Happy Birthday!

In honor of our website's 8th birthday, we have launched dozens of new features for ArtWanted.com today. Additional upgrades & features will be coming all throughout the month of March. Here are the details of the new features that are now live on our site:

1) Image Sorting

You can now specify the display order of the artwork in your portfolio and change it at anytime. When you add or edit an image, you can choose the 'image order' you want it to display in. You can also click on the IMAGE SORTING section of MANAGE PORTFOLIO from your members area to update the sorting of multiple images at a time.

2) Artist Blog/Journal

Premium members now have an optional blog/journal page on their portfolio to tell the world on what they are doing on a daily/weekly basis. To start your blog, just click on the 'Create Blog/Journal Entry' link at the bottom of the EDIT CONTACT INFO page. Once you have created your first entry, you will be able to add new entries on the 'Blog' tab of your public portfolio.

3) Updated Portfolio Page

With the addition of the blog and several other changes we are working on, we have added a few tabs across the top of your portfolio page. These tabs will show/hide, depending on your account type and the information you have. This new 'tab' system makes it easier navigate through your portfolio.

4) Artist Slide Show

A new 'tab' we have added for all members is the new SLIDESHOW page. When anyone clicks on this new slide show tab in your portfolio, it will display an automated slideshow of all the artwork you have in your portfolio. Users can change the size of the images (ie loading time), pause the show or click on any image to jump to that specific image page. This slideshow is a great way for anyone to sit back and look at all of your artwork without clicking a button.

5) Artist Biography Tab

We have seen many members use the 'bio' area to write pages and pages of information about themselves, upcoming exhibits, awards and many other things. We felt that the small column on the left of the portfolio was too small, so we have created a full page for the artist biography now. The space is no longer cramped and you can type an unlimited amount of information (HTML friendly) about yourself and your artwork.

6) Additional Artist Images

When you are looking at the large image of any artwork on our site, we have added a new area to that page that shows 2 random images from that artist. This new section will bring more exposure to your artwork and will show the user three samples of your work on any page they look at.

7) Report Image to Staff

We have added a small link on every image page, where someone can report that image to our staff to review. Some members may use this function to report images that don't meet our guidelines to our staff, but it has many other purposes. Every day we get e-mails from our members asking us to review an image in their portfolio for various reasons. Most of these e-mails don't have enough detail to locate the image, so we have to send e-mails back and forth until we find the right image. This new function will allow you to quickly point out the image you have a question about, so that we can review and resolve the issue much faster than before.

8) Artist Quick Links

At the bottom of your portfolio page, we have added a 'quick links' section for you to easier manage your portfolio. From this section you can quickly jump to your members area, edit your contact info, upload a new image, check your statistics and many other useful functions. These links are all found in your members area, but these shortcuts are placed on your main portfolio page so you can move around the site faster. NOTE: These links will only show up for you if you are logged in and looking at your own portfolio.

9) Canvas Prints

We have added canvas prints to our print program. These beautiful prints can be ordered mounted or unmounted (rolled) on 25,000+ existing images on our site. If you are a member of the print program, you can order canvas prints of your own artwork at a wholesale price. We offer sizes up to 36" x 48" through our site.

10) Improved Site Speed

We have been going through our database and code to optimize many of the pages on our site. Many of these pages have been improved dramatically, and we will continue to look for sections that are running slow, so that we can speed them up.

11) New Image Thumbnail Engine

We have implemented a new thumbnail engine for our website that has improved the quality of the artwork thumbnails you see and reduced the file size on these images up to 80%. This means that the pages you surf will load up much faster than before. This new image engine also handles GIF animation files much better than our previous version. We have gone through all the past artwork on our site and updated the thumbnails using this new engine as well.

12) New Thumbnail Size

We have created a new thumbnail size that is in-between the small and large thumbnail we have had in the past. This new thumbnail is the perfect size to get a good idea of what the larger image looks like, but loads much faster than the thumbnail images used in the past.

13) Saved Message Board Threads

We have added a new feature to our message boards that will allow you to save your favorite message board posts in a new 'saved threads' area. You no longer have to remember the posts/threads you want to check up on, we do this for you. Simply click the 'Save Thread' icon, found on any message board post, and it will instantly be saved to your saved favorite threads. You can access your saved threads from the message board menu found on every page of the message boards.

14) New Member Poetry Area

Many artists on our site can also create great poetry. Many of them have been faced with creating a 'graphic' of the poem and uploading it to their portfolio - this is no longer the case. We have created a new 'Member Poetry' discussion area on the message boards, so those that have a talent with words can share their poetry with all our members in one place.

15) Pop-Up Help Tips

On the add/edit image pages, we have added some new pop-up tips that will help explain the purpose of the field on the form. This information is very useful to new members and to those that don't know what each field in the form does. We will be adding these quick tips to many areas to help guide our members through our website and get the most out of it.

16) Add/Edit Print Images

We have added the Add/Edit print images section to the EDIT IMAGE page. This makes it easier to add/edit/delete the images that are in the print program.

17) High-Resolution File Download

Unfortunately, some of our members have had a hard drive crash and lost some/all of their artwork files in the past. We want to do what we can to help in this situation, so we have added a new page in the print section to download any of your own high-resolution print files. Hopefully you won't have to use this section much, but you can now quickly download any of the high-resolution files used in our print program with a few clicks.

18) Account Cleanup

Over the last few months, we have been going over our member database and cleaning up many of the old inactive accounts. We have also sent out thousands of e-mails to older members that have not visited the website in a while, so they can become active on ArtWanted.com again. During the next few months, we will continue to clean up these older inactive accounts to improve site performance and to give more exposure to those members that are active on our site.

19) No Right-Clicking

A recent ArtWanted.com survey indicated that the majority of our members would like to see a 'no right-click' script added to our site. Based on this feedback, we have now added this to ArtWanted.com - When a user right-clicks on any image/page, they will see the following message "In consideration of our members copyrighted artwork, right-clicking is not permitted on ArtWanted.com." We realize that there are many other ways to 'steal' artwork off a website and this change should not give anyone a false sense of security that your artwork is 100% protected from cyber thieves. However, this right-click notice does serve as a reminder to everyone that the artwork on our site is copyrighted. Please see our policy on digital artwork for additional information.

20) Improved Navigation

We have added additional links, icons and tips all throughout the site to help you get to the information you want faster.

But Wait...There's More!

We have a list of additional upgrades that we will be doing throughout the month of March to continue our birthday celebration. Some of these things are Private Member Galleries, Improved Statistics Reports, New Artwork Categories and Much More! The details on these new features will be announced later in the month.

We hope everyone enjoys the new features we have added to the website. We made a lot of changes to our site, so let us know if you find any bugs, so we can quickly repair them.

It has been a wonderful 8 years since ArtWanted.com began and we look forward to many more exciting years in the future. Thanks for your membership and participation in our artist community!

Reply