The new templates are live. Please click on the Themes button in your member Admin and then select one of 9 new variations. Preview your design choice first before making it live. One of the color variations does not yet show but will on Monday, February 12.

You can switch to the new designs whether or not you currently have a homepage and main gallery page now. We had previously announced that you would need to set up a homepage and gallery page before switching, but we were able to resolve the programming issues that seemingly made this necessary. However, Professional and Pro Plus members should probably set up a true homepage and gallery pages at this point anyways. This will make your site look better and be more interesting and logical to navigate and there are other reasons. One of those reasons can be found in the news item below entitled Boosting your Rankings by Optimizing your Website Content. It outlines ways to optimize your search engine rankings by tweaking your content – most importantly that of your homepage.

We are raising all member template site prices by US$1 per month effective March 1. This will not affect associate members.  

As I said last month, we need to narrow the gap between revenue and expenses. We are still the lowest cost major provider and the only one to spend significant sums on advertising. We are the only provider of artist sites to function as an art portal. We attract significant traffic (see below) and this traffic is shared by you.  

We are going to working to greatly expand our content offering beginning this month and this of course also involves additional cost to us. But the greater content will result in stronger traffic and rankings – again this will benefit all of us. We have other major projects planned also.  

This is our first price increase in 7 years. We did have one very small partial increase before, but this did not affect those who were already members. Please be assured that we remain committed to keeping the sites as low cost as possible.
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The regional directory is up. Just go to the regular A-Z Directory and use the Search Artist by Region dropdown to select a country or state. You then need to choose a letter. We will eliminate that requirement. That is, we need to see all artists in any state or country, not broken out by alphabetical letter, so there is a little more to do. As you know, we will also be programming directories by category of work or subcategory. For example, painting or abstract painting.

We believe that the easier we make it for our visitors to find work, the better for all of us.We are also close to launching the first of our category portals. The first one will be the Sculpture portal, and will incorporate an overview of the category, articles, news, member directories and a resource section consisting primarily of important links.

We have currently 155 members interested in participating in a group health plan, and we took this to a number of different carriers. We were not successful. It appears that insurance companies have not had recent happy experiences with affinity groups. We are waiting on one response and if that is not favorable, we will try again in a few months or so, possibly using a different broker. We will also contact other organizations to see if a joint approach might bring results.

Coop ads. Those who expressed interest have been contacted and we have reserved space in the April issue of Art in America. The next issue would be either May or October, though the annual which comes out in the summer is also a possibility. The summer is of course not a good time, but the annual does have a long shelf life. It is used year around as a reference. As to B&W Magazine, Mariana will have to let interested members know. They publish 8x a year so I am not sure as to which issue she has targeted. If you need to communicate with her, please use the display@artspan.com email.

Artspan had over 100,000 unique visitors for a month for the first time: 100,839. Unique visitors are visitors counted once only. Total visitors were 177,000 for January, with 6.62mm page views. These totals do not include visitors that go directly to your member sites. That total is considerably greater. Hits were over 9mm, but that is essentially a meaningless stat.