Artspan News

As of January 2, we are introducing the capability for you to arrange your images by category - whether by mediums such as Paintings/Sculptures/Photography or subject matter like Landscapes/Abstract Paintings/Portraits. This is for your current sites. I personally have tried it out and it's easy to do! If you use this feature (and it's optional, you can choose to keep your site as is) your site's home page will have one image per Gallery category that will be a clickable thumbnail with a descriptive phrase underneath. When the image is clicked, the Gallery that the visitor selects will open. In addition, the various Gallery titles will show on the left navigation bar and those links will also open the selected Gallery category. Unlike some other art site providers, we will not charge more for additional pages.

Looking ahead: the more complete redesign of the member sites is well under way. Other major changes include a real homepage for the site, not just another gallery page and we will remove the Artspan footprint from the top of the page. It will be at the bottom and minimally sized so as not to impact on your site. We continue to work on the other design changes that will be launched in stages beginning this month. Not only will there be a fresh and up-to-date new look for the Artspan home page (with the elegance and simplicity of design already associated with Artspan), but the member directories will be even more user-friendly. We will still have the A-Z directory of all members and we will be adding directories by broad category - Artists, Artisans or Photographers. Also, there will be more specific directories by medium and geographical region. All of these will enable people browsing the Artspan site to more easily find who and what they are looking for, whether it be a specific artist by name, acrylic paintings or hand-crafted jewelry, etc. Or they can check to see who is in their area – we expect this to be a useful feature for visitors.

As you know, we recently sent out a message regarding group health care coverage for U.S. members. We regret that it does not appear that we have enough U.S. members interested in launching a group plan to do this now. We had close to 100 members interested, but really need twice that to be able to put a plan together. However, we are reasonably confident that over the next year we will reach the 150-200 members needed to provide group coverage. This is coverage that Artspan would self-fund with costs over a certain limit covered by a major carrier. We believe this coverage would be considerably less costly than buying individual coverage. If you did not receive our email about this, let us know who you are. We will in any event come back to this later in the year. There is no question that this is a serious issue for self-employed professionalsin the U.S..

2005 was a banner year for Artspan on several levels. Most importantly, after 6 years of continuously working to improve our rankings in the major search engines, our efforts are bearing fruit. We have achieved high search rankings for key terms with all the major search engines and this continues to improve. See details here http://www.artspan.com/news.php?id=25 .. These rankings are as of 2 months ago and there has been improvement since then.

We believe that search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo, while incredibly useful for all sorts of searches, are less useful when using broader search terms. Take contemporary art for example. MSN returns 26 million results for that term. How, with all that clutter, can anyone find contemporary artwork of real interest to them? Its simple, they can click on the number one ranked site, Artspan.com, and use their more exact search functions to view images leading them to artwork of real interest to them.

Hand in hand with the search engine rankings goes an increase in traffic .

Here are the December stats vs those for December 2004 and 2003:

This of course does not include those visitors going directly to your sites. Some of you are doing extremely well with over 1,000 uniques per month. If you are not getting that kind of traffic, you can begin to generate it simply by promoting your site to any and all who might be interested. Make one new contact a day and you will see over a year's time a healthy increase in traffic. This is easy to do and we suggest that it be a part of your regular routine.

U.S. holiday online sales experienced a big surge to $30.1 billion, up 30% from 2004. This was not expected. Most experts had predicted a modest increase over last year's numbers which in their turn had represented a large increase over 2003 numbers. Not surprising was the big jump in sales of consumer electronics, books and the like. But perhaps somewhat of a surprise was the 42% increase in apparel and clothing. This had been an area that traditional retailers believed they would hold on to. We don't have numbers for art and artisan sales, but, judging from what we hear from members, people are more and more comfortable with buying over the Internet.

If you need Artspan to act as an intermediary in any sale, let us know. We would collect the agreed on sale price, and hold it until such time as the work was received by the buyer and the buyer told us it was as seen on the Internet. We would then release the funds to you.

This is the Artspan Satisfaction Guarantee. There would be a 10% commission to Artspan and, if payment were by credit card, there would be an additional 4.5% processing charge. Most buyers prefer to go directly to the member, but this offer is there if you need it. Some buyers may need that extra level of reassurance that would be represented by havng a larger and more established behind the sale.

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