ArtWanted.com - News

ArtWanted.com Down Time

Sat, 30 May 2009 11:57:48 MST

Valued ArtWanted.com Members

As many of you may have noticed, our website has been unavailable for a couple of days. We deeply apologize to everyone that was affected by this down time. Below you will find the details of what happened if you would like to know...

This all started a few weeks ago when we started seeing random hardware errors on one of our critical servers, which caused the website to go down for a few minutes at a time. Our engineers have been investigating the cause of these problems, when everything came to a halt on Thursday. One of the hard drives failed and the other drives on the server were corrupted, which made the server worthless and the website went offline. This is a very rare situation to happen to a server, but it is possible.

With this server out-of-commission, we needed to get a brand-new server built and setup to replace the old server. The process of building this new server from scratch and restoring our backups took several days, but things are now up and running. We are using a temporary server right now, which may make the site slower than normal, but this is only until we get our more power powerful server working early next week. We will have some scheduled maintenance next week to upgrade our servers, but we will plan to do this in the late evening.

And now the good news&

All of the ArtWanted.com data is safe, secure and backed-up.
No data was lost from this hard drive failure, because of our back-ups.
The new server should also fix the brief random down time you may have seen over the last few weeks.
Computers are unpredictable, but this situation has caused our staff to re-double our efforts on disaster mitigation, data back-ups and look for ways to be prepared for the worst.

We want to remind everyone again that the security of your data and images is very important to us and taken very seriously. We use the highest standards of data encryption on all sensitive data and maintain backups of our data for cases of emergency (like this one). You can feel good knowing your important data is safe and secure with ArtWanted.com.

Again we apologize for the last few days of down time and we welcome you back to the site. Hopefully you were busy painting and drawing and never even noticed that the site was down. Please report any errors or strange problems to our staff immediately. Thank You!

Sincerely,

The Staff of ArtWanted.com

New Artist Store Plus More!

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:58:01 MST

This year ArtWanted.com celebrates our 10 year anniversary! As part of our year-long celebration, we will be updating our website every month with new upgrades for our members. This month we have upgraded several features to help our members sell more artwork and manage their artwork sales. Here are the details...

1) NEW ARTIST STORE

If you have any artwork for sale on our site, you will now notice a new 'Store' tab in your portfolio. The artist store contains a list of all of the portfolio images that are for sale (and the price range). When someone clicks on the image thumbnail, they will be taken directly to the purchase image page which lists all of the for sale options. This artist store feature is available for those members who are enrolled in our Premium Print Program, or if you are listing and fulfilling your own artwork sales. We hope this new artist store area will bring a bigger focus to your artwork that is for sale.

2) E-MAILED SALES

Starting today, our Print Program members will now get e-mailed whenever a sale is made through our website. In the past the sale was recorded in our sales reports, but the artist was not notified via e-mail. We have had several members request that we notify them when a sale is generated, so we have made this feature available for all members when a sale is made on their artwork. All sales commissions will continue to be recorded in our sales reports and bank account as well.

3) EDIT FOR SALE DETAILS

If you have listed your own artwork to sell on our site, you now have the ability to edit the price and description of the artwork at anytime. In the past, you had to delete the pricing record and re-create it, but this is no longer the case. This should help reduce the time it takes you to manage your artwork which is for sale. You can edit the artwork for sale details at the bottom of the edit image page.

4) ARTIST PURCHASES RECORDED IN SALES REPORTS

In the past, we only recorded sales in our sales reports that were commissionable. We have just made a change to record all sales in our sales reports, so any purchases you make of your own artwork will be recorded in this area as well.

5) SALE CONFIRMATION IN MEMBERS AREA

In the past, when an artist sold artwork through our system, we would send them an e-mail about it with all of the buyers information. However, some artists did not get our e-mails about their sales. To help fix this issue, we now display any personal artwork sales as you login to the members area. The buyer's information will be displayed for you and you will be asked to confirm the sale and the shipping of the artwork.

We hope you enjoy these new sales features and watch for additional updates all throughout the year.

March Madness - Huge Pricing Discounts!

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:58:18 MST

Save some green this month during our huge March Madness sale!

$2 for the 2009 ArtWanted.com Calendar (while supplies last)

$5 for the ArtWanted.com Creative Minds Book (normally $19.95)

$29 for the Yearly Premium Membership (over 50% off the monthly price)

Click on the link below for more details on our March Madness sale - Enjoy!

March Madness Sale

Check out our new Facebook Page!

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 08:54:29 MST

For those members that are on Facebook, we have just created a new ArtWanted.com fan page.

This fan page allows users of Facebook to 'become a fan' of ArtWanted.com and interact with each other. All fans of our page can then upload their artwork and photography to our fan page for additional exposure.

If you are on Facebook, we invite you to become a fan of our site. If you are not on Facebook yet, why not? It's free and you will start to interact with your friends like never before.

Visit our fan page at:

http://www.facebook.com/ArtWanted

Enjoy!

Do you have a newsletter?

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 08:02:49 MST

One of the topics in our new 8-week marketing course on ArtistMarketingTips.com is artist newsletters.

Are you currently sending out a newsletter to your fans? If not, sign-up to our marketing course at ArtistMarketingTips.com and find out why you need to have one.

If you currently do have a newsletter, we want to see it! Please post a reply to this message board post with the URL/link to where we can sign-up for your newsletter. We would like to see what type of newsletters our members are sending out to their fans. Who knows, we may even feature your newsletter example in our marketing course. Thanks!

Artist Marketing Tips - NEW!

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 23:54:51 MST

How can I sell more artwork? How can I increase hits to my portfolio? What can I do to better market my artwork?

These are just a few of the many types of artist marketing questions we have been asked over the years. These are common questions that all artists usually have, even if they don't ask our staff directly for an answer.

To help every member of our site, and those artists that may not belong to our site, we have launched a new website dedicated to artist marketing help. It's called ArtistMarketingTips.com

For the opening of this new website, we have created an 8-week e-mail marketing course specifically built for artists and photographers.

The topics in the course include building a powerful online portfolio, newsletters, blogging, offline marketing, your artwork in print, video portfolios, social media, networking, pricing your artwork, tips to sell your artwork faster and much much more!

We invite all our members to visit this new website and sign-up for our e-mail marketing course. We are positive that the tips included in these e-mails will increase your portfolio hits, exposure and sales. Enjoy!

www.ArtistMarketingTips.com

2008 Year-In-Review

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 07:04:43 MST

Happy New Year! 2008 was another great year for ArtWanted.com - We wanted to take a minute and share with everyone a few significant items that happened in 2008...

We had over 6,500 new artists join our site last year. This brought in new talent, new members to our community and more hits to everyone's portfolios.
We improved our image policy and removed the monthly limit of only 3 images per month. Free account holders are now able to upload many more images to their accounts than before.
In 2008, we had 400% (4x) more artwork sales than in 2007. This is a huge jump forward and many members benefitted this year from selling their artwork. This increase in sales is mostly due to the changes we made with the re-design of the site in July, which put more emphasis on sales throughout the website.
As mentioned above, we changed the layout and design of our site in July to be more modern and improve the navigation of the site. This has resulted in more sales, a fresher look and less problems with users trying to find something on the website.
Throughout the year, we had over 30 new features/upgrades added to our website. Some of the major ones were the artist groups pages, new print products, ArtWanted.com bank account, featured image gallery, bookmark/share feature and many more. Most of these new features came directly from member suggestions. We love your feedback and use it to create a better site for everyone.

2008 really was a great year for the members of ArtWanted.com and we have even bigger plans for 2009. This year it's our 10th anniversary! We have a lot of new features and improvements planned for this year to make ArtWanted.com it's best year ever. Thanks for your continued participation on our website and we look forward to another great year!

PS - If you have not done so already, please take our member survey to help us shape 2009.

2009 Calendar Blowout!

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:57:19 MST

We wanted to let our members know that we are having a blowout sale on the ArtWanted.com 2009 Calendars.

Although the Traditional Artwork Calendar is now sold out, the Digital Art/Photography calendar is still available.

We are now offering this calendar (until it's sold out) for 50% off the regular price. That means it's only $7.95 for a full year of great artwork from our members. Click on the link below for more details, or to order your copy.

Order Now

Happy New Years!

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 10:49:13 MST

We just wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Years! We hope that 2009 is your best year ever!

ArtWanted.com Outage

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 12:56:08 MST

After several months of almost no down time, our data center had a hardware failure last night during a power outage, which caused our website (and many others) to be down for the last 12 hours. ArtWanted.com is now back online and no data was lost due to this hardware failure.

We apologize if you tried to access the website during this time and we not able to. We do not anticipate any additional long periods of down time now that this issue is resolved.

UPDATE: There are still a few things our ISP is working on surrounding this issue, which may cause intermittent down time, but it will only last a minute or two.