Artspan News

We are delighted to announce that we have hired an editor, Keith Bandelin, to coordinate the Portals effort. As announced last month, this will be a major initiative aimed at positioning Artspan not just as a general art portal but as a series of more focused portals which will be gateways to various distinct art categories such as painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media, prints, glass art, fiber art, ceramics, jewelry and more. Keith has done a fair amount of writing for arts and general culture magazines and will be in charge of putting together the content for each of these distinct portals. This content will include an overview of current trends for the art category covered, articles, links to interesting exhibits and a further breakdown of each category into subcategories (for example, for painting, these subcategories will include abstract painting, landscape painting, and many more).

We aim to make Artspan much more of a resource for all those who are interested in the varied directions that contemporary art is taking. This will lead, we feel, to many more visitors both to Artspan and to your sites.

We have a lot of initiatives planned, and some have been delayed by our limited programming resources. Rodney, who is our tech lead, has had his hands full with the new initiatives and the ongoing tech support requests, and we have not been able to move forward as quickly as we would have liked. We have therefore contracted with an outside firm for 3 additional people: 2 programmers and a project manager. They are starting November 1, and their first assignment is to get the new Artspan site design up and running. We will follow that with the new member site designs, programming for the portals and the distinct member directories, an integrated billing system, artspanShop.com, and a lot more.

Scheduled for this month are the new site designs, but we have been overly optimistic before, so we are staying away from giving firm completion dates on the first batch of member site designs.

Many of you have tried out the new member site homepage design introduced two weeks ago. For those who haven't, go ahead and log in to your main member admin page. You will see a new breakdown of buttons into two categories: Tools and Resources. The Tools will allow you to manage your site; the Resources will allow you to better understand the tools and help you to use your site in a more effectively.

There is a new Tool button named "Home Page" which will allow you to create a true home page for your site with either 1 large 500 pixel image or 3 smaller 125 pixel images and text above, below or to the side of the images. Your previous homepage will then become your main Gallery page. We are still waiting on the new member site designs, but with our additional new programming resources, we should see. the first ones up this month.

Many of you have tried out the new member site homepage design introduced two weeks ago. For those who haven't, go ahead and log in to your main member admin page. You will see a new breakdown of buttons into two categories: Tools and Resources. The Tools will allow you to manage your site; the Resources will allow you to better understand the tools and help you to use your site in a more effectively.

There is a new Tool button named "Home Page" which will allow you to create a true home page for your site with either 1 large 500 pixel image or 3 smaller 125 pixel images and text above, below or to the side of the images. Your previous homepage will then become your main Gallery page.

We are still waiting on the new member site designs, but with our additional new programming resources, we should see. the first ones up this month.

We got a nice response from members expressing interest in participating in the Coop Ad program. For those of you who are not aware of this initiative, w e want to use our greater buying power and established advertiser relationships for the benefit of any of our members who would like to show their work in a shared display ad in a premiere art publication. We have in mind Art in America and B&W Magazine (photography). Because we want the ad to be visually interesting and because we feel 16 artists for the page may crowd the ads, we are looking at having fewer artists. The cost would be greater than previously estimated. For 9 artists, the cost would be about $475 and it would be more if fewer artists were included. For B&W Magazine, the ad rates and cost to participating members would be much less. We will keep interested members posted on developments. The next step is for us to put together a few ad comps.

If you are interested in participating, please let us know at display@artspan.com.

As our members know, we had server problems in October and the member admins had to be taken down for a few days. We have added a new server to handle the database exclusively. The problems were caused by the very rapidly growing database (i.e. we have a more than a few members with hundreds of images). We are very concerned with building in plenty of redundancy going forward and will therefore add an additional server in December which should give us plenty of capacity for a long time.

Traffic to Artspan was at record high levels in October with close to 90,000 unique visitors (visitors counted once only) and 150,000 total visitors. These are both very healthy numbers and show, we feel, that our strategy of emphasizing Artspan as an art portal has been correct.

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