Part Three of a Ten-Part Series on Free Online Artist Portfolios.

I signed up with Saatchi Online almost as soon as they started offering free online portfolios in 2006.  At the time, they offered “your own page which you can update as much as you wish. You can post up to eight images…and there is no fee, we have created this to assist artists in raising their profiles.”  OK!  Sounds good.  Where do I sign up?  (here: http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/register/)

The Saatchi Online site is a very nice looking site, though I find the little boxes of links surrounding both sides of the main content column a bit overwhelming as a navigation method, and the page can be ridiculously long (see my page at right >).  There are some main navigation links at the top of every page, though I am not sure if those links include everything you can find on their site.  Luckily, they’ve included a very extensive site map.

They have a lot to offer; besides information on the physical Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea, they offer online chat, forums, and critiques; calls to entry, grants and funding; information on art fairs; links to art schools, dealers, galleries, and museums; a daily online magazine, blogs, and news; sections for under 17 students; and — perhaps one of the more interesting perks they offer — a “showdown,” where you can submit your work to be voted on by viewers in competition with other artists.

Over time, they have made a number of improvements to the portfolio pages, including increasing the number of images you can add — it appears to be 25 at present.  They do limit the size of your images to 500 pixels wide and under 2mb, but I find that is generous enough (and larger than they allowed formerly).  They also added an online salesroom, where you can offer your work for sale.  They take no commission and charge no fees for this service; the sales agreement is between artist and buyer.

Creating or updating your own gallery information on the site is quite easy; again, just copy and paste your plain text resume, artists statement, bio, etc. into the appropriate boxes.  There’s also a place for your photo, your email address, a link to your own website, and future shows.  Uploading new images is also very easy, and some of the fields “remember” what you typed into those fields previously, making it even easier.

They do request that you post the sizes of your images in centimeters, which is easy enough using an online conversion calculator (for those of us not thoroughly versed in the metric system). You might want to include the size in feet and inches in the description section, though, for those who don’t visualize in centimeters.

I did have a few technical issues when uploading new work today, which hopefully, they will fix soon.

I also wish they would give the artist some way of setting the order that the pieces appear on your page, especially since each piece is shown rather large, and in vertical succession; it appears that the piece shown at the top of your page will be the first one you uploaded (so potentially your oldest piece) — which is exactly the opposite of how I would order them.  As it is, the only way to fix that is start over every time you refresh your portfolio there.

Now for a few words on the Salesroom — this is the area where you can sell your artwork online — it is a totally different page from your portfolio page.  Unless I’m missing something, there is no direct link from your online gallery to your salesroom (and vice-versa, unless you are logged out), so you have to click on a link in the top drop down navigation to go to the Salesroom, then look yourself up.

Once there, though, it very easy to add your pieces to your Salesroom: with one click, you can add one of your portfolio pieces to the Sales page, and with one more click add the price, and then repeat the process for all your pieces.   One curiosity I discovered is that I was able to upload more than 25 pieces to the Salesroom, though only 25 pieces will show up on your portfolio page.

How your work in the Salesroom is displayed to viewers is disappointing.  One image is served up at a time, and while the “next image” will be yours, it is served up randomly, which means anyone viewing your Salesroom may not see all your work — unless they are obsessively patient — and they may see the same piece over and over again, giving you no control over what they will see or in what order.

Saatchi Online may be another good place to get more eyes on your work, but they show all work randomly, and the only way I’ve been able to find my own work on there is through a direct link or doing a search on my name.  So I do have to wonder how many other eyes have actually landed on my art.  There is certainly a lot of interesting information available to artists on the Saatchi Online site, which probably makes it worth your while to check out — and I have had requests for information on at least one of my pieces through them; maybe I’ll get more now that I’ve refreshed my pages.

The bottom line, however — I would not choose this site as my one and only online portfolio site.  It may be a nice addition to your own personal website or another free online portfolio, and then again, it may not even be worth your time setting it up.  I kind of hate to say this, because there’s much to like about the site, but the limited ways that your work may be found seem to really limit the number of viewers who will get introduced to your work on their site.

Tomorrow: MyArtSpace

Part Two of a Ten-Part Series on Free Online Artist Portfolio Sites.

Also known as WorldWideArts Resources, AbsoluteArts.com advertise that they are “the largest site for contemporary art, art news, art history, contemporary artist and gallery portfolios” with over 170,000 works of contemporary art.  I signed up with AbsoluteArts.com in 2003.  They send out a newsletter not quite once a month, reminding me occasionally that I have a portfolio there.  Over the years, I think I may have gotten a response or two to the few pieces of art I’ve had online there, though nothing has ever developed from that.

My Free Online Portfolio at AbsoluteArts.com

At any rate, they offer three levels of portfolios, the first of which is free and contains:

• the artist’s information
• maximum of 8 images (which in most views is spread across 2 pages)
• spaces/pages for an artist’s biography, statement, exhibitions, gallery affiliations, reviews, collections, and commissions
• a spam protected email form
• a guestbook
• your links
• ability for someone to be added as a friend to the artist
• dashboard to update your portfolio (um, I say this because they tout it as a perk, but isn’t this a given?)
• support and questions with a human being
• optional credit card processing for $35.00
• optional direct URL to your AbsoluteArts portfolio for $20.00 (in this form: “www.absolutearts.com/yourlogin” — which I suppose is better than “http://www.absolutearts.com/portfolios/yourinitial/yourname/”)

Other options require an upgrade (add videos, blogs, events, slideshows, an email manager, and more), and the upgrades are not inexpensive ($44.00 – $100.00/yr).

The other sections on their site are:

• search by keyword on a variety of particulars
• search or browse for art/artists using a number of sorting parameters
• news on current art trends
• sections for reading about/researching artists/art history
• artists blogs, an artists cafe, and a discussion forum
• some calls for artists
• some options for linking your existing website to theirs

In December, they updated their Portfolio Manager to make it easier to update your online portfolio.

But I have to express some frustration with updating one’s portfolio on AbsoluteArts.com.  I just updated mine, and it won’t let me rearrange my artwork in the order I want it (it’s a numerical ordering system, and some of the number options are missing from some of the pieces).

In the Bio section, it asks for answers to specific questions, not all of which I feel are pertinent to my art or for which I have a ready answer, so they show up as “Not Provided” on my Artist Bio page.  Finally, the following Q & A appear on my bio page, but there is no place where I can answer the question: “Why Did You Become An Artist? — “not provided.”  Now that’s a question I would be happy to answer (for the record – I was born believing I would be an artist — the rest is merely fulfilling my destiny).

Otherwise, the process of updating older pieces and uploading newer pieces was fairly simple and went smoothly.

Updating my bio, statement, resume, and links was quite easy as well.  (TIP: keep a plain text version of all your artist info in something like Notepad that you can copy and paste from, since many sites are fussy about preformatted text).

But what they do offer at AbsoluteArts.com is a lot of information about artists.  For the buyer, that’s great; for an artist, it may be merely a bonus — if you’re like me, most of the time, you’d rather be creating your art than reading about other people’s art.  But for those times when I poke my head up and want to look around and see what others are up to, this would be an interesting place to investigate.

However, as a FREE online artist portfolio site, the limitation of only having 8 pieces online at any one time is harsh!  With so many other free online artist portfolios offering so much more, you’ll have to decide whether having a free portfolio at AbsoluteArts.com is worth your time and attention.  A paid portfolio may be worth it — they claim to have much higher traffic than many other free online portfolio sites — but in my humble opinion, that’s a lot of moolah to dish out if some kind of desired results cannot be guaranteed.  I’d rather spend that kind of money on my own website with my own URL and complete control over the look and contents — or art supplies or food.  As always, your mileage may vary.

Tomorrow: Saatchi Gallery

Part One of a Ten-Part Series on Free Online Artist Portfolio Sites.

d-ART was an early entrant into the rash of sites offering free online artist portfolios.  I signed up early on — in January 2003.  I haven’t fully participated in all that they have to offer (forums and critiques, for example), but I find them to be a great online portfolio addition to my own artist portfolio website.  They’ve updated their look and options a time or two over the years, always improving an already very good online art database.  Here is what my portfolio there looks like now:

Features:

• each artist gets their own set of pages that include:
  • your photo
  • a banner, which can be of your own design
  • a bio page
  • gallery “wings” of thumbnail pages with up to 50 images in (as far as I can tell) unlimited wings
  • large image pages with artwork information, price, dominant colors, and “private bids,” “add to favorites,” “contact seller,” and optional “buy now” buttons (see Paypal/Google below)
  • a browse/search box for your art gallery wings
  • a links section
  • your own signature or avatar
  • the ability to add Paypal or Google checkout to your listings
  • the ability to integrate e-Bay listings
  • the ability to sync your database enabled website with d-ART’s database
  • an artist’s forum for information that others submit about your art
  • community critiques by other artists
  • a contact form with spam protection
  • monthly stats of views and clicks
• your work can be found on the d-ART site by:
  • a direct link
  • “browse artist alphabetically” on the front page of the d’Galleries
  • browse work by type, genre, subject and price
  • search the Marketplace by new listing, random, keyword, type of art, subject, media, price, size, and/or color
  • keyword search at the top of every page
  • browse the Critic’s Corner
  • directly from Google.com / Froogle.com (via their daily database feed)

Of course, as you might expect, those artists who pay to to be a featured artist or be hosted on their site get more goodies, but what they offer for free is quite good.

d-ART is an excellent site for the art buyer, and a very good one for the art seller.  In the past 12 months alone, I’ve had almost 390,000 thumbnail views of the 33 pieces of art I had on there last year, and almost 68,000 clicks to the individual pieces; I’ve had several inquiries about individual pieces, though I have as yet made no sales through d-ART.

However, as good as d-ART is, I would not use it instead of a website where the URL can be a name of my choosing.  Using it in addition to your own website, however, can only help get more eyes on your work.  On the other hand, when you have your artwork listed on several online sites, you need to be very careful to keep the information current and accurate on as many sites as you have a presence on.

To that end, one of the greatest things that d-ART offers is the ability to sync up your database enabled website with their database.  My next step with d-ART will be to attempt to do just that.  Once I have done that, I will post how easy or difficult I find that process to be.

One last noteworthy comment I want to make; d-ART does make it very easy to add new artwork and information about the artwork — if you are uploading a number of pieces, the best practice is to batch upload pieces that are similar — then after filling in the information on the first piece, be sure to click on the checkbox “this piece is similar to the last” and then all you have to edit are the titles and whatever else may be different about the remaining pieces.  On the other hand, editing bits of information about the artwork that is already in your d-ART Gallery must be done on a piece-by-piece basis, and is very tedious.  I speak from experience (having just spent way too many hours updating my portfolio there).

Tomorrow: AbsoluteArts.com

Are you an artist with at least a small body of work you’re ready to show off online, but are not yet ready to make the financial commitment for a custom-designed website?   Or are you looking at increasing your online presence as an artist in addition to your custom artist’s website?

Over the next ten days I will be reviewing the following ten online artist portfolio sites where you can show your work.  I have had portfolios on the first four sites for some time, and I will be signing up with the remainder of the list over the course of this review period; I’ll let you know how it goes.

1. d-ART: d’Galleries at Fine-Art.com
   
2. AbsoluteArts.com
3. Saatchi Gallery
4. MyArtSpace
5. FineArtAmerica
6. Artist-Listing
7. ArtistPortfolio.net
8. MosaicGlobe
9. 723 – Online Art Community
10. Voodoochilli

Bonus: Flickr

Finally, here is a link to a very good article on “Getting Your Art Portfolio Online.”

Tomorrow: Review of free online artist portfolio site d-ART: d’Galleries at Fine-Art.com.

OK, I just moved my newly designed Design site from a testing server to the real deal — right here!

I’ve tested and retested, and most of the bugs have been worked out.  (The previous post deals with the list of known issues, which I will fix if I find out how.)

I’ll miss my pretty little previous site, but it had no blog and the portfolio design was too complex to update very often.

So, welcome again, and if you see anything that looks amiss — especially if you have a fix for it — I’d love to hear from you.

Or — if you just like something about it and nothing is amiss, I’d really love to hear from you!

I’ve tested this site in many browsers and on several platforms, and for the most part, everything works as it should.

Tested and all is well:

• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows 2000:
  • Firefox 3.05
  • Internet Explorer 7
• Windows Vista:
  • Google Chrome 1.0
  • Opera 9.63

Tested with a glitch or two:

• Safari 3.21
  • fonts on nav bar less tall than on other systems, leaving gap below on hover
• Opera 9.25 on Windows Vista:
  • weird anomaly on portfolio hover images wherein all images seem to display at once — very dizzying
  • text links on portfolio pages do not work
• Internet Explorer 6 on Windows Vista (tested through IETester):
  • hover on navbar buttons does not work; alternate links provided
  • hover on portfolio images does not work; alternate popup versions provided (but with less information)
  • javascript “onclick window.open” script opens window with no Flash animation
• Internet Explorer 8 (beta) on Windows Vista (tested through IETester):
  • text in large portfolio image (on hover) does not appear
  • right box border containing large portfolio image (on hover) too far to the right
  • on-page links on FAQs page do not work
  • javascript “onclick window.open” script causes web design portfolio page not to show
• Netscape 7.2 on Windows Vista (because I could):
  • bottom row of Illustration portfolio thumbnails extend slightly past containing box

I am pretty happy with how my image galleries came out.  I knew exactly what I wanted: a small set of thumbnails arranged in rows and columns that, when you roll over them, a large image appears elsewhere on the page.

I found a very elegant way to do this, using an unordered list, spans and hovers, and absolute positioning in CSS.  It allowed me to display all large images in the same location when you roll over a thumbnail.  Only, I wanted to add more than one line of text to the hover image, so I would have needed to use a break, which would invalidate the page, as breaks aren’t allowed within list items. And paragraph tags aren’t allowed within spans.

I had to give up on using the elegant unordered list, and ended up assembling a way to do exactly what I wanted with nested divs, spans and hovers.

Only then I couldn’t get my emulation of IE6 to recognize the large images on hover!  It’s always something!   And if it’s trouble, you can bet it’s usually caused by Microsoft.  Sigh!

Finally I found a small JavaScript tutorial with CSS that was easily added to my existing code (yes, I had already coded all my portfolio pages before discovering the anomaly with IE6!).

This pops up a window with the large image when the thumbnail is clicked, for those 26% of folks still using IE6.  Can’t ignore them, you know.

Probably not the most lovely solution, but see what you think.  I have installed the script on the Web Design Portfolio page.

After you look at it, please head on back here, and let me know if you like it, hate it, if it doesn’t work for you, or if you know of a sleeker solution!  And if you wouldn’t mind, please let me know what browser you’re using on what OS (always helpful).

Thanks!

Sometimes, the best thing you can do when your eyes are bugging out of your head from staring at the same damn code hour after hour, day after day, while the solution to a tiny niggling code alignment issue still escapes you — is quit. Step awaaaay from the computer, have a great dinner and conversation with your sweetie, drink some beer or wine (or both), watch The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, and then get a good night’s sleep.

In the morning, suddenly it becomes clear.

As did my footer alignment issue this morning when I took a fresh look at the code. Duh! Of course, the way I had originally coded it was pushing it out of line, but I just couldn’t see that yesterday, after it seemed to break once I corrected my missing div. After days of it appearing perfectly correct (while the pages wouldn’t validate), I was just so anxious to be done with my new design already!

And now, I am very nearly done! Woo-hoo!

Immovable object, meet irresistable force!

Or “Site Validates, but has Layout Problems.” Artist as Designer ready to throw in the towel! (almost…) Or just throw the towel.

In the previous post, I made reference to all hell breaking loose when you miss an opening or closing div.

Or maybe not. Last Wednesday, after a small struggle getting the footer to behave, I finally achieved what seemed to be success in parsing all the bits and pieces of the css and html to the proper php files, and my pages looked pretty good in most browsers. Not IE, of course, but isn’t that to be expected?

So I tested the pages in Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, IE7, IE6, IE5.5 and even an old version of Netscape, and the layout was perfect in everything but the IE browsers, so surely I have all the right divs in all the right places, right?

It sure looked that way, so I kept working on the smaller details and finished finding and creating the desired size images for my portfolio pages, and put the three portfolio pages together. I wanted to hard-code the main content portion of these three pages, and find a way to incorporate the static center portion with my pre-existing dynamic header and footers. I kept reading, researching, trying things, (and even found a big list of premade gallery scripts one could use, but none were just what I wanted). Well, I was done with that part anyway. I never did find a way to accomplish the hard-coded static portfolio content with the dynamic header and footer, though, and finally decided to put that idea aside for now, and start focusing on completing all the other niggling tasks on my to-do-before-going-live list.

Two days of efforts later, and I try again to validate my pages. Almost all of them get the same 5 errors: it’s missing a closing div tag (and I’m guessing the rest of the errors are caused by that). So I start looking around at my various php pages again, and lo and behold, I didn’t close the right-side content column after the second sidebar, so I fix that, and now, the footer is out of place on every page in every browser!

So I took all the basic parts from all the php pages, fitted them together, removed the php code, added back in a few necessaries, and tested again, and now it totally validates, but the footer’s out of place!

Why exactly did I decide to get into coding websites, and specifically, why did I decide to create my new design in WordPress? I could have been painting! Argh!

Creating your own theme in WordPress can be a bit challenging — more so if you’ve had no previous experience with WordPress, and very little experience or true understanding of PHP.

I think I could have had my beautiful new website completed in about 2-3 days if I hadn’t decided to try to create it in WordPress. It only took me a day to come up with the visual design, and less than a day to code it in XHTML and CSS, and my design and pages validated at that time for both HTML and CSS. Admittedly, this was probably a bass-ackwards approach, but I started with what I knew, figuring I would figure out the WordPress stuff later.

And mostly, I have. Well, not like I could rewrite much more PHP code than a tiny expression or two, but at least I get the way WordPress breaks up the whole content and style across various parts that come together when the page is called. The header, the index page (and it’s work-alikes, such as the the archive page, the “page” page, etc.), the sidebar(s), and the footer get assembled with an external css file when the page is called, and together — with any images and database content — make up the complete page that is displayed. Your website consists of no html files — it’s all php files that may have some css and some html included within, plus the css stylesheet(s), images, and some javascript files. The content primarily resides in a database.

But the tricky part is that divs may begin in one php file and end in another, and if your content, style and code are fairly complex, you can get lost, and leave out a crucial beginning or ending div from the proper file, and then all hell breaks loose, position-wise!

Then, of course, there are the browser issues.

And finally, in my case, I knew I wanted a very specific style of css gallery for my design portfolio images, and had created it even before designing the visual look of my new site — and it’s simple in a way, but complex in another.

More details forthcoming later today.