Artspan News

The new Artspan Forum is live...www.artspan.com/community. This is a very important initiative for Artspan. One of our most important goals since we began over 6 years ago has been to foster a continuing conversation between artists, artisans and photographers, in the U.S. and in other countries. We are all in the same boat: we share interests and needs. We are committed to our work, to our careers and to the world of art.

There is no better way to further this commitment than to exchange information and opinions. In addition, we expect that the new Forum will build traffic to Artspan and to thus increase its visibility. This is important for our members, as it will inevitably lead to more traffic to their sites. You would be helping us all if you would contribute to any thread or start your own thread. The first contributor was a gallery owner who asked what artists really think of galleries! Interesting topic.

You will need to register to participate. We strongly urge you to enter your Artspan username and password. This will make it a lot simpler for you to remember. We will also be adding a link from your main admin page and that may help our tech staff. Please go here to register.

A final brief note on spam. Our previous Forum was spammed to death. We encourage all participants to post events and links that are art-related. If they are not art-related, please do not post, as they will be removed.

We are getting ready to introduce the new Helpdesk system. This will replace the current support@artspan.com and director@artspan.com email addresses as the primary way to contact us here at Artspan with any support issues or questions you may have. The new system will be a ‘ticket' system where you will need to open a ticket for each new issue that requires action from us. All queries and replies regarding each issue will be on the same ticket, allowing us (and you) to track progress effectively. When resolved, the closed ticket will be saved for future reference and/or inclusion in an FAQ file.

The old system worked well until recently, but the great number of members and support requests has made it difficult to track and service your requests. The new Help Desk will go live in a couple of weeks. We will let you know by email when that happens. We will also create a link from your main admin page for easy support.

This change is important: it will allow us to respond more effectively to your requests. As always, with urgent matters, call us.

It is critical to always have your email address in your admin ('About You'), and to keep it up to date. We have noticed that some members have removed their email address from their Contact information. If you have no email address in your Email 1 field, you will NOT receive any emails from interested viewers using the contact form on your site. It also hampers our ability to contact you for updates or other concerns. Please remember, that the email address entered in your admin is not visible to visitors.

Bear in mind also that if you have a unique domain name and don't update your email address in the ‘Manage Domain' area, you will not receive notices of pending expiration/renewal reminders. This can result in loss of your domain name, and regaining the domain name can be a long and sometimes costly process.

We recently did a search on Google for ‘online contemporary art' on Google. We are now #1. For ‘contemporary art' we are in the top 50 on Google out of 159 million results, in the top 20 on Yahoo for 54 million results and on MSN we are in the top 5 out of 13 million results. We continue to dedicate considerable resources to Search Engine Optimization.

As to print media, we will have a ½ page full color ad in the Art in America annual edition and expect to continue to do this in the Fall. These ads target collectors. We will be expanding our print ads as our increasing resources allow us to, in furtherance of our goal of making Artspan the number one Internet destination for art buyers.

We have finished one new design with 8 variations and it has been coded. More designs are on the way. These will be launched in the next month or so. We readily acknowledge that this redesign has been long promised and that we have been a bit slow in putting it in place. We regret this. However, happily, we have now been able to expand our programming resources, and this should move forward much more quickly.

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Copyright 2006. Artspan LLC. All rights reserved.

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