Many of you may have a personal account on facebook but would benefit from knowing how to make a successful page that will help promote your work.

Here is the twelve step process that will help you create a useful facebook page. A facebook page does not replace your own website, but rather SUPPORTS your work and helps to build your profile.

1. Get in the right mindset – this is important!

Remember that your art does not speak for itself and it will never be able to. The best person to help build the profile of your art is you. Think about promotion activities as an extension of your art — not separate from it. Writing about your art, displaying photographs of your work and communicating with your audience are all great opportunities that shouldn’t be wasted. Good language skills put you in control of you as your art’s ‘brand leader’. Take time to think about what is important in terms of presenting yourself an artist and take the time to get the words and images right. When you do this, there will be little room for being misunderstood.

2. Create your facebook page under your professional title.

A Facebook Page, sometimes referred to as a Fan Page, is a single page separate from your personal account that people create for many different purposes outside personal sharing. Think of it as a one-page meeting place, with information, links, a message forum box, RSS and anything else you want. The way people will get to interact with your page is by ‘liking’ it or finding it. Once someone has ‘liked’ it they will receive your status updates and be able to view your photo albums, just like a regular Facebook account page.

Take action: Go here to create your facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

3. Choose a Unique Page Image

This is one of the most crucial components of a fan page. It’s a simple component yet this image is of the utmost importance. Your image can either be of the most striking examples of your work to date or great high resolution photo of you at work. This photograph has the opportunity to leave a lasting impression so make it good!
Have a look at some of the examples of ArtWeb members that we think really fit the bill: (Sorry, in this edition they all happen to be attactive females!)

4. Make a gallery of your images

A major advantage of facebook is the ability to share images. Begin to think: how is your work divided up? Do you have different collections? Would you like to show a tour of your studio or represent your artistic influences? We recommend that you create different albums and upload images periodically. When you update new content, users are insipired to revisit your page. We recommend always maintaining a strong image of yourself in your ‘profile’ picture and change it only once every couple of months (if at all).

5. Create a good bio and include relevant data for the ‘info’ section

As previously mentioned, visitors will definitely appreciate your art without the addition of words, but the right words can make critical connections between you and your audience. A well-written statement and biography is the backbone for any promotional effort you make, and a good statement takes time to incubate. Include:

Education (if you deem it relevant)
Current location
Prizes you may have won
Exhibitions you are involved in
Main web address

and anything else that you believe may be of interest for both you and your audience.

Take action: Add this information to the ‘info’ tab of your facebook page – click on the ‘info’ tab, then press edit information.

6. Interact with your fans

Always allow people to comment on your wall. That means every time someone comments on your new status, a photo, a video, a discussion thread, or anything else, you need to comment on it. You need to be talk to fellow artists and fans alike. They’ll ask you questions that you can reply to and you can ask questions as well. Ask for their feedback on your work in a natural way. This will ensure that fans keep coming back if you interact from your spectacular brand!

Take Action: To allow people to post on your wall, click the ‘edit page’ link (under your profile pic) then click ‘Wall Settings’ then check the ‘People who like this Page can write or post content on the Wall’ box.

7. Landing page

You can control which page people land on first and so you might like to ‘control’ their experience by making sure that new people arrive somewhere interesting like an album of your artwork. If you ideally want and get good feedback from your fans, then the wall is good too.

8. Import your twitter feed into your facebook page

We hope you’ve already started your twitter account. If not, join today, it takes literally five minutes. (don’t forget to go straight to TheArtistsWeb and ‘follow’ us too!) By importing your twitter feed into your facebook page you will have a continual flow of updated information, even if you are only ‘tweeting’. It also gives facebook fans an even more detailed look at the content you share.

You can do this using the ‘selective twitter’ facebook application (currently the official twitter facebook application only works with personal accounts).

Take Action: Go to http://www.facebook.com/selectivetwitter and click on ‘Add to my page’, then configure with your twitter username.

9. Publish useful, relevant content

Just like in other areas of social media (blogs, Twitter, etc) you can easily provide interesting content to your readers. Your Facebook page will be no different. Unlike a personal facebook page, you should use your facebook fan page to regularly reference content you think will be relevant to artists and buyers. Because you have taken the time to do this, your fans will keep returning to your page. A Facebook Page will give you a weekly update of how many visits you have had in one week, and a repeat visitors is one of the most effective measurements of the success of your communication!

So how do you find interesting content?

Start with your favourite blogs, websites, video clips, and other forms of content aggregators like Delicious.com and Digg.com. If you are outside of the new media industry, you’ll have to use traditional sources like Google News, Google Blogsearch, and the mainstream media.

You can also repaste content from other users! Just like a retweet in twitter, re-pasting other people’s content is complimentary to that person and will result in more exposure to what you want to present later.

10. Use widgets to get more fans

A widget a stand-alone application that can be embedded into third party sites by any user on a page where they have rights of authorship (e.g. a webpage, blog, or profile on a social media site). Widgets are fun, engaging, and useful applications that allow users to turn personal content into dynamic web apps that can be shared on just about any website.

End users primarily use widgets to enhance their personal web experiences, or the web experiences of visitors to their personal sites.

The use of widgets has proven increasingly popular allowing users of social media are able to add stand-alone applications to blogs, profiles and community pages.

You can put widgets on your website, other webpages you have to encourage people to become fans:

e.g. http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like-box

The bottom line is communicating about your art will help YOU learn more about it and thus how to share it effectively with others. Understand that defining your art gives you control and confidence. A great Facebook Page created especially for your career is definitely a step in the right direction. Remember until you know and understand the soul of your art, you can’t explain it adequately to others.

Visit the ArtWeb Fan Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/ArtWebcom/278685876393
And follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TheArtistsWeb

11. Monitor your progress

Facebook makes available detailed information about the visitors to your facebook page – use this information! Click on the ‘view all’ button under the ‘insights’ box on the left column. Here you can see historic data as to when people comment, like, and remove your facebook page. Pay particular attention to when there is any significant change – maybe you are posting too much and people hide you from their newsfeed, maybe you just asked a particular engaging question and this attracted a lot of opinions.

Facebook even gives you a quality rating – this is key, the better your rating the more your page’s activity will be visible across everyone’s newsfeed, so it’s really essential you work to keep that high. Use the insights section to get a reliable picture of what works and what doesn’t.

12. Be patient

Building up to a popular facebook page can take time, you’ll probably get a chunk of friends and contacts supporting you at first and then progress may not continue with exponential growth. You might be tempted to keep repeat inviting people (that’s the ‘Suggest to friends’ link), but be very cautious about doing this more than a couple of times, it’s better not to be seen as ‘spamming people’. You might also be tempted to ‘Promote with an advert’, as Facebook often encourages you to. Rather be patient at first and watch to see what organic growth your new page will muster, once you’re been up and running for a month or so then you have a better picture as to how things may continue to grow.

And finally, be sure to follow us on facebook – we’ll be continuing with more detailed articles and tips:http://www.facebook.com/pages/ArtWebcom/278685876393.

DARVISH FAKHR

American-Iranian artist Darvish Fakhr studied in Boston and London.  An award-winning and internationally exhibited artist who was recently commissioned to paint Akram Khan (now permanently on display at the National Portrait Gallery), Darvish’s work is greatly acclaimed across the globe.  Six-times exhibitor in the BP Portrait Award and winner of the 2004 BP Travel Award, his work, described as ‘how portraits should be’, encompasses a diversity of multi-cultural aspects and are very specific yet universal.  A link to his site can be found at the end of this article.

ANNE MAGILL

Born in County Down, Northern Ireland, Anne Magill started her career as an illustrator, working in advertising and was also a courtroom illustrator!  Her many awards are testimony to the standard and depth of her work.  Mysterious, atmospheric and evoking emotions surrounding each picture, her art draws the viewer in, making them feel familiar with the subjects although the subjects remain shrouded in mystery and ambiguity.  Anne’s work has been and is displayed in galleries  in the UK and world-wide.   A link to her site follows this article.

CECIL RICE

Born in 1961, Cecil Rice has lived in Brighton since 1974.  Cecil is well known for his evocative paintings of shoreline subjects and architecture. He has a passion for Italy, especially Venice, and travel has been an important inspiration behind much of his painting to date. Recent painting trips have taken him to Granada, Marrakesh and India.
Limited edition screen prints of his work can be found in London and New York galleries. His work is exhibited regularly in galleries in the UK and abroad.  A link to his site can be found at the end of this article.

In this installment, Anne and Cecil give invaluable advice on how to deal with and overcome the fear of rejection.  We also start to explore the hard work but undoubtable rewards that selling your work free of galleries and commission can bring, with  Darvish Fakhr, who has consciously made the decision not to exhibit his art in galleries but instead sell his work himself…and who has made an inspirational success of doing so!

Feel the fear…..and hide?

One element that was touched upon in the last article but not explored, was that of rejection.  Very often an artist’s fear of their long slaved-over, beloved artwork can be key in preventing them experience success in their career.  Yet it is a very real, very genuine concern and one which, in controlled measures, can spur artists on to get that gallery deal.  If it is overwhelming, it is crippling and finding the balance of thriving on the adrenaline of risk and sinking beneath the weight of fear is a hard task to master.

So, first to the fear that gets to most artists at some stage…rejection.  How to deal with it?  Should you wait until you feel emotionally ready and prepared to face rejection, criticism (even if it’s constructive) and maybe having to go back to the drawing board to make adjustments to your work as maybe suggested by art gallery owners who’ve just said a polite but firm ‘no thanks’?  Just how does such rejection make an artist feel?

Anne Magill: “Oh, it hurts!  But I get over it.  I lurch from convincing myself that I’ll never paint again one day to thinking I’ve produced the best painting of my life the next.  I realise that I can’t please all of the people all of the time.  Art is so prone to trends and it’s no good trying to keep up.  Basically just try to keep having fun doing what you do and be pleased with what you create and hope that some people that see your work ‘get it’!  As to waiting – don’t wait, dive in!! If you make work that you feel proud of then get it out there; we’re our own worst critics!  At worst galleries can only say no – and if they do, ask why.  Some won’t bother to answer (probably because they are so busy) but some might and for the most part they will be polite and helpful.  Ask them if you can keep them posted with details of your future work and future exhibitions”.

Cecil Rice: “Don’t fall into the trap of working away year after year and letting shyness make you think that you just need to do a few more good paintings…it’s remarkable how quickly you’ll see any actual problems with your artwork (vis-a-vis selling it through a particular gallery) and how you might just develop it a little bit in order to make it acceptable, if only you’ll summon up the courage to walk in there and talk to them! I do think that rejection is painful but you’ve really got no choice You must ready yourself for several reections initially.  It hurts but you may have to accommodate some pain.  Waiting may only make it worse”.

What about acting on the suggestions that may be put to you for improving your work from galleries?

Cecil Rice:  “You do have to try to remain polite and interested in what they say to you.  You may well get useful feedback which, initially,  seems like salt in a wound.  Also, galleries that don’t take you the first time may well take work on the second or third attempt if you show that you’ve been a little bit flexible and taken on board their criticisms”.

Anne Magill: “Don’t react immediately.  It might not be all that constructive or appropriate to your work in the long-term.  If you’ve plucked up the courage to get out there and galleries want to see you and your work then I’d carry on showing it around and listen to what other galleries say.  Bring another gallery’s suggestion up with them; they could put forward another completely opposite but valid viewpoint.  Wait a wee while and let all their comments sink in.  If two or three galleries say the same sort of thing then you might want to respond.  But you’ve got to be comfortable with it; it’s your work!  Don’t make knee-jerk responses”.

So you’ve got an offer from a gallery!  Yikes!  They want you!  They like your work!  Before you float off into daydreams of multiple sales and fame, you need to make sure that you understand the agreement between you and the gallery fully…don’t be afraid to ask lots of questions before sealing that deal….remember, this is YOUR work and YOUR career you’re trying to forward here….

Anne Magill: “It’s such an important decision – they represent you.  Don’t touch a gallery unless you are at least 90% sure that you want to be with thenm.  Trust your gut instincts and look closely at how they represent themselves. Ask lots of questions, such as:

• Is their website up-to-date?
• Do they print good catelogues?
• Do they exhibit at fairs?
• Is there a contract and if so what are the terms?
  
• What is their commission and what does that cover?
• Are there any extra charges; printing, postage, wine – it’s amazing what some come up with!
  
• How long do they take to pay you after a sale?
  
• Do they charge you VAT even if you aren’t VAT registered?

Don’t be afraid to ask these questions – and don’t be grateful!  Remember that everything is negotiable – including the commission.  This tells the gallery that you are professional and organised (even if you’re not!!) – so if you decide to go with a gallery that you’re not too sure about, this lets them know that you’ll be on top of things!”

Commissions, negotiations and all that jazz! What should you be looking out for from the gallery in terms of commission and ownership?

Cecil Rice : “The two main issues are commission and honesty.  You may be surprised by how much of the ‘wall price’ the gallery will take in commission; 40-50% and higher are typical rates.  Get this clear between yourself and the gallery concerned”.

Anne Magill: “The artist aways retains the copyright of their work.  If the gallery asks for it, avoid them like the plague!!  Usually the gallery commission is lower if there are extra costs.  Get EVERYTHING IN WRITING; it doesn’t actually have to be a formal contract, just a list of mutually agreed terms (i.e. who pays for what, delivery dates, how long unsold work stays at the gallery etc.) – it’s better to be clear beforehand!”.

Working with galleries can be rewarding, exciting and a fantastic experience.  But, as with most things in life, there can be exceptional instances when the experience doesn’t live up to what you’d hoped!  Cecil shares one of his…

Cecil Rice: “ One potentially nasty surprise is when a gallery doesn’t pay.  Then you can’t get hold of them by telephone because they are always out.  This happened to me once; several paintings sold over a period of time and they owed me quite a bit of money whilst being happy to allow this situation to build.  Then I heard that the gallery had closed, other people were pursuing them, the police were involved and my paintings were nowhere to be seen!  It’s not very common, but some galleries take an age to pay up and seem, always, to have to be ‘reminded’  Others are always scrupulous in this respect….those are the ones to deal with if possible”.

What if galleries aren’t for you?  What is it like to see all your work yourself?  Here, Darvish Fakhr offers his advice – which is well-received given the success that he’s had!  Cecil also has sold work without the aid of gallery input….so what are the benefits of leaving the galleries behind in favour of  doing it yourself?

Darvish Fakhr: “No commission and no agenda!  Often galleries have an agenda and try to mould their stable of artists to fit in to this concept.  As a result they may only select one aspect of your portfolio that suits their image, but in doing so deprives the viewers of a full understanding of who you are as an artist”.

Cecil Rice: “The artist benefits by not having to pay gallery commission.  They also get to meet and to talk with clients.  This has many advantages, not least that you learn what people really feel about your work at first hand.  Often this can be very positive and the inspiration can encourage you to paint.  If a gallery is selling your work it is they who form the relationship with the client”.

Any pitfalls?

Cecil Rice: “Yes, there are many possible pitfalls.  Underpricing and overpricing are two real possibilities.  Spending needlessly could be a pitfall (you could decide to spend a lot on gallery-space hire or on expensive advertising that might just be misjudged and waste you money.  On the other hand, well-placed advertising can be worth quite a lot if you subsequently sell lots of artwork).  Upsetting your gallery or galleries is a real possibility if you do not communicate clearly with them and let them know that you intend to sell privately. Some galleries may want to bind you into an agreement whereby you shouldn’t sell privately. But if such a situation occurs they would really have to sell your work very effectively. One cannot afford to be tied to a gallery that isn’t working for you”.

How do you decide who to approach when selling your art yourself?  What work is necessary?  How do you know when it’s a good call?

Darvis Fakhr: “It is a lot like a marriage.  If that chemistry is not there and you don’t feel like they understand or respect your work then I believe it is worth waiting.  If you are not getting any bites at all, this may be either of the presentation of your work, or perhaps the work is simply not at a mature enough; they may want to see how you evolve, so keep at them”.

Cecil Rice: “Over the years I have accrued  a mailing list of interested people.  Word of mouth is important.  I do know that intelligently placed advertising does work, and being part of the Brighton Open Houses helps.  That’s as much networking as I can stand, other than communicating to people who contact me by e-mail or by telephone!  I tend to hang an exhibition and then send out a lot of invitations by post. Then I place a few images of paintings onto my web pages and let e-mail contacts know about the exhibition.  Then I bite my nails and hope people will turn up to the show.  Once at the show I find that a percentage of people will buy.  Others may telephone or contact by e-mail beacause they have seen an image on the website. I always reply and try wherever possible to make contact by telephone”.

How easy is it to manage creating your work and selling it, time-wise?

Darvish Fakhr: “It is not easy at all.  I try to designate one day a week to this task, but I often skip a week simply because it is such a boring, laborious task which, more times than not, ends in disappointment.  Try to maintain a contact list of interested or potential clients and everytime you finish a piece you are proud of just zap it out there.  People love receiving art updates from people they know or are keeping up with”.

Cecil Rice: “It’s often very difficult to square everyday life with the need to paint very regularly and for longish periods.  There are a myriad of actual distractions and duties that have to be attended to.  Even answering email eats up time.  It’s important to actually get into the studio and to do the art!”.

Is it necessary to have your own studio where people can come and see your work if you don’t exhibit in galleries?

Darvish Fakhr: “Yes, this is paramount.  People love to make studio visits.  Studios are much more revealing than organized exhibitions and therefore more informative as to the artists creative sources.  It is worth keeping sketchbooks around for people to perouse through and even books of artists that you tend to look at for inspiration.  This is part of how you have chosen to shape your craft and creative spirit”.

Is there any advice you could offer to an artists contemplating whether to give their artwork themselves?

Cecil Rice: “If the first couple of attempts don’t work very well, try to understand what went wrong.  Is your work marketable?  Perhaps try a different strategy.  Perhaps take a stall at an art fair and see if you have some success there.  Try to assess how visitors are reacting.  Are they telling you things?  Do you need to do a little targeted advertising?  Keep a visitors book.  Be friendly but not gushing.  Try to smile!  Try not go get despondent (sometimes buyers just don’t turn up).  Don’t be put off.  Start to develop strategies”.

I would like to warmly thank Anne, Cecil and Darvish for their contributions in these articles.  They are very much appreciated and their advice is proving to be very beneficial to our members!

Do check out the websites for Darvish, Anne & Cecil (below) to see their amazing work and to feel inspired!

http://www.darvish.com/

http://www.annemagill.com/

http://www.cecilrice.com/

ANNE MAGILL

Born in County Down, Northern Ireland, Anne Magill started her career as an illustrator, working in advertising and was also a courtroom illustrator!  Her many awards are testimony to the standard and depth of her work.  Mysterious, atmospheric and evoking emotions surrounding each picture, her art draws the viewer in, making them feel familiar with the subjects although the subjects remain shrouded in mystery and ambiguity.  Anne’s work has been and is displayed in galleries  in the UK and world-wide.   A link to her site follows this article.

CECIL RICE

Born in 1961, Cecil Rice has lived in Brighton since 1974.  Cecil is well known for his evocative paintings of shoreline subjects and architecture. He has a passion for Italy, especially Venice, and travel has been an important inspiration behind much of his painting to date. Recent painting trips have taken him to Granada, Marrakesh and India.
Limited edition screen prints of his work can be found in London and New York galleries. His work is exhibited regularly in galleries in the UK and abroad.  A link to his site can be found at the end of this article.

GETTING INTO THE PUBLIC EYE – WHERE DOES AN ARTIST START?

With such a lot of galleries now exhibiting all genres of work, how easy is it to research and select the right galleries for your art?  Where should you start?  Will they want cd’s of your artwork or will they be prepared to look through your website?  Anne and Cecil have  learned from their experiences of this stage of the process – and one key point seems to stand out with both of them:

DO YOUR GALLERY HOMEWORK BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING ELSE!
Cecil Rice:- “To some extent researching galleries is spade-work.  I don’t see that you’ll find the best galleries for your work unless you make these efforts.  The Internet appears to give more choice and speed of research but quite a lot of those leads are illusory or simply a waste of time.  I don’t mean to sound cynical but watch out for dishonest dealers.  There are some of these and galleries sometimes do close suddenly, the owner becoming untraceable.  Try to ensure that whoever you are dealing with has a reputation for paying up reasonably promptly.  I definitely rate phone calls over e-mails and don’t be afraid to try walking into a gallery with some work. If you find someone busy, ill-tempered or tired it’ll just be bad luck. Sometimes you’ll get a good response.  I tend to try to set up an appointment first by telephone, especially if I’m going to have to travel”.

Anne Magill:- “Google the genre of work that you feel your art fits into and the country or city that you wish to exhibit in.  Look at the websites or CV’s our peers or artists whose work you admire – see where they started out showing and check out those galleries.  It’s very important to get your website sorted so you don’t have to send discs of your work or printed examples; galleries can’t be bothered trawling through all this stuff sometimes.  Prepare a brief email making contact with the gallery including your website address and contact details so they can browse through your work at leisure”.

APPROACHING THE GALLERIES WITH YOUR WORK (AND YOUR CONFIDENCE!
Anne Magill: - “Artists should only consider approaching galleries when they feel that they have found their style; that is to say a way of working that is comfortable and identifiable to themselves.  I’d go for quality rather than quantity; a group of works which are consistent in standard (about 10-15 for a gallery, about half that amount for a solo show).  A good gallery will be able to tell if there’s something there; some want instantly sell-able work and other galleries want to nurture and help artists to develop in the long-term”.

Cecil Rice: – “It took me quite a time to work up the self-confidence. The gallery will soon dismiss you if your work is very weak or not appropriate to their tastes. But many galleries will at least give you some kind of feedback.  They may well reject you to begin with but you also stand to learn a lot about what they like and don’t like about your work. One or two galleries spent hours talking to me about what they felt they could sell and what they couldn’t.  I was turned away initially but went off, did some slightly different paintings and the gallery took my work two weeks later.  Those paintings sold almost immediately and the gallery staff became excited.  They wanted as much work as I could give them.  I think that it pays to listen to what they say and to try hard not to take offence at ‘advice’, much of which does relate to their actual market.  Being genial seems to go down well.  But don’t fall into the trap of working away year after year and letting shyness make you think that you just need to do a few more good paintings… it’s remarkable how quickly you’ll see any actual problems with your artwork (vis-a-vis selling it through a particular gallery) and how you might just develop it a little bit in order to make it acceptable, if only you’ll summon up the courage to walk in there and talk to them!”

TO CALL OR NOT TO CALL? INTRODUCTION ETIQUETTE!
Anne Magill:- “I’d strongly recommend that you telephone the gallery beforehand and ask who to send your email to. You could also send them an invite to your next art show!  It’s quite rare to get an appointment to meet with a gallery owner; sometimes a recommendation can help.  You must remember that galleries are really busy so they usually in the first instance prefer to look at websites and then they call you in.  As far as cold-calling is concerned, friends that I know who run busy galleries really don’t want to be cold-called; if it sin’t a busy time you could ask for an appointment.  But 9 times out of 10 they’ll probably prefer to see work first”.

Cecil Rice:- “|I’ve cold-called!  I definitely rate personal phone calls over e-mails but don’t be afraid to try walking into a gallery with some work. If you get someone busy, ill-tempered or tired it’ll just be bad luck. Sometimes you’ll get a good response.  However, I tend to try to set up an appointment first by telephone, especially if I’m going to have to travel to see that gallery”.

GETTING THE ‘FEEL’ FOR GALLERIES – IT’S LIKE BUYING A HOUSE!
Anne Magill:- “Yes, that ‘feel’ for a gallery that you get when you find ‘that’ house is important; it’s such an important decision.  They represent you – don’t touch a gallery unless you are at least 90% sure you want to be with them.  Trust your gut instincts, look at how they represent themselves; is their website up-to-date?  Do they print good catalogues? And is the gallery clean?! With buyers it is all about first impressions.  If there is a vase of dead flowers on their desk and dust everywhere they are hardly likely to want to hang around to browse or buy”.

Cecil Rice:- “Can you get a ‘feel’ for galleries? Absolutely.  You can.  It’s very clear.  And if you are not quite sure of the ambiance you will be once you’ve had a little chat with the staff.  I approached two galleries a while ago, within the same thirty-mile area. One had colourful contemporary artwork, some of it quite pleasing and the pricing was right.  The other was rather an old-fashioned gallery, but on closer inspection the artwork on sale there was really excellent and the prices were also about right.  What clinched it for me was that the more contemporary gallery had quite a number of really gaudy and sentimental art pieces that let any of the good work down badly”.

We’d like to extend our very sincere thanks to Cecil Rice and Anne Magill for their invaluable advice and time given to support other artists facing these sometimes challenging situations.  Check their website links (below) to see their outstanding and inspirational art.

Next week, the next step; negotiations, questions & rejections!  Also the alternative route if you decide that galleries may not be for you.

http://www.cecilrice.com/

http://www.annemagill.com/

If you don’t have time to read all of this, make sure you at least Register with twitter and follow The Artists Web!

If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave a comment

What is twitter

twitter.com is a "micro blogging" service, it allows people to make ultra short posts (no more than about 20 words) called tweets. The allows you to quickly and succinctly tell the world what you are doing, thinking, liking, disliking, reading, watching, eating or just broadcast any message you like at any time.

When you register you get your own twitter profile page where people can see what you’ve ‘tweeted’. twitter users can choose to ‘follow’ other twitter users in which case they automatically receive that users ‘tweets’.

If you use facebook, or myspace you could think of twitter as the ‘status updates’ or ‘mood’ part and nothing (much) else. And yet another way of thinking of twitter is a cross between instant messaging and a blog.

youtube video

So what can artists do with twitter?

As an artist probably the most useful aspect of twitter is the ability to raise your profile and ultimately being able send people to your website/blog/online gallery and tell them about you. It’s a bit like having a mailing list/ fan club – and you can instantly send out a message to all on the list, just finished a new painting and uploaded it to your website? tweet a link to it; got an exhibition coming up? tweet a link to the gallery/post time and date; appearing in a magazine/blog/tv? tweet about it.

But it gives you much more than that! here’s a few examples

• You can network and meet like minded people
• Ask for feedback on your work
• Ask for advice
• Invite people to events/private views
• Follow people/organisations on twitter who’s opinion you respect/ find useful (e.g. The Artists Web Tate Gallery)
• Make special offers or contests "retweet my me and get 20% off my prints"
• Twitter is great for live reporting, post about what’s happening at events/openings/shows whilst you’re there

And check this article on mashable.com with some more tips.

9 Steps For Artists To Get The Most Out Of Twitter

1. Register with twitter and create a full profile

People will read your bio when searching people on twitter, make sure you use this opportunity!

2. Optionally, find a service you like for posting your ‘tweets’

You can update via sms, iphone, facebook, widget etc. see: http://twitter.com/downloads – whatever suits your lifestyle.

3. Find people to connect with

You can quickly find like minded, interesting and influential people on twitter, use http://search.twitter.com

4. Use your profile background to show your work

Although most of the background image is obscured by the tweets, if you create a background image with a narrow image left aligned it shoul!
d be visible in the left margin. Use a twitter background creator like artweet.com. Some example uses of the background image: Tokyo art beat, Jay Goldman and Natasha Wescoat

5. Be Interesting!

If you follow any popular users on twitter you’ll note that many of them are respected in their industry and tend to be giving away great advice rather than Britney Spears-esquse drivel, ‘I had a nice massage/hair do/organic hare and mushroom profiteroles today’

6. Engage with other users

Reply to other users, ask questions to your followers, retweet

7. Publicise your twitter profile

Just as you would publicise your own website, publicise your twitter profile. Invite your friends, put a link (or use a twitter badge/widget) on your website/blog/SNS profiles/email signature, mention twitte!
r when you meet people in the flesh at events etc, tell the wo!
rld you
are on twitter.

8. Keep in sync with your profiles on other social networks

If you are already on some other social networks, (facebook, misplace, bebo etc.) make sure you have the same avatar so people stumbling across you will instantly recognise you if they know your online identity already. You might also like to keep your tweets the same as your mood/status updates. There are tools out there to make this happen automatically for you e.g. facebook app, myspace app and ping.fm

9 For More Great Tips Follow Us!

http://twitter.com/TheArtistsWeb

While this list is mainly geared towards high load situations, a lot of these points can easily be applied to sites of any scale, and you never know when your quite little blog is going to be hit by digg…

Don’t serve images via application (i.e. php etc.)

I think it’s totally cool to use an on the fly image generation script, wanna tweak all the image sizes on your mega site by 1pixel, no problem: step 1) change a line in a config file step 2) no step 2! . In fact that’s the way I generally do things.

However there’s absolutely no reason why you should call this script more than one time per image. Yes I know you can handle caching in the script, but why bother? Write the images to disk and let your webserver do the dirty with caching etc. The way to do this is to ‘lazy load’ this script i.e call the script once when the first time it is requested and the rest of the time the image file is served as normal – lazy load means your server doesn’t get clogged up for hours regenerating all your images, they are only regenerated when requested. Anyway this is simple enough todo with a 404 rule or Url rewriting:

Diagram: Generate images with a script, but serve with apache (see tips below)

ErrorDocument 404 /generate_image.php

or an apache url rewrite rule:

RewriteCond $1 ^image
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /generate_image.php/$1 [L]

Then in 404.php use the ‘REQUEST_URI’ server variable to figure out what the image is – hopefully you have some sort of unique key in the file name e.g.
/image/user/bob/23.jpg
and call your image generation script , here’s a brief php example (based on the 404 redirect).

//what image is this
$url = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

$bits = explode('/',$url);

if($bits[0] == 'image' && $bits[1] == 'user')
{
		$user = $bits[2];
		$image_id = $bits[2];
		generate_image_function($user,$image_id);

		//now redirect to the image etc.

}

Do use a CDN

A content delivery network helps speed up your page loads on many levels.

• Images load faster if loaded from geographical near (to the user) server
• Multiple server mean more images can load in parallel
• It can free up resources on your application server (i.e. your website), as you can reduce the number of requests to the webserver, plus there’s no need to have a the webserver load all the bells and whislte your app needs (php modules etc.)

Poor Man’s CDN

A CDN sounds a bit scary and expensive, but if you simply move your images onto another server you’ll see a lot of the benefits already. As a simple poor man’s CDN you could do the following:

• Set up few domains for images – subdomains will do images-a.mysite.com images-b.mysite.com images-c.mysite.com
• Get hold of one or more other webservers (bog standard webhosting accounts will do)
• Use your app or round robin dns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_robin_DNS to randomly prepend your domains to your image urls e.g.

  http://images-a.mysite.com/image/user/bob/97892789.jpg

• Copy/rsync your /image folder to the other server(s) with a cronjob
• On the image servers have a 404/urlrewrite rule that sends the user back to the original server for images that aren’t yet copied across.
  .htaccess example:

  RewriteCond $1 ^image
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L]

This will work even if all the domains are on the same server (but different to your app) and aliasing to the same directory, plus it sets you up ready for exansion later when you really do need to break out onto multiple servers.

Poor man’s CDN plan B – Amazon S3

Well this could perhaps be the plan A, as you’ll see in the point below S3 could act quite nicely as a CDN being a geographically dispersed set of redundant servers! I think my main concern would be the potential for the bandwidth costs to rise, they’ll be cheap enough to begin with, but it seems to me the cost scales closely with the bandwidth – if you compare 5TG monthly transfer: on S3 = $900 to dreamhost = included in basic plan.

Do host data sources (precious original images) on a third party infinite disk

If you’ve got some funky image auto regeneration going on, or you simply want to store higher resolution ‘originals’ then you’ll need a large warehouse and caretaker to look after then. Ideally multiple redundant replicated warehouses and caretakers in case one gets suicide bomber attacked etc.

When I started The Artists Web I realised storage would be the first bottle neck I’d hit, so I quitely hoped the problem would just go away. In fact it did just go away because one day I discovered Amazon S3, moreover I read on Don MacAskill’s blog that his company switched over in about a day. So did we.

Amazon S3 is essentially an infinite network disk, I won’t go in to any technical details here but it’s cheap, easy to set up and spreads your data around the world in multiple redundant locations. There’s plenty of libraries, command line tools and a few commercial services to boot.

Don’t store images in a database

When I was planning a few years back, I remember reading forum threads debating whether it was a good idea to store images in a database. The reason I liked the idea of storing images in a database is centralization of data – no need to manage image back up separately. Arguments against seemed to be more about having to do your own caching, use of resources etc. However, you can out put cache headers from your scripts, write the (thumbnail) files to the file system etc. to get round all these performance issuses.

Nice as the central backup idea is, the problem (as I learned the not so easy way) comes when you have more than a few hundred images – you have a Ghostbusters Marshmallow man crossed with a cow size database to back up. Even if you’re running backups off a replicated slave, your database is (most likely) many orders of magnitude larger than it needs to be which leads to all kinds of headaches. For instance disk space, restoring from backups or simply running a simple optimize table routine on a 100GB table is not my idea of a nice cron job (pun intended). And this feels somewhat like trying to swim with a pointless cow handcuffed to your ankle when the rest of your data is less than 48k (well, okay 480MB). There may be some reasons why ‘enterprise’ databases (oracle?) don’t mind this kind of cow sitting inside them, but I only have experience of ‘toy’ databases like mysql.

Don’t store your images in your database kids.

Do use a class/function to get image urls

Your image url schema is probably simple, something like : /images/username/size_imageid_imagename.jpg. So is it really worth having a function/class to generate urls? Well it’s certainly not going to hurt and is going to save time later on: want to shift to a CDN? substitute smaller images for mobile devices? serve the image from a different server depending on geographic location of the user?, no problem, most of these could be done with a few lines of code added to the image url class.

//normal images
$image_url->get_image_url($image_id);
$image_url->get_user_avatar($user_id);

//mobile devices? piece of cake
$image_url->set_mobile_device();
$image_url->get_image_url($image_id); //returns url to smaller image size
$image_url->get_user_avatar($user_id); //ditto

Do use a config file for image sizes

If you’re following the above rule, then you’ll probably be doing this anyway:

class image_url ()
{
		var $tiny_thumbnail_size = 30;
		var $thumbnail_size = 200;
		var $image_size = 400;

		/* etc. */

}

Simply make sure you only need to specify your images sizes in one place.

That’s it (for now)

Well I’m sure I’ll be back to add some more points, in the meantime hope you find this a useful read and look forward to your feedback!