November 2009 Artspan Newsletter

[artspandirector]

November 2009 Artspan Newsletter

November 2009 Artspan Newsletter
Prints-on-Demand: IMPORTANT
Server Move
Promoting Your Site
Featured Members: Jim Morgan & Lisa Renee Myers

Prints-on-Demand

We are close to introducing the Prints-on-Demand feature (PoD) and expect to have it live the last week of November.

A brief recap of the feature - visitors to your sites will be able, at your option, to click on an image and then size, mat and frame it. The print will be shipped directly to them. You will set the price for your print and will have to upload top quality, high resolution images to participate. Otherwise you will not have to do anything. Printing and framing will be done by our printer partner who will also ship. You will be the seller (not Artspan), and be responsible for paying any taxes (our shopping cart system will calculate the tax for over 7,000 tax jurisdictions in North America). You will also pay a 3.5% commission to Artspan.

We are considering a P.R. campaign centered on the Christmas buying season and are in discussion with a P.R.firm regarding this. In order to decide whether to proceed at this time, we need to know the following:

1. The number of members who intend to participate at this time. It does not make sense to drive a lot of prospective buyers to the site, if there are only a few sellers. If you are ready to go, click here: http://www.artspan.com/pod_survey.php

2. We need to know that you have the top quality images needed to make quality prints. Please go here for an October newsletter item on the subject of Better Quality Images. http://www.artspan.com/newsletter/ar...er09.htm#item1. As a general rule, we recommend that you use the services of a professional photographer unless you are very experienced in shooting your work. It’s not easy and has to be done right. So please do not indicate that you are ready to proceed (#1 above) unless you have the photography angle covered.

We will be promoting this feature to the prospective buying public in any event. It is simply a question of when we start the promotion. We don’t want to do this unless we (and you!) are ready.

I regret the delay in launching this and my premature optimism as to the launch date. The things we needed in place prior to launch (i.e. automated billing, shopping carts, server move, etc.) took much longer than we anticipated.

Server Move

We are most of the way through the server migration and database reconfiguration. It has proven to be a very complex task, and 4 people have been working on it. It has also involved some problems for members, most recently with the move of all the email files to the new servers. If you are using Artspan as your email provider and are having trouble logging in to the webmail, you can log in at www.artspanmail.com/webmail with the following username username@yourdomainname.com (the username is your Artspan username together with your website address, no matter that your actual email address may be something different).

If you use an email “client” such as Outlook, Thunderbird, Entourage or Apple Mail, then you may need to make some changes to your email servers. Go to your account settings and change your incoming ("pop") and outgoing ("smtp") server fields to mail.yourdomain.com. And change your username to username@yourdomain.com. Your password is the same one you use to login to your Artspan control panel.

This item only effects a small number of members, so if you don’t have problems, please disregard. If you are having problems that are not resolved by the above, please let us know immediately at ask@artspan.com and give us full details of the problem you are having and whether you use an email “client” or access your email via webmail.

Marketing Your Website and Your Work.

From time to time, I receive a message from a member, asking for advice on how best to promote and market his or her website and work. Clearly, this is a big subject, but here are a few thoughts:
First, as a professional, remember that your website should be the centerpiece of your promotion and marketing. It’s where you direct anyone interested in your work and the main way you keep your current collectors informed as to the direction your work is taking. It is absolutely key. So always feature your site when communicating with anyone interested in your work….whether it’s on cards, in your emails, facebook, blog, in conversation, etc. The promotion you do yourself is probably more important than anything else.
Second, here are some basic things that will help your site show better in Artspan searches and/or in Google, Bing and Yahoo searches. These were covered in an article I posted some time back here. http://www.artspan.com/article_displ...ur_art&atid=18
1. Make sure your Meta title (that’s the title that shows on the top left of your browser window) accurately reflects your work. Be as specific as you can be in a few short words regarding the nature of your work. To make a change to the Meta title, go to your Control Panel and click on Site Information. It’s the field called “default browser title.”
2. Spend some time with the keywords for each image. Again, they should be as specific as possible. Put yourself in the place of someone who might be looking for work such as yours. If you are a landscape painter, make your terms specific both as to the type of landscape and as to the region you are painting. Always include your name and other personal data such as where you live. Separate key words and phrases with a comma.
3. Site content. Words and phrases used on your site are important. Most important is content on your home page beginning with the upper left hand corner of the page and then the interior pages. Size matters… try to put your most important key words in headers. A note of caution – don’t overdo it with mention of the same word. The search engines will penalize that. You can see the Artspan homepage and how we have used the phrase “contemporary art.” This has helped in obtaining a #1 ranking for that term.
4. Links to your site from pages with strong page ranks. One of the things we considered when we designed Artspan, was to maximize the quality and quantity of Artspan pages linking to your site – you have a big advantage with that and don’t need to do too much more. But setting up a links page and exchanging links with other sites carrying work that relevant to yours can only help.

We at Artspan also continually look for ways to help your site show best. Here is one thing we did that I talked about in the Summer newsletter…the URL that corresponds to each of your individual pages - (that’s the address showing in your browser’s address window for the page you are at any one time. I talked about this in the summer newsletter… http://www.artspan.com/newsletter/ar...er09.htm#item2.

Featured Members

We are taking a look this month at two talented and strong painters tackling landscape painting from different perspectives. The work of both has atmospheric and abstract qualities, but there they diverge.

Jim Morgan
Artworks

Born in New Jersey, Jim earned his BFA in Art and Design from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Since graduating, he has worked as a designer and art director. In 2004, Jim began exhibiting his landscapes, and has continued showing regularly in galleries across the U.S. His work is part of several corporate and private collections. He currently resides in Princeton, NJ with his wife and three children.

Jim Morgan brings a painterly sensitivity to his landscapes. These are unabashedly beautiful and lyrical paintings. And then there is his other work: abstractions, geometrical constructions and “other distractions.” Take a look at his website.

Lisa Renee Myers
Contemporary Abstract Mixed-Media Paintings

Lisa states: “My paintings are not traditional images of our coastlines as seen from the land's edging. They are atmospheric abstract paintings…landscapes and shorelines as seen from a bird's eye view or through new technologies, such as remote sensing and satellite imagery, and are mainly focused on expressing a sense of place or a mood or feeling. My techniques involve many different tools, from paintbrushes to palette knives, wire brushes to sandpaper, and many natural found elements such as sticks, rocks, sand, and wood chips.