I’ve just updated my long-time artist friend Derek DeYoung’s website canvasfish.com. I’m a huge fan of his style, and greatly honored to work with him on his site.  His style of painting has been attracting people from all over the world, and he desperately needed a stronger web-site to display his wonderful artistic gift to that growing audience.  I’ve been tracking his sites analytic’s via Google for the last several years, and let me tell you, the visitors are unlike any I’ve seen before.  He captures an average users attention for close to 10 minutes “insane”.  The gallery of the site seems to keep people integrated for an astonishing duration.  This of course opens lots of opportunities to market his merchandise to this captive audience.  What i came up with, seems to be working already.

The new site uses wordpress, and the open source gallery2 server CMS tools.  These tools enable he, and his wife Janell to easily add blog posts, merchandise, and photos with very minimal coding experience.  I’m hoping that Derek pours his artistic daily endeavors, and successes often with the site’s blog to tap into the gold-mine that a blog provides for organic search placement.  Judging by the site’s historical stats, i think his audience will be very pleased to share this closer relationship with their favorite fish artist.

One of the main objectives of the project was to make his merchandise available for purchase directly on the site.  This task would attempt to alleviate all the email, phone, and exhibition only purchasing his average connoisseur would typically endure to acquire anything from a decal to and original.  By providing his audience the run of all his available merchandise we hoped to spawn sales of different non high volume items that might otherwise be overlooked.  Derek offers his work in many different formats to help consumers show their support regardless of budgetary status.  One of the most popular products Derek offers is Giclee Prints.  These signed, and numbered prints offer his collectors an affordable alternative to acquire their favorite originals with a slightly different provance.  By adding a Giclee Prints section to the web-site we’ve enabled users to browse his work by species.  This feature opens up his entire catalog to users who would under normal circumstances only see a select few.  I’m very excited about the possibilities of this new merchandise section.

Another feature we added to the site to help promote available merchandise was a banner ad.  This ad rotates all of the seasonal deals Derek is offering.  The banner was created in flash and loads all of the ad data from an easily updated xml file.  A fun aspect of this banner was adding in season falling items.  For the holiday sale I’ve got snow-flakes, the fall has leaves, and I’ve been brainstorming what we’ll have for the other seasons, but I’m thinking flowers for spring, and fire-crackers for the 4th.

This project is my largest wordpress themed site to date.  With every new site i create using these very flexible CMS tools, I learn more, and am more impressed with the ease of integration.  Most of the sites I’ve built using these cms tools are for friends, but I have to believe with tools this easy to use, and so well supported by their respective community’s, why would anyone make their own that provide a quarter of the functionality, and ui ease of use.  One of my observations with working at agencies is the attitude that the best solution is a custom built one.  Unfortunately you can’t throw away the hundreds of hours these cms communities have spent on updates, variations, and painfully simple UI.  Viva la open source content management tools!

In conclusion I wish Derek the very best with his new site canvasfish.com, and hope that his audience will enjoy the artist I’ve know for years in a much more approachable way via this new artistic portal.