The new customization feature for all Professional Plus member sites is up. Simply log in to your admin, click on Themes and then on the Customize link under the B Themes image. Choose any color/font combinations you wish. There is no limit to the number of styles you can define, so feel free to play with it. Once you are happy with the look of the preview, click on Save and your custom style is live. The style name will also now appear on your main Theme selection page. We will be adding this functionality to the Theme A designs. We hope to have that done this month, but it may not happen until January.

The new html editor in your Navigation Bar section (controls the text on all the interior pages) is now live and will work better than the old one. Problem has primarily been with copying over Word documents. You can now enter these in the pop-up screens and they will show well. Another big plus is that toolbar shows across all browsers. We previously had issues with Safari and icons did not show for Mac users who used Safari. They do now. Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and Firefox are fine. The only change in the way that the text box looks is that you will no longer see the icons at the top. They are at the bottom.

There is also a new link on the top of all admin pages, View My Site. Clicking on that link will open your site in a new window, so that you will more easily be able to see any saved changes. Don’t forget to click on the Refresh button to view the changes (in Internet Explorer, that’s the two green arrows at the top of the browser window).

We will be changing the look of the member admin to, hopefully, make the updating process a little clearer. We are also looking at other template platforms, it may be that there is a way we can make the sites better by redesigning the way they work, from the ground up. We will also be working on the Artspan database, primarily moving images from one server to another in order to speed the time they need to show on the sites. Finally, our TO DO list includes the Blog feature, new Search filters, revamped image upload function, video and more. Of these, we see the new search filters as the priority, it will expand the different ways visitors can find your site. And it will make it easier for us to accurately assign more images to the different portals they correspond to.

We intend to greatly expand the number of portals this coming year from the 13 portals that are currently up. This is key to attracting more traffic, both with increased relevant content and with better search engine rankings for a host of keywords and terms. The additional traffic will be positioned to go on to the member sites.

Over the past two months, our focus has been on developing the back end, making it easier for us to create new portals and add resources and content. We have also worked on getting more content. As this is time-consuming and requires a big investment, we are moving towards having more RSS feeds, in order to use the best content from other art sites: news, articles and events. We hope that an investment in this technology will greatly speed the time we need to add portals and content and to maximize their search engine rankings. We are working with a consultant who is an expert in XML (Extensible Markup Language), and he is putting together a proposal as to how we can best do this. We hope to get this underway this month, and anticipate this new consultant will be with us on an ongoing basis.

Professional Plus sites will go to $19.95 per month in January. ProPlus sites will have features that the other sites don’t have are: capability of choosing any colors and fonts, bigger image enlargements (coming soon), preference in featured member placement on portals pages, unlimited images, as well as the video and blog options (when available). The most important of these are the capability to customize your individual site, the preference in showing as a Featured Member on the homepage and portals pages, and the unlimited images. The other upgrades are coming.

We will increase pricing for Professional Sites to 17.95/month. If you are a Pro Plus member and want the price to stay at 17.95/month, go to your admin and click on About You. Then change your member type to Professional from Professional Plus. For Professional sites, we will increase the number of images from 18 to 24.

The introductory or Basic membership will go 13.95. And the Associate Membership with Hosting will go to $9.95.

We very sincerely regret the need to increase the prices. With current pricing, we simply do not have the resources to grow the site (and its content and visibility) as well as to improve the functionality of the member sites. You will remember all that we have done this past year to improve your sites and to expand Artspan as a destination for collectors and others. For the individual sites, upgrades include the Home Page, the Galleries, new designs, the slideshow option, color and font customization and a lot more. We have more planned for next year. For the site as a whole, the Artspan Portals is an initiative that will need constant updating and renewal if we are to serve as a serious destination for collectors, designers and others….and get more traffic through to your sites.

This is our second price increase in 8 years and our pricing is still much less costly than that of our our major competitors. Take a look at Big Black Bag, Foliolink, Foliosnap, and FineArtStudioOnline. Their top packages average $40-50/month; we are still below $20 (and less with the 10% annual pay discount). No other provider of template websites is an art portal and attracts anywhere near the traffic that Artspan does.