MatthewS's blog

I feel humbled.  24 hours after I officially launched this gallery:

• More than 155 167 visits from 26 27 countries have visited.  Not that this is incredibly heavy traffic, but still...
• On average, folks have spent time on 4.62 pages. 
• I've had half a dozen people IM me shocked that they didn't know my roots as an artist.
• I've had one inquiry after a piece of work
• Googling "Matthew Saunders Gallery" returns #3 in rankings
• 10 tweets related to the gallery have crossed the twitter stream

I want to thank everybody who has popped online and taken a look at my work.  If you like what you see, even if you aren't interested in purchasing, please let me know.  Better yet, let somebody else know about the artwork.  Follow me on Twitter or Plurk as @creech - I regularly send out messages.

Finally, if you are an artist, keep coming back.  There will be additional announcements in the near future that might be of interest!

Anyway, thanks for a sweet little launch!  I appreciate it.

Welcome to the Dogstar Art Gallery.  I built this gallery for several reasons.

1. I am an artist who lives in Colorado.  I needed a site to market my own work that was flexible that I could add or remove products quickly and easily. 
2. I needed a shopping cart.
3. I wanted something that could handle sales tax.
4. I needed the flexibility of being able to have stock levels that range from one item to an infinate number of items.
5. I wanted something that would optimize well with Search Engines.
6. I wanted a blog a part of the site so I could write about what I was working on.
7. I wanted to be able to easily break items up into categories like Mixed Media and Photography.
8. I wanted a contact form.
9. Finally I wanted something that I could replicate to sell site setup services to other artists.

It just so happens that Drupal provides an ideal framework for this kind of site.  Constructing this during the evenings proved to be pretty fun.

If you're interested in having a site like this one, drop me a line at matthew at dogstar dot org or use the contact form on the site.  I'd be happy to set you up for $300 as an introduction to the system.  I partner with Brownrice Internet for hosting.  Brownrice charges $14.95 per month and you get email addresses with that.  You will also need a secure certificate to keep payments safe.  That will cost $49/year which includes setup and installation.

In general, once you've signed up, I can have your site delivered in about a week.  You'll be responsible for setting up your own products.