Art Business - for Artists

Today I launched a new website Art Business - for Artists. It's the product of nearly 10 years of writing about art including the business side of art - and quite a few years experience of business before that.

When I became involved in art, I was coming from a long career on the business side of life.

My background in education and business

I'd first qualified as a teacher but I was a baby boomer and I qualified just as the government was reducing school places and shutting schools. Becoming a teacher was a remote prospect.

Instead I became an accountant prompted in part by what I saw in schools re. the management of money. I thought there was a good chance I might have more benefit on education if I became an accountant - and so that's what I did - and gained my second professional and occupational qualification.

Then I decided that it was obvious that what I really needed was an MBA(!)because I didn't want to just do the accountancy bit for the rest of my life, I wanted to get involved with financial management in a more strategic sense. So I went to the London Business School and did a part-time MBA degree. This involved me in fitting in enough class contact hours to be able to have the NUS Card which only full time students were entitled to - at the same time as I was holding down a third tier management job managing a couple of groups of accountants delivering services for rather large budgets! (People often ask how I fit everything in. Believe me after three years of doing a part-time Masters Degree at the same time as a full-time job, you learn how to make it work!)

After that came a career which involved working for my professional institute in a marketing role as well as travelling all over the UK to work for clients in analytical roles focused on performance improvement. Which was topped off by a very senior management role with responsibility for support services across a very large service.

So I come pretty steeped in business performance management, marketing, money management and analysis.

When I retired I decided to use this knowledge and experience to help artists with an aspect of 'being an artist' which many struggle with.

So I started to create websites on a topic basis. Every time I learned about a new subject and how it worked in art, I made a website. Some of them have been extremely popular over the years and have had very many visitors - and some very nice words have been said about them.

The migration starts....

I was making and keeping the webpages on large article sites (which basically meant they were no cost to me).  However the day of the article site appears to be doomed. Google does not like them as they seem to be targeted by scammers and spammers.

The site I used for my webpages became the latest one to fold - which happened very fast last summer - and all my webpages were exported to a new site. I have to say it's not one which provides an adequate framework for my topics and I finally decided I needed to start moving them for the very first time to brand new websites which would focus on what I'm calling "a big niche"....

...and this is the first one to go public. (There will be a second one next week!)

Art Business - for Artists 

URL - http://www.artbusinessinfo.com
I've now moved enough content to make it a site worth publishing and drawing to your attention. However it's nowhere near finished - and I expand on what it currently contains below.

The home page of my new website Art Business - for Artists 

Content

So what can I tell you about it?

It's got a lot of content already - but there's much more to come.  There's a menu of broad topic areas across the top of the site which you can see on every page and most have a drop down menu. Some large topics then have a sub-menu - such as How to write an Artist Statement and How to Price Your Art.

I'm still very much at the experimental stage as to to optimal content on one topic and one page so feedback would be appreciated as to how well the individual pages and navigation works.

Communication for Artists

Communication - acts as an introduction and index page.

This is what exists:

• How to write an Artist Statement
• How to write an Artist Resume or CV - on another site | to be transferred here
• How to sign a painting, drawing or fine art print - on another site | to be transferred here
• How to write a press release - available on another site | linked to from here
• Email Newsletter Software - A Guide - on another site | to be transferred here
• Blogging for Artists - on another site | to be transferred here

This is what is planned

• Websites for Artists - to be developed
• Facebook for Artists - to be developed
• Twitter for Artists - to be developed

Copyright for Artists

This is the introduction - which covers what copyright is and has links to

• Global Conventions on copyright e.g. Berne Convention
• Copyright in the UK
• Copyright in USA
• Copyright and intellectual property in Canada
• Copyright and intellectual property in Australia

Also included so far are:

• How to protect artwork online
• Copyright and artists' rights
• How to do a reverse image search If you want to find out whether somebody has created copies of your photos or artwork on the Internet. To date this is a link - but the existing site will be transferring to this 

I intend to do pages about

• A Guide to Photography in Public - what you can and cannot do [coming soon]
• Pinterest, Copyright and Spam - for Visual Artists & Photographers [coming soon] - for copyright infringements on Pinterest and what you can do to prevent and resolve this

Money and Tax

This section provides advice and information about:

• How to Price Your Art - which has a submenu and extensive content
• Tax Tips for Artists - covering general conventions and the UK and USA tax sites
• VAT for Artists - which will be expanded
• Insurance for Art and Artists
• Art After Death - again this has a submenu for the detailed content

New sections

Sections to be added as soon as I have the time include four new sections covering:

• The Art Business - Tips for emerging and aspiring artists
• Selling Art - covering 
• options for selling art
• art competitions and juried exhibitions, 
• galleries
• how to sell art online and ecommerce, 
• How to pack, post and ship your art
• The Art Studio - practical aspects to do with setting up a studio
• Art Education - options for continuing art education

Technical

I've created the new website in Weebly - which I have to say had been very easy to work with.  My preference has always been to work with a site where somebody else sorts out a lot of the nuts and bolts re coding and "how to" do various techie bits and bobs so I can spend my time focusing on the content.

I guess the best way I could describe it is that I've been very happy with Blogger for nearly ten years and Weebly is like Blogger on speed!

The template I used should automatically resize for the screen you view it on. I know it does on my iMac, iPad Mini and iPhone - but I'd love to hear if anybody finds it does not resize automatically for them and/or whether there are any issues with font size.

At the moment the site looks much more boring than it will do in future - but I'm focusing on getting the words transferred and then sorting out imagery later.

The new sites are not free because I've taken the opportunity to go with my own url for the domain name.

I'm including Google Adsense on the site - mainly because although this site is free to artists to access, it does now need to recover its costs. However I'm very pleased to say that the adverts now appear to be MUCH more relevant than the ones I used to get on the old sites!  I may at some point also include display adverts for people offering services - but that will be later rather than sooner.

Also the books will be amazon affiliate links - and at some point I'll get round to including both .com and .co.uk links.  Again the tiny subsidy helps me to cover the costs of the site.

So that's it - my new website. I hope you find it helpful.

Do please let me know 

• if there are any topics you'd like to see included in future
• what you think of it - either via a comment on this blog or via the contact form