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I would like to see it turn more into a sales site as it suggests. I know I used to receive quite a bit of commission works through AW, but that stopped about a year ago.

Although, I do think it would be hard pressed for any serious art buyer to take this site seriously when you have great pieces of artwork for sale next to juvenile sketches on notebook paper done in study hall. Same thing with photography, you have fine art photography being shown with shapshots of pets and people that you would find more common on people's Myspace pages.

Speaking as a self-professed professional shopper, that is like shopping at Wal-Mart for art, not a gallery. AW is just another place to promote yourself as an artist to gain exposure in the search engines imo. But then again, I truly feel the best way to sale artwork is to do it through exhibitions and galleries in real life.

I think the problem online, that I see with any site, is that buyers are complaining of poor quality in prints and the actual artwork looking nothing like it does online with the help of many artists retouching artworks up on the pc. I have seen many articles on this disturbing trend. I never expect anything when it comes to selling artwork online, which happens, but I do expect quite a bit when selling in shows or exhibitions in real life through experience. I think AW can only promise so much faced with this reality.

Original Post: Member Survey Results

A few months ago, we had a member survey to ask our members a handful of questions. We have surveys from time to time on our site to gather important member feedback and make changes to our site based off that feedback. Below are the results of the most recent survey that was answered by over 600 members. We display the results under the question along with the percent of responses for each answer in (parenthesis).

Q: Should we remove the Top Ten feature/section of our website?

NO (77%) - DON'T CARE (12%) - YES (11%)

That data clearly shows that most of our members like this feature of our site. It's no wonder, when it brings thousands of our members extra exposure, portfolio hits and maybe even a sale or two. The Top Ten Charts are not perfect, but they will continue to improve as we get feedback from our members, but it appears they are here to stay.

Q: If not, should we increase it to include more members?

NO (39%) - Top 20 (37%) - Top 50 (13%) - Top 100 (11%)

It looks like the majority of our members like it how it is, but a very close second is increasing it to include the Top 20. At this time, we are going to leave it how it is, but when we redo our image categories, we may need to make some changes to continue to include many members.

Q: Should we bring back the General Discussion area of the message boards to discuss non-art related topics?

Don't Care (40%) - NO (31%) - YES (29%)

From this data it shows that those surveyed don't care much about the General Discussion board and are probably not active members on the boards. The 'No' group won over the 'Yes' group by a few votes. However, we took a look at these number from another angle. We ran the results again filtering only those that have posted to the boards in the last three months, which are those members that use the boards. Here are those results:

Don't Care (36%) - YES (33%) - NO (31%)

These numbers are also very close, but it does show that 33% want to keep the General Discussion board. We were hoping for a clear winner on this question with a large percent of members picking yes or no, but this is not the case. The numbers are so close that if we opened back up the survey for another few weeks, the numbers and winner would change again. This makes things more difficult, because either decision we make, will upset 1/3 of our members.

Our decision at this time is to bring back the General Discussion board on a trial basis with a few changes. We will launch it on Sep 1st after we have some time to make a few programming updates to message boards that will help control the chaos. This will also give us a chance to get a few new moderators on board to watch the boards more closely. When this opens back up, we will be more strict on rule violations and ban more members for abusing those rules. If we are to have a General Discussion Board, we do not want it to be like it was before. Non-art related topics will be able to be discussed, as long as our normal guidelines are followed and things get out of hand.

If our members can prove that they can control what they type, we will bring it back forever. If the same antics continue, we will be forced to close them forever. Either way, it's up to each member to decide the fate of General Discussion board.

Q: Are you interested in being a moderator on our site and/or message boards?

NO (78%) - YES:PUBLIC (13%) - YES:PRIVATE(9%)

Thanks to those that are interested in being a moderator. We will be contacting many of you in the upcoming month to help moderate the site.

Q: Have you noticed an improvement in the website speed/performance in the last month?

Improved (50%) - No Change (47%) - Worse (4%)

It's great to see how many members have noticed an improvement in our site. Our staff is working each week to make improvements to make our website faster for our members and we expect the speed to continue to improve in coming months.

Q: Have you noticed if our website 'goes down' less frequently in the last month?

Improved (48%) - No Change (48%) - Worse (4%)

Again, our members are seeing improvements, which is all that we could hope for.

Q: What things should our programmers/developers spend most of their time on?

New Features (41%) - Current Features (35%) - Performance (23%)

It looks like most of our members want to see new features, and we have plenty of them in store for the upcoming months. We will also continue to work on current features and improve performance. Each of these things are important and it's good to know what our members are wanting.

We appreciate all those that took the time to fill out our survey. To view additional charts/details, click here. These surveys are very important to us and they help us improve the site. We have learned over the years that we can't please every single member with any decision we make, but we hope that by going with what the majority of our members want, we can make most of our members happy and continue to make our site better each month.