Artspan News

We have a new launch date for the member sites redesign, November 21. The redesign has taken a bit longer than we anticipated due to the complexities of programming the new member admin tools which you will use to manage your sites. We have retained extra programming help to enable us to move forward with this a bit faster.

Here is a preview of one design, The first page you will see will be one option for the homepage. Click on the Next link and you will see another option for the homepage, this one with 3 images. So, you will be able to choose between more text or more images. Keep clicking and you will come to the CV/bio page, then the Contact page, then the main Gallery page which will approximate what you have now as your homepage. On the main gallery page you will see a number of images which will represent the different galleries. The final page will show you one of these gallery pages. Finally, to see some color variations for this design, go here. There are a number of other different designs planned including one with 30 plus thumbnail images on each gallery page.

Here is the new design for the Artspan homepage. As you see, it's a very different look, but we believe it will clearly introduce Artspan to visitors interested in contemporary art. This design will be up the third week of September.

Shortly after that we will begin to introduce a number of new portals under the Artspan banner. Artspan will remain the principal portal, but we will also have portals for major art categories….artspanPainting.com, artspanSculpture.com, artspanPhotography.com, artspanGlassArts.com, etc. These portals will serve to introduce the visitor to the different varieties of work under these broader categories, for ex: abstract, landscape, figure, etc under painting. These then will be new pages consisting of directories for each of these subcategories. That is, a different directory for abstract painting, landscape painting, etc.

We have had a number of members ask that we include more of their images in the Artspan search results. There is a reason we limit the number of images. With some 40,000+ images in our database, we believe the search results would simply be too long (some results could be 100's of pages) and visitors would not go past the first few pages (as they generally don't do with Google and other types of searches).

The Artspan searches are meant to show representative samples of your work. As your work inevitably has a stylistic similarity, visitors will be able to judge by one image whether the body of work could be of interest and to click through to view your site. As you are now able to show from 4 to 9 images in the searches, visitors should be able to view works that are representative of any particular direction you are going with your work.

Another way to do this would be to have all the work on the member sites show in the searches. This would be appropriate if Artspan was only concerned with sales of individual pieces, if it were strictly a sales or auction site. But it is intended to be more than that, it is meant to be an art portal and introduce visitors to more than just one piece of work, it is meant to introduce them to you, and to the body of your work.

However, we are also very much concerned that you have adequate channels to sell your work online. For this reason, we intend to launch a site which will be solely concerned with selling member work. We expect this to happen towards the end of the year. This site will be called artspanShop.com, and will have all the work from your individual sites that you decide should be included. It will be all about sales and will be promoted as such. There will be no link through to your individual site, but there will be a brief bio pop-up. There will also be a small commission which will accrue to Artspan, necessary to help with the promotional expenses.

If you are not happy with how your images are appearing in the search results, you can and should do something about it. Spend some time with the keywords that correspond to each image. Make sure that you list as many keywords as you can. Words can have to do with subject, style, medium, color, and with you. Please also make sure that these keywords accurately reflect the image in question. Putting in a word that does not correspond to the image constitutes spamming. For example, adding “photography” for a piece of sculpture. If you do this, you are liable to lose your Artspan site. Accuracy in the searches is just too important to us. If visitors find that the searches don't bring accurate results, why would they continue to visit Artspan?

Also, don't forget to be careful in highlighting the category and subcategories on the image pages (i.e. painting, and then oil, landscape, etc). These categories and subcategories are what guide the browse by genre and search by category searches which are used as much as the keyword searches.

A final word about keywords. The keywords in the “About You” section of your admin have to do with your site as a whole and are for Google and other search engines to better index your site. Again, with these, be as complete and accurate as you can be. Bottom line: you can bring more visitors to your site, if you work at it.

You may have noticed that we introduced an updated version of the Member Directory last month. Prior to this new version, some of the letters had more than 100 member images on the page corresponding to that letter and were taking a long time to load. We have therefore divided up the listings for each letter of the alphabet into multiple pages. For example, B, M, and S each have 5 pages of up to 25 members each and all pages load up quickly.

We are still working on the other Directories and they should be ready to introduce with the new Artspan. These are Artists, Artisans, Photograper, Directory by Category of Work and Directory by Region.

Take a look at your contact page. There is now a field that anyone using the contact form has to fill in. It's a series of letters and numbers that automatically refreshes each time the page is opened. This will cut down on spammers and scammers, particularly those using programs that automatically populate contact forms.

We had a post on the Forum from an Artspan member which may prove useful for Mac and other Users. Here it is, somewhat edited:

"If you are a Mac user, as I am, then I hope this will help. I have had problems uploading images to my Artspan website using a Mac. After some investigation I found there is an easy solution to resolving your upload image problems. Chances are you using the Safari browser which comes bundled on Macs. You will need to use the the Firefox browser. Here is the link to download FF for Macs: http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefox-1.5.0.6&os=osx&lang=en-US
There is another use for Firefox on a Mac. The textbox toolbars are only visible with Firefox, not with Safari.

For PC and Mac users, I also suggest buying PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS 3, which is the stripped-down version of PHOTOSHOP. The cost is $99.00. What makes Photoshop Elements 3 so valuable is that you get most of what you would get with the full version of Photoshop, a $700 program."

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