We spent a large part of September revamping some of the backend programming for the Artspan member sites and for the gallery and association sites. This kind of work is not obvious to members, but it is important to the long term stability and usability of the sites. We also reprogrammed and simplified the Artspan application. This coincided with a switch to a new provider of domain names for new members.

Next up is to offer members the option to choose their own website fonts and background colors so as to give members a much bigger say in the look of their sites. We are also doing work on the portals, as Laura outlines below.

Many of you have been inquiring about being featured on the portal pages. We should stress that the portals are still in beta (test) and that not all the programming is in place, so we are not yet able to feature all the members we would like to. We are working on this. We believe the portals will be significant source of traffic for the member websites.

In other portal news, we have launched four new portals. They are Mixed Media, Glass Art, Landscape Painting, and Plein Air Painting. If you have comments, suggestions, or resources and articles you would like to submit, let me know at portals@artspan.com. We are currently developing the next four portal pages: Botanicals, Still Life Painting, Watercolors, and Pastels. Please share your knowledge and expertise with us.

We have been looking at the Artspan internal searches and considering how to improve their accuracy and use to visitors. Caoimhin Barry, Artspan Tech Lead, tells us that he would “love to do a nice big overhaul of the artwork metadata and revamp the search so its giving more accurate results for artwork. This should also mean custom searches would return exactly the artwork we need for the portals. I envision a sort of filter system, where all artwork shows in the beginning and where you then apply whatever filters you want, in whatever order you want, and the search begins to narrow. You can see similar things in operation at many large retail websites now, and its quite intuitive. For example, go to www.lowes.com, select appliances. Then on the left you will see options to narrow your search by price range, maker, style etc. As you select each option you get fewer filters.”

This should work well with our system and be important for both members and Artspan. We look to begin programming for this in about a month.

There is a lot of confusion as to how search engines work. They automatically spider the web and index sites according to different criteria. We have gone into this in past newsletters (see December 2006 and Febuary 2007). Perhaps the most important criteria are the Meta Title and the actual content on the site. Less important are the Meta Description and Keywords, but all the meta fields should all be filled out in the About You section.

To see what you have entered right now, in Internet Explorer or Firefox, click on View, then Source. You will see, towards the top of the page, the meta information for your site: Meta Title, Description and Keywords

Using Artspan.com as an example, we wanted to rank well for certain terms, for example, ‘contemporary art.’ We succeeded. We are the #1 ranked site in Google out of 93.4 million sites (including a lot of museums with the word ‘contemporary’ in their names. A strong clue as to why this is happening is seen when you open up the Artspan homepage. First, notice the title (in the upper left of your browser window): Contemporary art and original art in online galleries at Artspan. Place of honor is given to Contemporary art and search engines recognize this.

They also recognize the terms that are given prominence on your homepage (and to a lesser degree on your interior pages). On the Artspan homepage, you will see numerous mentions of contemporary art. It is important not overdo this. If the search engines see too many mentions of one term, they consider that spamming and you will be penalized.

Search engines will index the homepage first and follow the navigation bar links into the interior pages. Each page is “read” top to bottom and left to right. The further up on the page and the larger the text, the more important the term will be seen as.

We do NOT suggest you try to optimize your site for big terms like contemporary art. Rather choose terms that are very specific to your work. For example, “Marin County Landscapes.” .

A couple of weeks ago I suggested to members that they set up a page on the Saatchi Gallery site as a step towards increasing their web visibility. A number of you have had problems doing this, as Saatchi appears to have some programming issues. Here again is the link for one last try

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/register/. If you continue to have problems, I suggest not pursuing it at this time. It is simply not that important by itself. What is more important is to do this kind of thing on a regular basis. Participate in forums, blogs and social networking sites, and always post your URL with your signature line.