Utilizing Our Artist Blogs

Thanks for the suggestion Skip, I may give it a try... :-)

Great !.....Skip....I don't see your name on that header.....just curious.
You are such a great communicator, AND, have so many tales to tell!
My turn....duh!......is there a BLOG at the AW?


I do keep an FAA blog,now with.......9000 ! ....... visitors! To my utter amazement! So, I can post it at AW?

The Blog title /link is too long for me to copy/paste here from my miniIPad browser,lol.
"Continued Treasured Comments................."

So, I try to keep it up front at the FAA link to our Blogs, via Community, Member Blogs.

@Matthias, just looking for all the ways we can at least try. :)

@Vivian, if you go to the main page you see my name and photo, and I'm on the "about page". I was trying to keep it a little less about my name being constantly in the visitor's face all the time. I'm not sure if that's a mistake or not. I might at least try to add a ghosted version of my name embedded in the background.

To be honest, all of this "self promotion" we're required to do as artists is very awkward for me. Feels too narcissistic. I'm not saying it is... it's just that it someone feels dirty. Figured I'd try to keep that art to a tolerable minimum.;)

I used to use the FAA/Pixels blog more, but didn't think anyone was really seeing it and it was redundant. But, I'm trying it now to see if over time the extra relevant content gets more easily picked up in Google searches.

Skip, when I try to look at your artist web site I get an almost blank screen with an icon inviting me upgrade my flash player. I'm not getting this other members sites, do you have something different on your home page.
using an android tablet, perhaps someone else with a similar device could check

Seriously?!

Paul, maybe you just happened to have been trying to view my page while I was updating the top banner with my name ghosted in? Would you mind checking again? It would be very unfortunate if it's not working now, because after being told by Sean and Abbie that we're just not promoting ourselves enough... Or, just not trying hard enough... I've been promoting like crazy for the last few days.

I've done everything Sean recommends, etc. I have nothing special on my page. Basically stock with a modified banner and a logo image.

Forgive me if I get a little "negative", but if my freakin' @#$% "artist website" page basically doesn't work... after all that... well, I just plain give up. :(

Stumbles off into the inky dark night of his soul with shoulders slumped like a beaten dog who no longer fights the whip. He kicks the dirt, mutters some profane nonsense, and shakes his head in utter disbelief.

The only tablet device I have access to is an iPad. And, although the blog page I was just touting & recommending utilizing, is loading all messed up in portrait orientation. Everything overlapped. Looks somewhat acceptable in landscape mode.

Glitchy looking, but nothing that would prevent browsing images.

Could be some issue on other platforms though. Looks ok on my MacBook Pro.

I'm really hoping it was just something to do with Paul just happening to visit my page while was updating the banner, but I had Google analytics running live reporting and it didn't show that anyone was browsing the site while I was making edits.

Skip, sorry for the delay getting back to you, sleep and work got in the way
No different I'm afraid, also just tried it on my android phone and same results, both devices are Samsung, the tablet is a Tab 3 and phone Galaxy S4 and fully updated. Both show a small message asking me to update my flash player. If I click on the icon I get a new screen opening saying my device does not support flash.
I've just done a random check on half a dozen other members that use these forums and their web site are all ok,
Perhaps somebody else reading this could check with an Android device

Edit: Just checked on my Widows laptop, it work ok but I notice you are using BananAlbum their web site says it uses flash so I suspect that is the problem. I see that flash can be installed on Android manually if required but it's not on the device by default

Yes, I've noticed my blog posts from AW in search. So have my buyers ... so they tell me. Also, remember you can send a monthly email through the email campaign and create your own SEO direct to your buyers .... What I do is provide the first paragraph or two of each blog post from the past month with a link to complete the article on the AW blog. The only difference I see is the button you see " Click to learn more " is missing on AW, but is included on the FAA side along with the RSS link.

Hey Paul,thanks for checking, but I think you're not actually going to my "Artist Website" http://skip-hunt.artistwebsites.com

The only site I'm using banana is an old site that I leave up since some seem to like its layout skiphuntphotography.com but I haven't updated it in years. I've been thinking of rerouting that address to one of my more current sites. Maybe to the artist website but with all the things I've recently learned regarding the search stuff I haven't decided if I'm sticking with FAA/Pixels at this point. Figured I'd at least try a few more work-arounds before deciding whether or not to move on.

Would you mind checking the actual artist website? http://skip-hunt.artistwebsites.com

Frank, I used to use the FAA/Pixels email campaigns a lot, but found they mostly wouldn't get through, or sent to bulk mail, or snagged as spam at the mail servers.

I switched to mailchimp a couple years ago and at least have better luck with the campaigns getting through, with much better performance tracking as well.

Yes, I think you are correct
I was following this route
Click on your avatar in this forum - this takes me to your FAA site, under your avatar there is a link "visit web site" - that's the link I'm using

I has assumed your Artist web site was the one linked to on the FAA site, hope you'll soon recover from the panic I caused - by the way the links above don't work, there should be a 's' after website, as in
http://skip-hunt.artistwebsites.com/

Paul, that was from before there were artist websites here. Guess I've been here too long. ;)

I did manage to discover the layout glitches in portrait mode via iPad though. Had no idea it looked that bad,

Just corrected the AW links, updated my bio page to point to my main blog & it took awhile to find where to change the visit website link, but it now points to the AW site. So, the induced panic was indeed very useful.

Need to figure out if it's worth keeping the skiphuntphotography.com site, or pointing it somewhere else like the AW site. Everyone seems to first go to the skiphuntphotography address first, but I don't know whether to kill the site or reroute to a more current one.

I'm tempted to just reroute to my artist website, but I'm not certain Im going to continue utilizing it. I'm trying some new things out to see if I can somehow adapt to Sean's algorithms that favor mostly the biggest sellers. I'm not all that confident I'll succeed in this environment, but I'm going to keep trying a little longer even though it feels like I'm only grasping at straws. Won't go down without a fight. :)

Paul,

Actually went to my old skiphuntphotography.com site to put in some browser detection code, but it appears I'd already done that a few years ago. Evidently it wasn't working for your device, but it was working for iOS stuff, ie. visitors using iPods/iphones/ipads and blackberry devices were auto redirected.

Found some other script to specifically redirect if the browser doesn't have flash installed.. and got it working for iOS devices, but it broke the desktop display version. I FREAKIN' HATE FLASH!!! ;) I think Steve Jobs was right on the money within disdain for Flash.

So, after about 3hrs now, I just gave up and set up a URL forwarding to the AW site for now. It was easy enough and was almost immediate. So, if I decide to abandon FAA/Pixels and not have my skiphuntphotography.com domain forward there, it's easy to change it to something else.

Most likely, I'll just build a whole new site for that domain name at some point. For now, I'll see if I can get this FAA/Pixels/Artist Website approach to work out better for me before setting up something new.

If you're a lightroom user and decide to build your website again I can recommend plugins by The Turning Gate
http://theturninggate.net
they produce a professional site that is easy to keep upto date. (Without using flash)

If you're a lightroom user and decide to build your website again I can recommend plugins by The Turning Gate
http://theturninggate.net
they produce a professional site that is easy to keep upto date. (Without using flash)

Paul, I've got a couple of sites on squarespace at the moment. Really like their features and especially they're incredible customer support. I've got 2 domain names I'm still paying for skiphuntphotography.com and poppinfreshmedia.com. The sites for each of these were old-school html static sites I built and hosted on Yahoo Small Business, which I'm also still paying for.

The poppinfresh was too dated and also used some flash, so that URL is forwarding somewhere now too. Can't remember where, but likely my kaleidoscopeofcolor.com site.

What I haven't figured out is if it's better for Google indexing to have a bunch of URL's all pointed or forwarded to one place? Or, to have several stand-alone sites with varied content, but all interconnected to each other via links and image references.