The great questions keep rolling in! Here’s another great question from “Ask a Question“. In this one, fiber artist, Kaythe is asking about whether it’s a good idea to remove her website address from her hangtags because of a request from one of her gallery accounts.

Hi Nicolette,

My name is Kaythe. I make hand dyed scarves that I sell in gift shops. I’m finishing up my web page and I’ll be selling some of my scarves online as well. My question is that after I listened to your interview about how to get people to come to your site by putting your web address on business cards and postcards, I thought that I’ll start adding my web page to the hangtags for my scarves. But some of the gift shops I sell to don’t want me to put my contact information on my hangtags. What should I do? Should I make two set of tags and have one set that does have my information and one without? Or should I just not include my web page at all? I want people to visit my web page. How can I do that if I can’t include my web page address?

If you’re selling both online and in retail galleries and gift shops this is a common problem. This is what I wrote to Kaythe.

Hi Kaythe,

This is a common dilemma that a lot of artists face when they are selling both online and in retail galleries and gift shops. I’ve run into this issue myself a couple times where a gallery wanted me to remove my email address and website from my jewelry cards. I even had one gallery that wanted me to remove my company name from my jewelry card because they were afraid the someone was going to Google my company name find my website!

Basically it comes down to this. If you are already selling galleries and want to open up a retail web store for your work, you have to decide how valuable your gallery accounts are to you and how you will handle issues like this. Some gallery owners may be cool about you having a retail website (that is a website where you sell directly to the public) as long as you don’t directly compete with them and some may not be. For some galleries that means that you don’t underprice them on your website. For others that means that you don’t try to direct their customers to your website through your packaging like jewelry cards, inserts, and hangtags.

If you value the relationship with your galleries then don’t include your contact information on your hangtag if they request that you remove it. This is a common concession. You can either print two separate forms of your hangtags, one with contact information for those items that you sell either through shows or online and one set without contact information for those items you sell through galleries. Or you can design your hangtags without your contact info and simply add your website address onto the tag using a small sticker or label so you won’t have the hassle of designing and printing two sets of hangtags.

If you’re hoping that you can use your gallery accounts as a “lead generation tool”…that is you’re using your presence in a gallery as a way to direct people to your website so you can capture future sales, you’re looking at the artist-gallery relationship wrong. Most galleries aren’t interested in being used as a tool to generate new customer leads for the artist. Remember that once you put your work in a gallery you become partners. The customers that come into the gallery to buy your work is just as much their customer as they are yours. And they’ve spent a lot of time and effort to bring that customer into their gallery. Actively trying to cut them out of future sales is not a great way to maintain that partnership.

Before you open your website, you’ll need to decide how you will deal with the hangtag issue and all other issues related with your website and your wholesale gallery accounts. I’ve written a newsletter article called “How to Sell Online…Without Losing Your Wholesale Accounts” that addresses some of these issues and how to deal with them. I’ve attached a copy of the article so you can read it and get more information.

Good Luck!

If you want a copy of my past newsletter article, “How to Sell Online…Without Losing Your Wholesale Accounts“, send me an email at info[at]craftedweb[dot]com, and I’ll send you a copy. If you haven’t listened to my free audio download, “How to Market Your Website Offline“, you can listen to a small excerpt here:

 

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Do you have a burning question about websites or promoting yourself online? Click on the “Ask a Question” tab at the top of the page and send me your question. I’ll send you an answer to your question personally.

I have to thank Alyson Stanfield over at the Art Biz Blog for the link to this Wall Street Journal article about “The Lost Art of Writing About Art“.

Apparently the art critics writing about the biennial exhibition of contemporary art at the Whitney Museum weren’t so much criticizing the art as they were criticizing the commentary about the art. I believe the criticism involved the words…”unalloyed gibberish”.

Ouch!

Why is it the fashion to use phrases like “inhabits those interstitial spaces between understanding and confusion” (an actual excerpt from the exhibition) when it comes to writing about or talking about art? I experienced a lot of this when I was in school. When the professor called on students to make a statement about their work, those budding artists seemed to automatically gear up into this kind of high flown and incomprehensible language to describe a collage made out of paper and a variety artfully arranged found objects.

And I, who much to the disappointment of my professors and fellow students never quite got the knack of inventing such phrases like “invents puzzles out of nonsequiturs” (another actual excerpt), would be at the back of the class rolling my eyes.

And guess what? That’s how most people will react to your artist statement or any kind of description or commentary about your work if you start writing about how your work “is a conflation of art space and work space” (the hits just keep on coming!).

If you’re exhibiting in galleries or museums, if you’re selling at an art or craft show, if you have a brochure or website, sooner or later you’ll be called upon to write about yourself or your work. Your artist bio and artist statement are the things that speak for you and your art when you aren’t there to speak for yourself. Do you want your potential customers to roll their eyes when they are reading your artist statement?

When you’re writing about your work, be natural. Pretend that you’re explaining what you do to your best friend. That doesn’t mean that you should be talking down to people or that you can’t use 50 cent words like “nonsequiturs” if you need to. Just don’t go for the complicated word or phrase when a simpler one will work just as well. And FYI, no one is going to type in “nonsequiturs” when they are Googling your website. So web-wise, writing naturally about your work will not only make your fans and customers happy, it will also make Google happy when they are trying to rank your site in search engine results.

If you’re in the midst of writing an artist statement, artist Deanna Wood wrote a great blog post on how to write an artist statement a while back ago. Check it out for some great ideas. Plus, read a previous post I did on what words to avoid when you’re writing your artist’s bio. I’ll admit that I’ve been guilty of using these words!

If you’re interested in how not to write your artist statement, check out Carol Diehl’s blog, Art Vent. She wrote about the Whitney exhibit and was the source of these interesting tidbits from the show.

A while back ago, I wrote about some tools you should get to help you maintain your website. One piece of software that’s really helpful is something called a text editor. A text editor is a program that allows you to type documents in plain text…without any formatting or special characters. If you want to be able to open up an individual HTML page and look at the code underneath, you’ll need a text editor in order to see it properly. Text editors are also important for preventing garbled text in your web pages and emails when you’re cutting and pasting text out of Microsoft Word

PCs come with a free text editor called Notepad. You’ll usually find it under “Accessories”. Unfortunately Macs didn’t have a free Notepad equivalent installed so Mac users needed to buy a text editor called BBEdit, which is about $125.

BBEdit is a great little text editor and I’ve used it for years to help me edit code for my website, write my email newsletters, to clean up text cut out of Word…heck I’ve even used it to make up a grocery list. But if you’re a Mac user and your budget is a little tight, you can try out a free text editor called Smultron (nope…I’m not sure how to pronounce it).

I’ve been testing it for a bit and it seems to work very much like BBEdit…and you can’t beat the price (free!). Check it out and download your own copy here.

Here’s another question that I got about websites from my Ask A Question feature. John is asking about why his website looks different on different browsers…

Hey heres my question. I finished building my website and it looks fine on my computer, but when my friend looks at it the top is all messed up. He’s looking at on using IE6, but it looks fine when I look at it on my computer. I use IE7 and Firefox. What’s going on? Does it look like this when everyone sees it. Any help would be great.

Ahh…browser differences…the bane of every web designer’s existence. Here was my reply.

Hi John,

This is is not unusual at all, in fact it’s pretty common. If you look at the same web page on two different browsers, say Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox, it’s not usual to see differences in how the web page looks. You can even find differences in different versions of the same browser. Older versions of Internet Explorer can display the same web page very differently than the newer version. You can even see some differences if you’re using Internet Explorer for PC and Internet Explorer for Mac. Which explains why when someone is looking at your website using Internet Explorer 6 they see the messed up header as opposed to someone using Firefox who will see your website perfectly.

Internet Explorer in particular seems to be especially bad about this issue. Most of the newer browsers like Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, and Safari all follow a set of standards in how they display web pages, which makes them fairly consistent when in comes to viewing and designing web pages. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer doesn’t always follow these standards, which is one reason why you get these differences.

What makes this even more difficult is that Internet Explorer is also the most popular browser in use on the Internet, so you can’t really ignore it. Fortunately, more standards compliant browsers like Firefox like are becoming more popular and supposedly the newest version of Internet Explorer, which is version 7, is more standards compliant than the older versions of IE. But there’s still a lot of people that use older versions of IE, so you or your designer needs to be especially careful about looking at your website using different browsers, on different computers, and looking at your website using different version of of the same browser.

One easy way to check to see what your website looks like on different browsers is to go to a website called Browsershots. There you can enter in your website address and then you’ll get screenshots of your website in different web browsers. It’s a free service and you can check it out at: http://www.browsershots.org

As for your website, if you had a designer build your site for you, drop them a line and tell them that your site needs to be fixed for IE6. Most designers should be familiar with these issues already. If you’re building your own website, here are a few articles that can help you:

• Explorer Exposed!
• Designing for IE - Design for Firefox First
Designing for Every Browser: How to Make Your Site Fully Cross Browser Compatible

These links might be a bit geeky but they should help you if you’re already familiar with web design.

Good Luck!

Do you have a burning question about websites or promoting yourself online? Click on the “Ask a Question” tab at the top of the page and send me your question. I’ll send you an answer to your question personally.

…while we’re on the subject of domain names, be sure that you check any name that you’re planning on registering thoroughly for misspellings or some potentially embarrassing misinterpretations. If you’re not careful, your innocent art website could be mistaken for something else.

Check out this article with some examples of perfectly innocent websites with perfectly terrible looking (or sounding) domain names.