We have been continuing work on the same projects for the last couple of months. Here is a status report:

1. Shopping carts. We expect to launch by April 1. They are in test now. See below for more information.
2. Prints. This project will follow the shopping carts. Expect launch by June 1.
3. CollectorsMoment.com. This is a collector’s website we are launching with a partner. Objective is to raise our profile with collectors and the art world at large. It’s been designed and is being coded now.
4. ‘C’ Templates. This is a new customizable template design for all members – it’s a different look from our current sites and a strong design. It will be coded this month.
5. Associate member templates. We will be offering a one page site to our associate members and will add the prints option to it. This will be an upgrade on our current offering to associate members.

There are also other projects and initiatives that we have planned for a while and that will be developed as soon as the current projects have been completed.

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The shopping carts are in test. These carts will be of particular interest to Artspan artisan members (i.e. jewelers), but are also a necessary precursor to introducing the prints option to member sites. These integrated Artspan shopping carts are optional. You can decide not to install anything and continue to use your sites in the general promotion of your career and your work, with less concern for online sales. If you already have a PayPal cart, you can keep it (though anyone buying from you will need to have a PayPal account).

Here are three reasons to have an Artspan shopping cart:
1. Your cart will be fully integrated with your site and customers will not need to leave your site to add items, view cart, checkout, etc (unlike paypal cart).
2. All of your artwork will be enabled for sale with just a checkbox. (much simpler than the Paypal cart).
3. Customers can choose to pay directly with a credit card or use Paypal.
4. Artspan will process all payments and pay the money to. .

You, the member, will be responsible for determining the terms of sale on your site and for posting these terms. For example, what is your policy going to be on refunds? We suggest that you have, for a very limited limited time only, a no-questions asked refund policyThat will help to reassure buyers. We will have more on what we suggest for terms of sale, including shipping and handling, when we introduce the carts. We will also ask you to guarantee that any items will be shipped within three business days.

You, the member, will be responsible for determining the terms of sale on your site and for posting these terms. We will have more information when we get close to launch, including our recommendations on refunds, shipping & handling, sales and use taxes and other issues.

The Artspan fee for our service will, we project, be approximately 6.75% (this percentage is not yet final), this amount will include all credit card processing and transmission fees, both of the original charge to the buyer and the charge to then automatically credit your account with the proceeds. We estimate that our processing costs will be a bit below 4%, leaving a small percentage to cover any customer service costs, tech issues, and any other liabilities that may occur.

When we launch the integrated shopping carts we will alert members with a special email blast. Members will be able to sign up in their Control Panel. As soon as the carts are up, we will move to introduce the prints option which will be of greater interest to most members.

Artspan, as is the case with all major sites, is increasingly subject to attack by hackers. One such episode happened on February 19-20. Our site has not been penetrated and all member financial data is totally secured by a GeoTrust SSL certificate. However, these attacks have caused continuing problems with our webmail system and with the Help Desk. We are addressing these issues and they are mostly resolved, but if you sent an email to help@artspan.com of billing@artspan.com on or around Feb 25 or 26 and did not get a response, please resend or, better, login to the Help Desk from your Control Panel. As to Artspan webmail, as I write this we are still having isolated problems with Squirrel mail and we are addressing those problems.

Through the end of June we will again give a free month to anyone referred by you. That is, as an Artspan member, through June, you will continue to receive a free month for every new member you refer to Artspan. In turn the new member will also receive a free month.

You have two ways to shrink images for your home page and other pages in the Website Pages section.

Here is the simplest method but this method can slow the page’s loading time as the page will load up as though the image were still the larger size. However, if you need to only shrink the image by a little bit, then use this method:
1. Insert an image (see last months newsletter for detailed instructions – http://www.artspan.com/newsletter/artspan_news_February09.htm#item5)
2. Click on the image in the textbox.
3. You should see small white boxes on the perimeter of the image. Click on any of the boxes in one of the corners of the image. 4. Drag the corner in to shrink the image.
5. Click Save

Here is the best way to shrink images when you need to shrink the size significantly:
1. Click the tree icon (second row to the right)
2. Click the folder icon
3. Click the dropdown menu next to the title of the image you wish to resize
4. Select Edit from that menu
5. Select Resize from the top toolbar of the edit image popup
6. Type the size (in pixels) that you wish the image to be (usually around 400-500 on the large dimension is a good starting point if you only intend to have a single image on the homepage.
7. Click Apply
8. Select Save from the top toolbar
9. Change the name of the image file to differentiate it from the original (for example, if the original is sunset.jpg, change this to sunset_400.jpg)
10. Click Save. The resized image will now appear on your main Artspan
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Copyright 2009. Artspan LLC. All rights reserved.

All /images are the property of their respective owners. The opinions expressed in this newsletter do not necessarily reflect those of artspan.com members.

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