How can you protect your art while showing it on the internet. Let's start with the premise that the reason you have a website is to display your art and attract prospective customers to admire and buy your art. Given this premise, what are some things you can do to achieve this purpose and still protect your art. First let's consider the size of the image. Marketing research indicates that when a viewer lands on your site, you have 4-5 seconds to capture their interest before they move on. So the very first reason for them to leave your page is an image that is 3 MB (megabytes) large because that's the size of the image that came out of your digital camera. Even with more and more people accessing the internet via high speed links, it can take 35-55 seconds to download this image. Your prospective customer has long since departed your website. Another reason to keep your image sizes small relates to how the images are displayed on the viewer's screen or monitor. These devices are only capable of showing images with a resolution of 72 dpi (dots per inch). The images that are produced by your camera have a resolution of 300 dpi which are appropriate for sending to the printer. Therefore if you are loading large images to your site, you are providing a potential thief with all they need to extract your art, blow it up to a reasonable size and print it out. Opps. MyArtClub.Com recommends that you resize your images between 50 KB (kilobytes) and 140 KB before loading them to your site. We have found that in most cases, this size of image provides a clear representation of your art that can be loaded to most computers in a matter of seconds. As computer screens are replaced with larger sizes (19" and 21" screens), the available real estate to display your image gets larger. However, many of your prospective customers may still be using a smaller 15" or 17" screen size. Therefore to show your art to best effect, display your art so that it can be seen without having to scroll up and down the page to view the whole image. Most image editors have a mechanism for resizing your art. We recommend a couple of simple tools that are freely available to download off the web. They will either resize your art images one at a time or can resize an entire directory of images for you. They will also control the physical size of the saved image for .jpg files by controlling the compression or quality factor. The Microsoft editors save your images with a default quality of 80%. However you can vary the quality factor to set the physical size and improve the image at the same time. In our next blog we will discuss other recommendations about displaying your art on your website. read more ...

Whether your art marketing focus is to Show, Connect or Sell art to your fine art website visitors, the central point of an artist website must be your art images. Here are the basics to show your art in the best possible light, from a customer point of view. Show your art well: 1. Use a good photo of your art. Photograph the art directly, never through glass. Use natural indirect daylight (on a cloudy day is best) and use a tripod when shooting 2. Crop your images - do not show any portion of a frame, and if you over-crop, meaning cut off some of the original work, that is far better than leaving a distracting portion of background 3. Don't fret too much about adjusting image colours on the photo. Showing art online is like standing on the TV showroom floor - every screen has different settings- so even if it looks good on your screen, you have no control over how it looks elsewhere. Instead you invite customers to come to see the work in person. 4. Present a selection of images as smaller images, called "thumbnails" on your site and provide a way to expand each thumbnail to a full page view 5. Load internet sized, clear images. Customers will not wait for your image to load, so use an image around 100 kilobits (Kb) plus/minus 20Kb in file size to ensure reasonable loading times, and yet maintain high image clarity. Too small a file size and the image appears pixelated or fuzzy looking. 6. Let your art be the focus of the page. Don't distract with conflicting background colours, patterns or animations such as scrolling text 7. Minimize the clicks -  Make it easy for customers to navigation from one full page image to the next, or to see text on your art page 8. Change up your images regularly, keep your site current. Email your customers to let them know when new content is added. Connect to your customer 9. Tell the story - every artwork has a story - please tell it! Customers want to know more about the piece and about you the artist. 10. Give a story that helps the viewer relate to themselves. Imagine what your visitor would say if they showed this image to their friends and family. 11. Be sure your purpose comes through in your brief narrative to tell customers why you created this work, and how it connects to your central purpose in making art. 12. Use key words to describe your art, or your story that are preferred words for Google to pick up on. Search your topic on Google and see what words are going to best resonate with your audience. 13. Add links to relevant sites, blogs, that add more context to your narrative. 14. Insert a YouTube clip of you in your studio to add emotion and your personality to your art work comments. 15. Let your visitors make comments on your website and respond to them when they do. 16. Offer connections to social media, so customers can easily share the work with their contacts. 17. Let visitors sign up to follow your artistic progress Sell to your customer 18. Show prices online. Customers want this on your website. They want to know if they can afford the work, and they don't like to ask in person. Price your works with potential galleries in mind. 19. Give customers a "call to action". How about a discount if you order by Friday? 20. Provide copies for lower price ranges. Customers have been found to buy just about as many copies as originals. Offering say a limited edition at lower prices enables a wider range of buyers to sample your work, and start to get to know your work better. 21. Connect the art for sale to your ordering system. Your site should provide a clear and simple means for ordering online. 22. Make it clear how to contact you, and that you stand behind your sales. Offer a guarantee to limit the customer's perceived risk to buy. Outline your purchasing and delivery policies. 23. Provide options for gift sales - what if a gift receiver wanted to return it, or exchange it? Our fine art market customer survey report shows that customers purchase art to give to others almost as much as they buy for themselves. Your artist website should assist your art marketing efforts by enabling easy ways to accomplish most of the above. Much of this list can be quickly addressed for each additional artwork. Remember that you don't have to do this entire list - see our article about deciding what your website purpose is as a guide to what you may want to do. Typically start at the top of the list and work your way down. Do you your customers say "wow!" about your art? Do you agree these suggestions would help? Let us know how you wow your customers! read more ...