ArtSites Updates

I just want to let everyone know that ArtSites.us has improved it's support for a wider range of web browsers when administering your website. In particular, we now support the latest version (3.0) of the Safari web browser on Macs! Safari 3.0 comes with OSX 10.5 and I think that it is possible to install it on OSX 10.4.9 as well.

ArtSites.us websites should display well in all modern web browsers and even a lot of not so modern web browsers. The ArtSites.us administration system is more demanding and it has some specific web browser and version requriements. They are as follows:

• Internet Explorer 5.5 and newer (Windows)
• Firefox 1.5 or newer (Windows, OSX, Linux, etc)
• Opera 9.5 (still in beta tests) (Windows, OSX, Linux)
• Netscape 7.1 (Windows, OSX, Linux)
• Camino 1.0 or newer (OSX)

If you find any issues with the way that the administration system is working please let me know. If you are a Mac user and have Safari 3.0 on you computer, I would be very interested to hear about your experience of using Safari to administer your ArtSites.us website.

Happy New Year to Everyone!

I was reminded again yesterday by one of our ArtSites customers that there are some pretty creative scammers out there on the internet. I thought I would gather together my thoughts about what red flags to look for when dealing with people that reach you via your website.

Overseas Customers

Scammers like to keep an ocean between themselves and their victims. This reduces the number of angry victims that arrive on their doorsteps. It also makes the payment process more complex and opens up opportunities for the scam. London seems to be the purported home of a lot of these scammers. I think that the scams originate elsewhere but because London has a lot of immigration from all over the world, the scammer uses a London based relative or friend to facilitate the scam. London looks better than, say Abuja, Nigeria.

Purchase of Multiple Items

It seems to me that someone who wants to purchase multiple works, all at once, without having seen a single item in person is suspicious. Purchasing art online without ever having seen the work in person is a risk for the purchaser. Do the colors in the photo really reflect the work? It's hard to gauge size from a photo even if you have the dimensions. If you found that you liked an artist's works that you see on their website, you would likely only purchase a single work as a test and then purchase more if you still liked it when you got the first into your hands. Maybe there are people that will spend several thousand dollars to buy 3 works based on a 2" by 3" web image but I think that these are rare people!

Complex Payment Schemes

If the buyer suggests a payment mechanism other than using PayPal.com or well known credit cards, that should be the biggest red flag of them all. PayPal.com and credit cards are not scam-proof but both provide an arbitration mechanism that tries to protect both the sell and buyer (although they have a vested interest in the buyer being happy so that they will use that payment method again).

A popular scam is based on the mistaken notion that a "cashiers cheque" is guaranteed cash. While I don't profess to be an expert on the banking system, I do know that there are forms of these cheques that can bounce, and if drawn on an oversees bank, may take as along as 30 days to bounce. That's a 30 day window in which the scammer has you thinking that they've paid for your works. Usually the cashiers cheque is only part of the scam. That would only get them your artwork and would not pay their rent. The scam usually involves a triangular payment scheme that beings something like this:

"My brother owes me $5000 so I would like him to send you a cashiers cheque for $5000, you deposit it and send me the balance over the $3000 artwork purchase price via Western Union."

So you get the cheque, deposit it, send $2000 via Western Union and then 30 days later the $5000 cheque bounces. Once the money is picked up at Western Union, it's gone with no recourse to get it back. So you are out your artwork, shipping costs and $2000 in cash.

I'm sure that there are lots of other imaginative payment scams out there too.

Scammers Build Confidence Before Attacking

Internet scammers try to gain your confidence by exchanging several email messages with you. These message contain a lot of unverifiable personal information and try to paint themselves as a sympathetic character. In a legitimate transaction, people are primarily going to want to discuss the product and build up their own confidence that the product is right for them, not try to build up your confidence in the buyer. When the buyer doesn't seem all that concerned about the product that you are selling them, you've got to figure that their mind is on some other part of the transaction.

Be Wary of New Customers

It's unfortunate, but like everything in life, you need to be careful with people you don't have experience with. It's not that you shouldn't interact with them but you do have too keep an eye out for various red flags that they might be trying to take advance of you. What the internet brings is a much wider range of people, ideas and ways to interact. Unfortunately these interactions can be both positive and negative so we all need to educate ourselves as to the best way to handle what we run into.

If you have a suspicion about a transaction that a buyer is suggesting, we would be quite happy to give you our opinions on it. Many artist have already ask for out thoughts on the correspondence that they've and I think that we were helpful. We are not experts in exposing scams but we've been on the Internet for 15 years and online for 25 years so we've seen our fair share of scams.

I hope that you all have a great 2008!

Take care,

Geoff

Geoff@ArtSites.us
http://ArtSites.us/

Many of our early ArtSites customers had expressed interest in us providing a directory of artist. We created a simple directory but that just didn't feel like it was enough. It wasn't taking advantage of the new, cutting edge ideas of community and two way conversations that have been evolving on the internet over the last couple of years. The so called "Web 2.0". We wanted something that would really engage the artist and their followers and create excitement around their artwork.

To this end, we have create Lustrio.com a place where artist can post, gather feedback and discuss there work with their peers and the general arts community. Members of the community can award Lustrios to those work that they feel warrant special praise.

We are still in the early development stages of Lustrio.com but we welcome all interested in helping shape the growth of this community.

For those who already have ArtSites accounts, we have provided an easy mechanism for you to import some or all of your ArtSites artwork into Lustrio.com. Once you have registered for a Lustrio account (http://Lustrio.com/artists/new), go to your Profile and click on the Import link. You will be asked for you ArtSites login information and then provided a list of artwork that you can choose to import from.

So go to http://Lustrio.com/ and have fun! Please let me know if you have any problems or if you have any ideas for improving Lustrio.com.

We wanted to improve the process of managing the images in and their gallery locations for some time. Some people who had quite a number of images were finding that the process was cumbersome and was prone to issues that might cause a number of images to drop out of the galleries.

We have now made it easier to control the which images are show each gallery from the gallery interface and have remove the long list of check boxes from the images list. The images list is now more compact so it's easy to with less scrolling around the page.

When in the gallery interface you can ask for a list of images not yet in the gallery and then add new ones from that list with a single click. It's also much easier to reorder images within a gallery

We are in the testing phase of developing a new website that is complementary to ArtSites.us and should be of interest to most of our customers. We are looking for a few people to help us test this new website before we release it to the world.

Here are some of the characteristics that we are looking for in a tester:

• be artists with images of their work that they will be ok with uploading to a public website,
  
• have the time to try out the new website and provide feedback about the experience,
• are comfortable and experienced with using web-based tools,
• can intuitively figure out things without a lot of documentation, even if the design is not complete.

If you want to give us a hand working the bugs out of our new website, we would very much appreciate your help. Just contact us and let me know that you'd be interested. We will bring on testers at intervals so if you don't hear from us right away, don't worry.

We will make an announcement here when the we open up this new website to the world.

Hopefully you will find the website useful and can have a hand in shaping it's future.

We have added some additional Anti-Spam technology to the guestbook submission process. We won't say exactly how we are doing it but we think that this should filter out most of the spam that is getting through the captcha (numeric code in a distorted image) filter. If this is successful, we will add this to the contact form as well.

Let us know if you are getting any spam via your guestbook page.

We have been busy making some changes to the software that run ArtSites and have finally made these changes available on the website. A lot of these changes have been based on requests made by customers over the last month or so. Here is an overview of the changes:

• Face lift: The whole administration system has had a face lift. It's hasn't been changed radically but it has been made more consistent. It has a lot better description of what each field does along with legends describing icons, etc. In general, it should be more obvious how things work.
• Advanced Menu: We've added an Advanced menu option where we've added some new features. The idea of the Advanced menu is to provide an easy way for us to add new features without disrupting the rest of the administration system. In time we will likely move these new features from the Advanced menu into other menus as the mature. Most people won't need to use the features in this menu.
• Title Image: You can now upload an image to be used as the title in the header of your website. So if you are handy with a graphics program you can create a fancy title image and use that on your website.
• Adjustable Image Size: Feature image size can be changed on the Vertical and Tiled layouts. The Matted layouts don't allow the image size to be changed due to constraints associated with those layouts. It's also possible to change the size of or remove the contrasting borders that the Titled layout used.
• Typeface (font): The fundamental typeface (also know as the font) for the website can be set along with the basic font size.
• Copyright: The text of the copyright notice can be set.
• Meta Tags: The Description and Keywords meta tags can be set. Quite a number of people have asked for this. It's of very limited use but if you want to use these on your website you can do it now.

None of these new features should affect the look or operation of your website as it is now so you can ignore this new features until you feel a need to make updates to your website.

If you see any problem with the new features or have any ideas for improvement, please let us know!

I hope that everyone is having a great summer!

We have had some requests recently for the ability to change the name of some of the navigational menu links. We have also been asked to turn off some of the pages. Not everyone wants a News section for example.

So to accommodate these needs we have added a "Page Control" section to many of our administration web pages. This section allows for that page's navigational menu to be changed or for that whole page to be disabled.

These changes will not have any effect on your website as it is now but if you feel the need further customize your website you can now take advantage of these new features.

Enjoy the rest of your summer!

Geoff & Rochelle

Darren Perkins (darrenperkins.ca) wrote a wonderful review of ArtSites in the August Opus Visual Arts Newsletter. It's always great to see what happy customers have to say!

We have added a Slide Show feature to ArtSites.us. This feature behaves exactly like any other image that you can put on your Home, Bio or More pages. When you chose a specific image, the first image on the page is a white square with the text: "This special image will be replaced by a slide show of all works in all of your galleries". If you select this image, it will be replaced on your website with a slide show that changes it's image every 5 seconds. This is an early version of this tool so we are very interested in everyone's feedback on it.

We have also upgraded the page editor. There are a lot of very subtitle changes but no specific features to note.

Please let us know if you find any issues with either of these.