Archive for the ‘Artist Websites’ Category

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Buyers Test-Drive Artwork in Virtual Rooms

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

As much as artists would like to think that buyers chose their work based on the art alone, in most cases the buyer is also influenced by the setting in which the art will be hung.   I have heard stories of buyers using colour swatches from their living room couch and paint chips of their wall colour to help them decide what piece of art would be suitable for their room.  Buyers also want to know if the size of the artwork will “fit” properly in the space they have available.  Context matters.

Often artists will let a buyer test drive a painting by letting them hang it in their home for a period of time before making a buying decision.  However when you are selling online, this option is less practical.   Another option that is being used on art websites is to show the prospective buyer on their computer screen what the art would look like hanging in a variety of settings, be it a living room, bedroom or office.  The buyer would chose the artwork they are interested in and a sample room to “hang” it in.  The user is then able to drag the artwork to the desired position on the wall.  It’s probably better if you see for yourself.   Click  here to hang this Klimt print (above) in one of the rooms available at OverstockArt.com.

Generally the rooms you can chose from are not exactly what you have in your own home.  The furniture is different.  The wall colour is different, the lighting is different.  So to overcome this, some sites like OverstockArt.com allow a visitor to upload a picture of their own room!  Then the buyer has a much better appreciation for how the artwork would look in its desired location.  This is an impressive application.   It gives the purchaser more confidence that they are making the right decision to purchase the piece.

You will find this technique of allowing buyers to see the art in a virtual setting used on E-bay,  reproduction houses, and individual artist sites.  This is one way artists can distinguish themselves online and engage the customer in a different way.  Just imagine having your art in these pictures.

Left:  A Claude Monet hung virtually in my office.

Posted in Artist Websites, Marketing Communications, Your Art Offerings | 4 Comments »

Throw A Blog in With That

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

When you think of an artist website you generally think about a site that showcases an artist’s work, a portfolio site if you will.  With the exponential growth of blogging, many artists are now supplementing their portfolio site with a blog.  Blogging allows artists to share their art and life with the world in a very different way, one that lets people get to know the artist behind the art.  Portfolio sites and blogs are both websites, they just have a different purpose and function.  Portfolio sites tend to be like an online brochure, whereas blogs are more like a diary that allows artists to communicate with their audience. 

If you already have a website you may be thinking about adding a blog.   Artists who wanted to start blogging are faced with a question:  Where do I set up my blog?  There are 3 options:  

  1. Set up a separate blog elsewhere
  2. Integrate a blog into your current website
  3. Build a new website based on a blogging platform

Let’s look at these options.

1. Set up a separate blog elsewhere. 

This is the easiest solution.   There are lots of places you can go to set up a blog.  You can even blog for free if you are willing to live with the design and usage limitations.  The main drawback with this approach is that the blog is not integrated with your portfolio website in form or function.    It has an entirely different look and feel and the format and navigation are completely different.  It leaves visitors with the feeling they are “somewhere else” when they are reading your blog.  Also there is no guarantee that someone who lands on your blog will take a link to your website.

Hosted services are available from TypePad,  Blogger, and LiveJournal.  Duane Keiser is an example:  Website,  Blog

2. Integrate a blog into your current website.

Adding a blogging function to your portfolio website addresses the problem described above.  Visitors could see a consistent design in terms of headers, navigation, colours, etc.  In this case, your blog would appear as a menu item on your website, and when you click on it, the blog looks like it belongs on this website.  Your portfolio header and navigation bar carry through to the blog page. While it  is technically possible to integrate a blog into an existing portfolio site,  these types of projects can be a challenge because of the coding, style and format of the existing website.  This means that most artists would be dependent on someone else to make those changes and the cost of making them could be prohibitive.

An example of an integrated blog is Marilyn Fenns’ website.

3. Build a new website based on a blogging platform.

A blogging platform is a software solution that allows people to easily create and maintain a blog.  Blogging software is getting better all the time.  You can now create a blog that looks like a portfolio site, yet provides the flexibility to also blog.    It all hangs together as one cohesive site.  On some artists’ websites you would be hard-pressed to tell that it was created using blogging software.  Platforms you could consider for a self-hosted blog include Movable Type,  WordPress, and Textpattern.

Becky Joy’s website and blog is build on WordPress.   Says Becky, “I had a website with another company. I quit that and went with WordPress. It gives me more options in my website and blog. I think it is better to have the blog integrated with the website.  Ultimately, I want people at the website.”

 

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WordPress Site Increases Traffic Fivefold

Monday, January 10th, 2011
Amy Shackleton 

Amy Shackleton completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours degree at York University in 2008. In only two years, she’s exhibited paintings in New York, London, Toronto, Montreal and Calgary.  At 24, she has received multiple People’s Choice Awards, was a finalist in the 2010 Signature Art Awards at Degree Art Gallery in London and nominated for the 2010 Palm Art Award in Germany.             

Amy’s original website was created for her 2 years ago by a friend through an art-for-programming barter.  Her friend created a site using (Adobe) Flash,  a programming system that adds animation, video and interactivity to web pages.    Flash sites have been criticized because it is difficult for search engines to index their content.  As a result you could have a pretty site that was hard to find.  To make them more visible also requires programming.  Also her Flash site couldn’t be viewed on iPods, iPhones and iPads. Because of the programming required, Amy was unable to update the site herself, so 6 months ago she decided to replace her existing website with a site based on WordPress, the software widely used for blogging.  Her site is Aim Artistry.    She now makes 1 or 2 updates to her website every week, because the WordPress user interface is easy to use.  Search engines are attracted to websites that change content often and new blog posts provide new content for search engines to index.   
  
Boiling Point,  45″ x 60″ Acrylic and Enamel on Canvas
  
Did the switch from her Flash site to WordPress make a difference in her traffic?  Have a look at her 2010 statistics below.  She has averaged 40 hits/day since she installed WordPress. Prior to that she was averaging 8 hits/day.  Amy says, “I’m pretty sure the growth was because I converted to WordPress. I launched my new site in July, which is the exact time my hits-per-day jumped! My visits HAVE increased significantly since the summer. Last month I had 1291 visitors (44 per day) and it’s been like this since I converted it to the WordPress theme this summer. Looks like it’s working!!!  It’s definitely worth paying a freelance web designer $500 – $1000 to set-up a customizable website!”  
 
 
 
 

2010 Visitor Statistics

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Take Control of Your Website

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010

This week an artist asked me for some advice about her website.  I checked it out.  It looked pretty good, frankly.  The design was attractive, the navigation well-structured, the galleries appealing.  So what was the concern?   The website had not been updated in 10 years!   Why?  Because the original website developer had long-since moved to a far-away land leaving the artist with no capability to update the site.  As a result, the site has remained static for all these years and the artwork on the site is completely different from what the artist’s work looks like today.

This is not an unusual case.  I have heard many stories from artists whose website was created for them some time ago by one of their children, a friend, or a professional developer.  But now they are stuck with a site they are no longer pleased with, and the person who developed the site has moved on to other things, has moved away, or is for some other reason, unavailable to provide the needed support. Worse, many of these sites were created using raw HTML programming, a skill few artists have.  

In my view it is very important that artists are able to update their websites themselves.  When you are not dependent on others to make changes to your website, you are much more likely to keep your site current.  You can put up an image of your latest work in less time than it takes to compose an e-mail to your developer.  You can promote a new show on your website without paying a dime for someone else to put that information up for you.    It’s faster and cheaper to maintain your website yourself.

So should you put your brushes down and enroll in  some serious computer  programming classes?  Oh no!  Not unless you are so inclined.  Today it is not necessary to develop that level of  technical expertise to be able to manage your own website.  There are some excellent solutions for artists who want to manage their site but do not want to become programmers (more about this in the new year).  If you can edit a text document, transfer pictures from your camera to your computer and crop them,  you are well on your way to being able to manage your own site.  Moreover, you can create and manage a site that you would be very proud of, one that compares well with expensive customized websites.

If your site is locked in limbo because you can’t edit it, or your budget is limiting changes you can make to your website, you should seriously consider taking advantage of the new self-management options available to artists.

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The Fuzzy World of Search Engines

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

If people want to find your art website, and they key your name into a search engine, chances are good they will find you.  But wouldn’t it be great if people discovered you by keying in the type of art they are looking for?  Let’s face it,  most people in the world do not know your name!   So how can an artist increase the changes of being found when the searcher does not know the artist’s name?   The answer lies in understanding how search engines index content, and that is fuzzy territory since those methods are always changing.

Recently Deb Kirk asked if putting underscores between the words in Alt tags would increase search engine visibility.   I performed the following test:

I googled “algonquin park painting”,  “algonquin_park_painting”, and “algonquinparkpainting”,  clearing my history before each search.  All searches returned 59,400 search results, but when I googled “algonquin-park-painting” and got 64,700 results!   This would suggest that underscores between the words produce no advantage, but dashes might. Artist Joseph Pearce  managed to be rated #1 on the 59,400 results.  Looking at the HTML code for his homepage (Click View-  Source,  in Internet Explorer)  reveals more.  Nowhere in the code do you find an Alt tag with the words “algonquin park painting”, “algonquin_park_painting”, or “algonquinparkpainting”!      You will find the individual words scattered throughout the page however, which means that Google is clever enough to map the overall page content to my search words.  
 

    

Morning on Opeongo Lake by Joseph Pearce  24″ x 48″

I asked Dave Achtemichuk, a software developer who has created an online service for art organizations and artists called ArtistQuarter to explain these results.

“In the specific example you mentioned, different punctuation gets different results, I guess because it processes the search in slightly different ways. With dashes, it might first try to find hyphenated words that match your query, and when it doesn’t find any, it looks deeper and separates the query into the individual words. When you type the words all together as one string, it probably does the same thing– first tries to search for the single word, then intelligently breaking it up into its component words and re-runs the search to get the proper results (also note that capitalization has no effect on the searches). This is also how Google can give the proper desired results even if you spell a word wrong in your query.   I believe that what is indexed is not affected by the punctuation– just how you enter your search term determines what subset of the indexed data is used. The indexing seems to use the same fuzzy approach to infer meaning and component words regardless of what punctuation is entered.  It may have been that at one point years ago, adding dashes to ALT text had some effect on searchability.  However, the searching algorithms have gotten more and more ‘fuzzy’ and punctuation is often ignored.”

“Google releases a new indexing mechanism every few months on average, after which old SEO methods can become irrelevant. Given Google publishes very scant information on how their indexing methods work, it’s mostly trial-and-error.  There’s lots of books and tutorials about SEO out there, but most are outdated. Even those that aren’t too outdated involve a lot of guesswork.  Modern-day SEO  is largely founded on hunches rather than hard data.”

“Google Image Search is a good example of how intelligent the searching has become– you can search by topic and even if that text only appears NEAR the image as text, the image is still shown as a result. Google is smart enough to infer captions and descriptive text related to an image in the content.”

“There are a few core concepts to SEO when trying to optimize for a certain search term or search terms:

1.  Provide relevant (text) content
2. Update that content whenever possible to improve ranking. Updating the front page with the latest news of your artist site remains a good thing to do to get strong rankings.
3. Have other people link to your content from their own content (but only when the link is coming from a page with related content).

The basic point being that as along as your pages have words that describe what they’re about, they should be indexed by the search engines and come up ordered by their relevance to the specific search term.  Search engines are now very good at determining the true relevance of pages to the search terms, even at a very abstract level– very little has to be spelled out for their benefit.”

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Pet Artist Fetches Online Commissions With SEO

Monday, September 27th, 2010

Toronto artist Paul Boddum is a nationally recognized animal artist.  Not your typical pet portrait.  They’re hip, contemporary, and commissions normally cost between $1,000 and $3,000.  He has been painting pets exclusively for 20 years and accepting commissions for 8 years. 

There was a time when the only way he got commissions was by word of mouth or doing costly art/craft and dog trade shows.  Six years ago he created his website.  In 2009 45% of his business results from search engines and it has led to sales in Bermuda,  New York,  Chicago,  British Columbia,  and New Brunswick.  These sales are from people who saw his work first online.  In addition he recently was hand picked by a gallery curator who found him through Google.  This led to a new exhibition at the Museum of Arts an Sciences, Daytona Beach, Florida. 

These people found Paul online not because they knew his name, but because they were looking for the kind of art he provides.  This is a critical distinction when you are looking to go global.  How do you connect with strangers who have never heard of you before?  If someone knows your name, there is a good chance they will find your website with a search engine.  But if they are looking for “pet portraits”, for example,  how do you increase the chances that they will find you through a search engine?  A lot has to do with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). 

 A year ago Paul put his mind to learning the nuts and bolts of SEO with the help of a friend.   It’s  a science in itself with experts in the field that do nothing else.  Paul’s site was created using WIX, a template-driven site.  Wix sites are created with Flash, which is not search engine friendly.  However WIX does provide instructions for users to improve visibility to search engines.  It is possible to describe your site to search engines through “meta data”, text that is hidden from the view of visitors.  Choosing the right meta tags took Paul months of research to assemble.   Not only does the meta data allow search engines to better index Paul’s site, it allows his artwork to be seen globally by pet art lovers.    

Search engines are blind to the images of your artwork.  They can’t distinguish a Picasso from a stick drawing.  Search engines love descriptions, however.  In addition to any description you add to an image, you can add “Alt(ernate)  Attributes”, which are hidden from view, but read by the search engines.   The alt attributes  could help search engines identify the above jpeg as a “triptych of a dog catching a ball”.  This description would allow the image to be found and included in a list of image search results. 

Paul’s SEO work paid off.  He watched his site rise in the list of search results.  Before the website SEO work,  his site was listed on page 12 or higher of the search results.  He can currently be found on page 3 of  “dog portrait” search results and page 4 of “pet portrait” search results.   He measures success by the number of people contacting him who are researching custom portraits and are ready to purchase. 

“The website changed everything for me”, says Paul, “and optimizing it with SEO made a big difference.”  Now that’s dogged determination! 

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“The Internet Saved My A**!” -Sheila Norgate

Sunday, September 19th, 2010
 

It doesn’t take long to appreciate artist Sheila Norgate’ s sense of humour.  The photo to the right is from her home page.  On her website she offers a line of cards called Freudian Slips, “blank cards full of meaning- $5 each, or $20 for the full-blown complex”.  Visitors to her website are assured that “operators are standing by” to receive  their telephone call.  She gives talks:  I Never Met a Blank Canvas I didn’t like,  and Charm, Beauty and Poise: Timeless Tips for Girls Who Have Let Themselves Go. 

But one thing Sheila is serious about is that the “The Internet saved my a**”.

Sheila is a self-taught, self-supporting artist living in Gabriola Island, BC.  She left a banking career to be an artist full-time in 2001.  Gallery representation had always been her primary marketing channel and the galleries rewarded her with steady income.  But more recently the galleries have not generated the revenue she had enjoyed in the past.  Some galleries, she  says, are on “life support and others have closed altogether”.  But Sheila was able to bounce back by using the Internet to market her art.  “Without the Internet, I would need another job.”

Her Internet marketing is paying off.  She is selling about 2 or 3  paintings per week, mostly to people she has not met.  She always has a commission on the go.  Her commission sales have doubled since advertising them on the website a year ago.  Recently she received a commission from a stranger in Ottawa for $4,500.  

Sheila’s Internet marketing is straight-forward.  She has a brilliantly written and designed website which she has written in the first person.  Her website was developed for her by Kim Bruce  but she maintains it herself.  “Any outdated website”, she say, “is worse than no website at all.”  About 50 people have subscribed to news of her small works.  She had the website in place before the recession hit and she reports her online business is spreading “virally”.  Her site is refreshingly unpretentious, and I believe this is what endears her to her collectors. 

     

Dreams of Flying
24″ x 24″
Mixed Media
$2400

 When Sheila first considered marketing on the Internet she was skeptical.   She now laughs at at her concern about having her artwork copied.  It was.  She doesn’t care.  In fact, she is flattered.

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Tar Artist Corrals Old West Historians

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010
 

When artist Neil Klassen first created his website  in May, 2009 there was little traffic.  He had worked hard to get  his website ready for some shows, including his Outlaws show at the Board of Directors in Toronto.  Initially, his site received 5 to 7 hits per day.  By advertising his site on promotional literature and cross-promotion with the Queen Street Art Crawl, his traffic increased to 40-50 hits/day.  As he contemplated what steps he could take to increase traffic even further,  his strategy was driven by the nature of his work.

 
Neil’s media is tar, an oil bi-product, and his work shows “the stern faces of the Old West, drawing comparisons between these rebels and the Big Oil culture we experience globally”.  He began reading blogs that focused on the old west and posting comments which included links back to his website.  In one case the author of a blog called Western Americana: History of the American West wrote a feature article about Neil and his art and for about a month the traffic to Neil’s site soared to 200-300 hits/day.  More significantly he made 2 sales to people who had discovered his site this way. 
 
Neil notes that you can reap more traffic by posting comments on blogs that have a strong readership, although it may not be possible to find out how many readers they have.  This is the case with Western Americana: History of the American West but anyone can see they have a pagerank of 3/10,  meaning it is a site of substance to Google.   Neil’s tracking system allows him to see where in the world his visitors are coming from.  Interestingly, the article drove traffic from Europe and Australia to his site, not just from the US.
 
Neil says, “Prior to the Internet it would be difficult and time-consuming to get this kind of press coverage.  By commenting on other blogs you can make your presence known quickly and easily.  Sometimes nothing will come of it but other times you will strike oil.  We are in a very competitive market and artists should be ambitious about getting onto blogs.”
 
So where should you start?   Well, first learn how to search for blogs that relate to a subject.  You can search for blogs on Google as you would  search for images or maps.  Using the Advanced Blog Search you can look for blogs that have specific words in the blog title.   So for example, if you like to paint scenes of Algonquin Park  you would discover that  Algonquin Outfitters  has a blog just waiting for your blog comments.   Maybe you could refer to your waterlily paintings on the water-garden-blog or your wonderful portrait of a clown on Evolution: Faces, a blog advisory for clowns.  I think you get the picture.
 
If you have had some similar experiences in generating traffic to your website by posting comments on blogs, please share them with our community of artists by posting a comment here. Just click on the title of this posting and scroll down. 
 
 
 

Posted in Artist Websites, Blogging, Increasing Traffic, Success Stories | 2 Comments »

Up Your Search Engine Profile Here Today

Saturday, September 4th, 2010

This summer I met an artist at the Muskoka Arts and Craft Show in Bracebridge, Ontario, who proudly announced that his newly-created website was ranked number one in the Google search results.  Perhaps you have experienced similar results with your website.  I remember feeling like the master of the universe when Google showed ArtGoneGlobal as the number one search result.  

Regrettably your website may not be as significant to Google as you think.   The reason is Google takes into consideration your personal browsing history and previous search requests when it delivers search results to you.  Google creates these personalized search results using Web History, a default feature when you open a Google account.  If you do not have a Google account it still records your search history.  Because you have likely visited your own website on many occasions, Google recognizes that your website is significant to you.  However if someone else who had never been to your site before  performed the exact same Google search, the results would be different.  Your website might not even be on the first page of search results.    To test this out, ask a friend who has never been to your website to Google your site and report on their search results.  Alternately, if every soul you know has visited your website,  you can delete your Web History and Google your site yourself to see the results.  

If you are counting on traffic to your art site from Google searches, it is useful to understand how Google assesses the importance of a website.   It determines what other websites are linking to your site and assigns what is called a PageRank  (after Larry Page, co-founder of Google).  The PageRank (from 0 to 10) is assigned based on the number of links to your website but more importantly, the significance of those websites.  If you have a Google account you can display the PageRank for any website you visit on the Google toolbar.  For example, artist Doris McCarthy currently has a PageRank of 4. 

   

You can find out who links to your site by entering the following into a Google search:   

link:www.domainname.com      

(of course you replace www.domainname.com with your website address)   

So for example by entering   

link:www.dorismccarthy.com/   

…we find Google has so far discovered 11 links to Doris’ website, and that is used in determining her PageRank.  You can test your link popularity with other search engines here. 

To improve your PageRank,  look for opportunities to have others link to your website.  You may want to have reciprocal links with other artists, get listed in art directories, write articles for other websites, and post entries on blogs.    And while we are talking about blogs, I would love to hear from you on this blog!  Please add a comment and be sure to create a link to your website in your posting!  Just click on the title of this article, scroll down and “Leave a Reply”.  Every link to your website adds to your significance with the search engines.    

 

    

 

 

Posted in Artist Websites, Increasing Traffic | 3 Comments »

Artists Use Wedding Registry to Sell Art

Monday, August 16th, 2010

 

Sometimes people buy art to commemorate a special occasion.  Artists Carol Currie and Stuart Leggett are a husband and wife team who have sold their art on the occasion of a husband’s 50th birthday,  a couple’s anniversary, and as a retirement gift.  In the past,  family members had gotten many people together to buy a gift certificate to purchase a piece of art.   Now Carol and Stuart are using their website to set up a gift registry for an upcoming wedding.  The bride is already a collector of their work, and she thought another work would be a wonderful wedding gift.  By promoting the registry on their website they are hoping that other visitors will consider doing the same thing for their special occasion.  The current registry is being promoted by the bride and groom, but Carol and Stuart have plans to market the concept to their client list.

Their website has been up for nearly 5 years and their blog, which is integrated into their website,  started about 7 months ago.  Sometimes having a website pays dividends in unexpected ways.  One collector thought it might be amusing to find an artist with the same last name.  He googled artists named Currie,  found Carol,  loved their art,  and purchased a piece for $4000 sight unseen.  Claustro have sold hundreds of paintings and most are to people who have seen their work in person.  However they have sold about a dozen paintings sight unseen from their website, which dispels the belief that customer must see a painting in person before they buy it.  Carol says they would allow a buyer to return a painting sold sight unseen if they requested it.

Most of their customers are in Toronto and Ontario, but they are now getting more momentum on the Internet and they finding more clients in the USA and the Canadian west coast as a result. 

” The Peak”  40″ x 60″  Sculpted Painting

Carol and Stuart  work in a self-developed medium they call ‘sculpted paintings’.   Stuart first sculpts a bas relief interpretation of landscapes onto a wood panel and then Carol paints the scene on the panel in acrylics.  Their process is unique and they highlight the process as a way to differentiate themselves on their website with words and images.  The collaborate artists call themselves Claustro,  an anagram containing the letters in their names Carol and Stu (It’s better than Orca Lust, they claim).  They own Claustro Gallery in Midland, Ontario where they show their work.

Posted in Artist Websites, Marketing Communications, Success Stories, Your Art Offerings | 1 Comment »

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