Ties that Bind: Art and the Web
I participated in “For the love of art,” a function presented by Arts Alliance and Albuquerque Independent Business Alliance.
The collaboration made perfect sense to me. (By way of disclosure, I serve on the AIBA board.) The cooperative venture included excellent food, always a draw, and a silent auction of art originals.
Inspired by art and intrigued by the New Mexico Business Weekly’s listing of the top 25 Art Dealers and Galleries in this week’s edition, I trolled a few websites to learn more. (NOTE: Of the top five listings, only one is located in Albuquerque.)
The top five dealers and listing provided an assortment of information:
The collaboration made perfect sense to me. (By way of disclosure, I serve on the AIBA board.) The cooperative venture included excellent food, always a draw, and a silent auction of art originals.
Inspired by art and intrigued by the New Mexico Business Weekly’s listing of the top 25 Art Dealers and Galleries in this week’s edition, I trolled a few websites to learn more. (NOTE: Of the top five listings, only one is located in Albuquerque.)
The top five dealers and listing provided an assortment of information:
- Weems Galleries and Framing offers a promise that a 2008 calendar will be coming soon. The site goes on to list last week’s sidewalk sale on their events, a reception for February 1 and a no-fooling move for April.
- Owings-Dewey Fine Art presents a site with special effects, bells and whistles. It timed out loading my second choice in the menu options so I never did check out the select press.
- Chimayo Trading and Mercantile touts an update of January 17th on its home page so one can assume everything is current. Every section of this site contains a similar update notation.
- Arlene Siegel Gallery delivers a website that is part of Collector’s Guide. When I checked for events, none were listed. However, Collector’s Guide displays the “For the love of art” event in this week’s art news.
- Manitou Galleries offered an option that included events and news releases, although I found no news items. At the bottom of the home page a line stated the load time for the page. I found that interesting; is this a stat that Manitou Galleries customers request?
Take any category. Look at the competition and evaluate information. How does your selection stack up? Have you done this for your business? Getting visibility is about standing out from the crowd. What do you do to enhance your visibility?
Labels: critical audience: customer
posted by the profitmeister at
9:10 AM
2 Comments:
Always collector/buyer beware!
Good article....
Aargh. I only looked at one - Weems. Several things:
1. Don't just post PDF/graphic of forms. If you really want people to participate in something - have it all online. Including registering for Artfest event. If I want to register, I have to print the actual web page, fill it out by hand, cut it out and mail it. (You can very easily embed Paypal code these days, and also preformat a subject line for inquiry emails so you automatically know why someone is writing you.)
2. Artists list - but with no further info about why I should care - and only a handful of artist links (I have to think more have web sites, or at least web pages.)
3. I can look, but I can't buy online.
4. Since the text of several pages are images, search engines can't read them. (Example: "We're movin'" and frame shop).
This is, at best, an online brochure. Which is a shame, because we have so many visitors from out-of-state who could be googling (as I type this) art galleries in Albuquerque.
Nothing against Weems - they're in the biz of selling art. But, with a better web site, they could sell a lot more of it.
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