online, through e-mail and mobile messages, on an e-commerce website or at the brickand- mortar location.

Q: Is an e-commerce site an essential part of a small retailer’s online strategy?
A: In a few cases where the retailer-client relationship must take place by phone or face-to-face, a shopping cart is not an essential component. What we’re seeing the most is a hybrid model, where the online storefront complements the brick-and-mortar storefront, and vice versa. In either case, the retailer can gather invaluable “browsing” information to allow them to better gauge the popularity of products.

Q: How are current e-commerce sales comparing to those of years past?
A: While brick-and-mortar sales plummeted sharply in late 2008, e-commerce sales flattened out. However, holiday and postholiday season spending attributed to an online sales growth that was five times the rate of retail.

Q: Is it possible for small retailers who decide not to develop an online presence to thrive in the coming years?
A: It is unlikely. Small businesses, especially those that have a local or hyperlocal presence, have realized that as their customer base is being affected by the economy more and more each day, having an online storefront can significantly increase their footprint. With an e-commerce enabled website, small businesses can successfully target and acquire new customers just about anywhere in the world.

“Picnic jugs were never meant to be attached to vacuum cleaners in a sturdy, yet visually appealing way,” Toby Atticus Fraley admits. But his robots (simply named and numbered in order of appearance) certainly have a life of their own, and are found in complicated—and often entertaining— poses. One swims with fish while capturing it on 8mm film, another stands firm with a space gun, and a third hikes with a pool cue and backpack.

Found-object robots are just the tip of the iceberg for Fraley. His primary love is oil painting, but he’s also a self-taught woodworker, photographer, slipcast ceramist, digital videographer and, soon, a full-on mad scientist—once he incorporates circuits for real-life robotics.

“Part of the reason I stay active in so many mediums is because there isn’t a single one that is one hundred percent satisfying,” Fraley explains. “It keeps me fresh.”

Fraley’s other successful line is just as eye-popping. Slip-cast ceramic birds play out captivating scenes: in “Live Free,” birds in business suits confront a red bird in a dunce hat; in “The Funeral,” a white angel squares off with a red devil overlooking a blue bird in a coffin. “I want to make people pause,” Fraley says. “For the most part, people seem generally amused.”

Fraley spent a few years at a state college in his native Pennsylvania before “the money ran out” and he continued to do what he does best—acquire new tools and teach himself how to use them. It’s an inherited characteristic; he grew up in his dad’s workshop creating a variety of projects, and has always had an inclination to draw.

“Stuff just pops into my head,” Fraley says. “It seems natural. I’m going to go home and work on a robot that’s flying a kite. That’s just the way I work.”

“From the moment I touched Play-Doh as a kid, art has always been my favorite subject,” says mixed-media artist Laura Reese. Although her calling was clear from the start, her upbringing in a family of doctors initially pushed her to explore a more “marketable” career.

Reese entered the University of North Carolina Wilmington as an art history major, transferring after two years to Tulane University in New Orleans to pursue architecture. There, she took her first courses in ceramics, but pressed on to graduate in 1998 with a master’s degree in architecture.

Reese continued her education with a move to Baltimore, where she studied computer graphics with a focus on collage at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

In 2000, she and her husband Scott moved to Asheville to escape the city scene, and Reese landed a sales position at the Southern Highland Craft Guild’s Folk Art Center. Exposure to Leah Leitson’s ceramics led her to call the artist “out of the blue,” and in 2002, Reese started an apprenticeship.

As she learned the ins and outs of working as a potter, Reese found that she “wanted to create beautiful things. Not things that might collect dust or be dated by next year, nor things that poured or held chips.”

Her first foray into mixed media was a collage that incorporated elements from her diverse education—photo transfers lent a graphic element to the ceramic tiles, and Reese “housed” the piece with a frame.

In 2005, Reese opened her own studio and started developing her current aesthetic. Today, she works primarily in porcelain, carving greenware into shapes, adding textures and characters and sending it to the kiln for a series of firings. After glazing, Reese adds decals she’s made (usually a mix of images drawn from nature and architecture) and fires the piece a final time. It’s completed once she’s added a decorative, often Asian-inspired, frame.

Her education certainly hasn’t ended, though. Reese recently took a class in glass fusing and hopes to explore it in her work. “I hesitate to ever have a plan,” she says. “I arrived at my style because I didn’t have a plan. I think the trick is to stay open and have the gumption to explore new ideas.”