SANDY GARNETT ART BLOG

I’m taking a hard look at managedartwork.com, the best online gallery software I have seen for the price.  This is not a cheap product but it is very attractive and robust in features.  I have grown to enjoy the format of a site being hosted and designed by a service.  Although my posts are choppy lately on the blog the service makes perfect sense and is a pleasure to use, squarespace.com that is.  I recently signed on for a year with foliolink.net, which is another such gallery product, although much more limited than managedartwork.com.  I go to their site, I upload my work, selecting templates along the way, and the experience has been pleasant and excellent.  By contrast designing my own website is labor intensive, requires me learning programs and updating software, managing data on my hard drive which is such a pain, and hiring web design at an average of 150 month to do stuff I don’t want to do.

managedartwork.com handles all of this and more.  They do contact management, inventory for originals and editions, ecommerce, web tracking, email, bulk email like constant contact, favorites pages for returning clients, logins and guest registers, invoicing, automatically generated reports, labeling for shows, authentication papers for sales, a framing module for your collectors, and so on.

 My system as mentioned in a post recently uses Office, Filemaker, macmail, Maxprog bulk emailer, Quicken, Word, Quark, to run the admin of my business.  None of this data, these programs and layouts, talk to each other, so I’m always doing redundant data entry.  And none of these programs help me sell; on the contrary, I’ve got to reassert my personal sales force (me) on a weekly basis, which requires considerable effort which could be assisted tremendously by the product I am leaning towards.

There is one major competitor, the industry standard Artsystems.  I don’t like their interface as much and they seem top heavy.  Managedartwork.com started in Portland 2001 and now works with 95 galleries around the world.  None of their clients have ever left.  The program is built for a gallery, and I function namely as a wholesale gallery, my various genres could replace different artists in a gallery site.  I run my own business so I often think about business solutions.  My major concern is security and how this company intends to grow.  They say they are at the beginning of a long road, every client owns his own data that noone can access save the owner of the data (like banking security), one’s data can be downloaded daily for backup in standard data formats and so on.  

 I think that this system may well save me time, money, by consolidating with one system.  They are not cheap, 150 - 300 month, but this includes hosting and all the a la carte services you care to have on top of this.  I would venture to estimate that my web hosting, foliolink with ecommerce, a bulk email program like constant contact (30-50 monthly) might cost 100. and web design might be another 100 month.  There is a setup fee as well, which covers the implementation of your website into their system (they do most of this in the setup fee) and data transfer.

In the end it’s the change which requires the energy but in the long run managedartwork.com is built well for galleries or professional artists who have a large breadth of work and a strong collector base.