Artspan:

NEWSLETTER
SEPTEMBER 2011// VOLUME 8 // ISSUE 8

September 2011 Newsletter

Written and edited by Eric Sparre

IN THIS ISSUE:

Current and Just Past

In July, we added Chris Marano to our tech team. We are happy to welcome him (along with his skills, intelligence and sense of humor). We are now able to get things done in a more timely fashion, especially projects that are not major but that still need to be addressed.
Here is a very partial list of some of the projects worked on in the last month or so:

- multiple fixes for Internet Explorer 9
- improvements to the blog function.
 -better foreign character set support
 -improved contact form
 -"customization field" enabled for the new member design templates.
 -additional fixes to the new templates
 - "AddThis" (social media links) support for individual images 
- architecture design for the new Artspan server configuration.
- compliance with new credit card industry security standards.
(Incidentally, please note: You should not order a private security scan on your own. This results in a huge increase in traffic to Artspan.com and can slow our system. Again, we take care of the security, it costs a lot of money and anything you do on your own will only complicate our efforts.)
 -fixes to mailing list functions

For those of you with large email newsletter lists, we are working on improvements to the email function, allowing much larger lists.

We are also developing a new queue system for better handling of image processing. This will make changes in how we deal with images easier to implement – batch uploads and a common image library being the most important projects.

Also in the works is a new inline website pages editor, allowing you to better edit the content of each of your website pages and predict exactly what the page will look like. And we have widget system coming to give you the capability of placing code to appear on each page of the site (ie google analytics code).

Other planned projects coming are localized pages for the UK and Germany. Also on our list is artspanPrints.com, which will give us a site-wide sales platform so that visitors can more easily shop for prints without needing to go to the individual websites each time they want to view a print. We suspect that this will not be live until later winter but we want to make sure the system is robust and scalable. When up, we expect it will result in a significant increase in print sales.

Marketing Initiatives

At the beginning of the summer, we brought on Joan Kathleen Smith as our new marketing director. Here . from the June Newsletter is more about her.:
She is assisted by Sid Bailey, our marketing associate, who joined us in August.

Joan and Sid have begun a number of new initiatives including our partnership with Fractured Atlas, which we announced in July and which many of you may not have noticed when we announced it. Artspan members are eligible for Associate Memberships in Fractured Atlas, a major artist organization with some 18,000 members. As part of Fractured Atlas’ Open Arts Network program, Artspan members can now be Associate Members of Fractured Atlas, providing them with access to a wide variety of benefits, including special offers, discounts, online classes, and resources for health and liability insurance. This is free, so why not join Fractured Atlas? They do a lot for their members.

Learn more about this new partnership (and sign up) here!

Another project that Joan has taken the lead on is our outreach to graduating art students who need the kind of Internet tools and marketing info we provide our members.

She is also working on our European marketing program. We want Artspan to be more of a global platform and will be targeting both artists and the broader visual arts audience in selected European countries. We are beginning with the UK this month and will follow with Germany. France, and possible Italy and Spain will probably come next year. We think this kind of cross-border reach will benefit members wherever they may be… in North America, Europe or elsewhere.

We are also working on providing more marketing documents and information for our members. This will be Sid's responsibility. Please see the Twitter article in this newsletter.

Referrals: the NEW (Even Better) Best Referral Program Ever

The Artspan referral program allows members to gain a free month each time a referral signs up for a website. We are now making this program even more attractive. For the next four months, until December 31, each referral will continue to bring a free month to the referring member. BUT, if you refer 3 new members in that period, you will get a total of 6 free months. That is, two free months for each new member when you refer 3 new members.

The new members will continue to receive one free month in addition to the 30 day free trial they get automatically…. so that is two months they get free when they mention your name or give your referral code (which is found in your Control Panel). Also, for anyone who may already have a website, we will be happy to provide individual assistance in moving images from your old site to your new Artspan site and in any other way we can. We know that it may seem a bit of a pain to set up a new site, even if you are paying twice what our cost is, and we want to make the process an easy one.

Selling Art into a Headwind

As the economy, at least in North America and parts of Europe, is seemingly heading into another downturn, I think it could be useful to take another look at a post I contributed to Alyson Stanfield's art business blog, giving 10 ways to continue to sell in a down economy. The post is a long one, so I will ask you to go to the post here .

Establishing a Social Media Presence: First Steps in the Twitter Universe

by Sid Bailey, Artspan Marketing Associate

The next time you have a few free minutes, go to www.webmii.com. Type your name in the boxes and click "Search". You'll be taken to a page with a number: your online visibility score, which indicates how strong your presence is in the cyber community on a scale of one to ten.

The world average is 2.8. If your score is anything below that, you have some real work ahead of you. But your ultimate goal (as with the oh-so-dreaded standardized testing of school days) is to reach the 'above average' tip of the scale -- by waging an active social media marketing campaign, a battle that can be fun once you get to know your way around the system (think Tron).

Need some help outlining the battle plan? We may not be able to offer you Napoleon, but we do have a blog post detailing the first step in your campaign: entering the Twitter battlefield. Continue reading here .

Featured Members




Ann-Mari Broman

Photography


Broman is a native of Sweden but currently a resident of the United States. Her treatment of the human body is striking: unflinching and even, at times, iconic. It demonstrates an internal struggle in the subject and, perhaps, in the photographer. That which is hidden and that which is revealed. Her other work, landscapes and cityscapes, also shows a real originality and vision.

She makes extensive use of large format cameras but has recently begun to experiment more with digital photography.

 


Melissa Imossi
Contemporary Realist Drawings and Paintings

In her drawings, we see a very different view of the human body from that shown us by Broman. Here we have a neo-Classical, detailed but idealized, interpretation. She also exhibits her paintings on the site, grouped in two galleries, Tree Paintings and Landscapes. This is strong work.

Here is the artist on her paintings: “Recently I have been drawn to the natural world.  As I spend more and more time indoors, I miss the outdoors, just enjoying the beauty and magic  in nature.  In a world that revolves around technological advances, we fail to note the simple wonders found in nature."



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