Frank Martin-Buck
Founder
FindingArtOnline.com

The fact of the matter is, very few gallery’s have the time or the resources to create their own website and host it on one of their servers. They would then have to commit to maintaining the website and server, which could mean waking up at 2am to figure out why the website is not live or updating it.

Going with an established company whose sole business is to provide a 99% website uptime rate and who can provide the services and tools that enable a company to be successful is immensely helpful and overall more cost productive.

I think a good middle ground is to go with a useful paid service and company but still have the ability to import your data in case you move to another service. If I may include a cheap plug for my site, purely for the purposes of this article of course, is to take a service such as http://www.masterpiecesolutions.com. It gives the ability to update a website via a contact and inventory management system as well as CMS but also allows the ability to import and mange ones own data.

As the economy starts to turn around, Gallery’s will once again shop for services to enable them to be successful.

Thanks again for taking the time to comment and for this discussion. Indeed a lot of it is technical and I hope we don’t confuse people out there… so I encourage anyone who is confused to contact either one of us with questions for more clarification.
Cheers
Moshe

SEO/CONTROLLING DOMAIN
Your points about link structure are important, but it’s pretty easy for a technically savvy person (with wordpress et all if the artist is doing it, or the support team of the host if with a service like faso or foliotwist) to set up 301 redirects to match the old link structure. (in fact this is nothing more than a simple entry in the control panel with faso). I should note, that some artists did have domains provided by Boundless, and those artists are in better shape, since they can still control that domain. Yes, moving a wordpress blog to a new host might be easier (for a tech savvy person) than other solutions. On the other hand, if you move to a service like Dan, Daniel or I provide (backed by good support), our companies are happy to do it for you – so one could argue that *our* solutions are “easier” in that you just sign up and our teams will get the work done for you….while you paint.

COMPARING APPLES AND ORANGES
While us techies get worked up about this kind of stuff we do have to remember that marketing art is much more than “having a website.” The type of solution that a company that helps artists is a different solution than wordpress or a static site – so it’s a bit of an apples/oranges comparison. A lot of things offered by a solution designed for an artist who needs a commerce/portfolio/marketing site may require a lot of tweaking to achieve on an open source solution. Again – that’s not necessarily a problem but may be pretty technical for a lot of users….and a lot of our support discussions start with “what do you mean when you say ‘double-click’”….

EMAIL NEWSLETTER MORE IMPORTANT
The bigger solution, even more important than a website, and frankly even more important that owning your domain, is to have a current email list (and other contact info) of all your buyers and supporters. Then it’s easy to let everyone know where you want people to go to see your art. Any boundless artists who had a complete email list (and a way to send the email such as the included ESP backed service with some art website services) are in pretty good shape. Even if they simply sent a message to fans saying “I used to show my art at boundlessgallery.com/myname and now I’m over at myname.etsy.com”

FREE vs. PAID
My point was not that a paid service would not shut down while free ones would shut down. My point was about the nature of the customer relationships. Many paid and free services have a three-party system where the real customers subsidize the users. This is how google works. Searching is free to the users – it is paid for by adwords advertisers. We, as users, have no control over what google does with search. In the end, they are working for adwords customers. Boundless (and other online galleries) are selling art to collectors (I do realize that late in their history they introduced some paid artist plans, but their model was essentially to sell art.) In the end, the users (the artists) are not really the customers – their ability to continue to use the service depends on if the set of real customers wants to continue paying for the service. Whereas foliotwist, faso and beautifulartistwebsites all charge the artists who are direct customers. We are not providing something for “free” while making money from a different set of people. So, as long as the artists are happy with our services, we have every incentive to keep improving, looking out for their best interests, and keep our doors open.

DIFFERENT SOLUTIONS
In the end, there is no “one solution fits all” – WordPress with open source advantages (& headaches), is best for some, Foliotwist (paid and closed source) is great for others, BeautifulArtistWebsites (custom high-end static html…I think) works for a lot of people, free closed source like blogger works for some, we certainly hope that FASO (paid, closed source, with “extras” and membership discounts just for artists) works for some. A lot of artists use a combination of services. Maybe that’s another way to protect yourself. Have a site with a paid service, a blog on blogger, and a current email list – if one site goes down you can direct people to the other by sending an email newsletter. I’m sure I’m as guilty as everyone of writing posts that say “you should do this” or “artists should do that” – partly that’s because writing that way is more interesting than being wishy washy and saying “I *think* artists should to this” or “*Maybe* they should do that”. I mean, if I write it, it should be obvious that it’s what I *think*…. but, in the end, there really are a lot of ways to achieve one’s business goals and I think all of us in this discussion provide differing but good solutions for artists.

Wow, this is practically a blog post of it’s own…..but I’m too lazy to go back and edit it right now.

Thanks again Moshe, for the important discussion.

I think there is place for all type of solutions, and I am a big supporter for generic systems – build it once, use many many times. On the other hand, I am also a big believer in business and paying for the value you get. If you can’t efford something, don’t cry for “breaks”, just do the best with what you can efford. The same way that artists work hard on their artwork and want to get paid for it, software crafsmen (and women of course) work hard and should be paid accordingly… But I am getting off the topic now

Thanks again
Moshe

I’m with you pretty much actually – the points that Dan and Clint raised about the importance of owning and controlling your domain name while very true and extremely important are only a piece of the puzzle. If you have your own “independent” open-technology website – whether it’s static html, wordpress-based, or some other solution, you can always recover from a major system or business failure on the part of your webhost. Why – because as long as you have a recent backup of the site files and any databases you can simply move the whole thing to a new webhost.

If you have a “closed” website solution, even though you own the domain, its fairly unlikely that you will simply be able to move to a new host or solution provider.

Dan’s point about the importance of controlling your domain for search engine recognition is very important – but just as important is that the search engines will have crawled and indexed your site with it’s current structure and naming conventions. If you have a website based on open technology you can simply move the whole thing to a new host and keep all your SEO structure intact. But if you are forced to move from a closed-technology solution (such as an online gallery), it won’t be at all easy to replicate the exact structure and naming of your site in another solution – even if its technically possible it will still be a lot of effort.

It is precisely for these sorts of reasons – as well as the importance of having complete control over your site for SEO purposes, that we have always recommended that every artist should have an independent open-source website as their primary online presence. By all means be in lots of online galleries too – but the core should be something that you have complete control over.

Of course I have a vested interest in recommending this direction because independent artist websites are the basis of our business. But we built our business this way because that’s what we believe in!

Thanks for bringing up the discussion – as you know we always enjoy a healthy discussion

Cheers to you and to Clint and Dan,

Daniel.

Like I mentioned earlier in my reply to Clint, I agree, and its important you added this clarification for everyone to understand. Still, the issue of setting up a new site is not just the domain but everything else related to it – content, wireframe, pages, permalinks, etc. True that Google will continue sending more traffic, but all those broken links won’t do much help…

Thanks again for commenting and the discussion
Moshe

The reason why having a transferable domain is important is because Google and other search engines place value on domains. The longer an individual domain is active, and the more inbound links it has, the more “important” it is.

As a domain becomes more important, Google and other search engines will consistently send more visitors its way.

So if you place your entire portfolio of artwork on a domain that you don’t own, and it shuts down, you will immediately lose all that domain “value” that you’ve helped to build up over the years.

More importantly, this means you will also lose your most consistent source of traffic, from search engines.

-Dan
EmptyEasel | Foliotwist

Couple of observations, that I think are important to note:

- Owning a domain name is not the same as owning the software that supports your website. Yes, it is important to own your own domain, but without the software that support the actual site hosted in this domain, it worth (almost) nothing. Therefore, WordPress as a free open source package has its advantage – it is the actual software that is installed on my selected host provider. As long as I have a backup of the entire software (including the content uploaded regularly, and that’s why it’s important to have regular backups), converting the same exact website from one host to another can be a matter of minutes. On the other hand, if I only own the domain, but not the software, than it is not that easy to transfer my site over. True, everyone who has my website URL will still be able to get to me after I am done setting it up with a new provider, but probably all the links will be broken because it will be a new website… And the time it will take to setup will be much longer.

- Free vs. Paid service is a good differentiator, but as we see from the Boundless Gallery example, it is not a guarantee for anything… Good business practices, transparency, reviews from peers, excellent customer support – all of these worth so much in evaluating the right solution. And being involved a bit with FASO recently, I can recommend all of the above!

- Coming from the software world, I always have discussions with people who are in the Open Source world, vs those who are in the close source world, or mainly Microsoft (who you either love or love-to-hate). So looking into our case at hand, I couldn’t help commenting about this wearing my Software Professional hat… Here is an interesting blog post I read recently by an old friend of mine, Yaniv Golan, related to Twitter and their closed microblogging platform: http://yaniv.golan.name/blog/2010/02/25/twitter-hear-buzz/ as well as an interesting blog “The Internet adhors a funnel” by Dave Winer http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/10/17/theInternetAbhorsAFunnel.html. I think such discussions can be applied to our niche of art sites and marketing online.

- Great to know about the Import and Export options, I will definitely have a look into that.

Thanks again for the great discussion
Moshe

Blogger (and wordpress.com) do not charge you to set up a site with them. Therefore YOU ARE NOT THE CUSTOMER. (Blogger could not have killed FTP so easily if the bloggers were paying customers). Boundless Gallery made their money (primarily) on the commission from selling art. The artists, again, WERE NOT THE CUSTOMER (collectors were). FASO and FolioTwist both have a straitforward relationship with artists – Artists pay us as CUSTOMERS and we make enough profit to keep the site up and running, provide support and think about the best interests of the people who pay us. (Google, OTOH thinks about the best interests of advertisers…bloggers simply being an army to produce pages on which to show those ads).

You didn’t mention Typepad, but Typepad is doing very well and is very stable, because the bloggers pay Typepad directly. It’s very healthy actually – the customers form a community to support the host and the host focuses all it’s efforts to support the customer. It’s a symbiosis.

The other difference is that services like FASO and Foliotwist provide the artist with their own domain name. So, if a situation ever arose requiring such a service to shut down…..no problem, the artist is free set up a new site on the same domain. A domain is portable like a phone number.

Open source products like WordPress don’t mitigate the risk of a provider shutting down, because you still have to pay SOMEONE for hosting your open source code. And there is always a small chance that that any hosting company could have to shut down. But if you, the artist, own your own domain, you can move your site to another hosting company. Maybe not instantly, but it can be done fairly easily.

I agree with you about import and export options. We have recently added some import/export options and are working to add even more as we move forward. In fact, one of our long term projects is even releasing a public-facing API, but that’s a story for another time…..

Thanks again for making this forum for discussion available.

Clint Watson
Software Craftsman and Art Fanatic
FineArtStudioOnline