Name of your website?Artsified.com
Your name?
Lee Long
Your Location (city, etc)
Birmingham
When did you start your website and why?
We developed www.artsified.com in April, 2007, to give people the ability to show their pet's personality through art. In addition, we have many clients and friends that are interested in helping animals and providing safe, loving homes for strays and we wanted to contribute to that effort. Short of adopting every animal they found [which we've done several times], we decided to develop a site where we could financially assist the many groups that are so dedicated to helping less fortunate animals.
Please give us a short summary of your website, business model, etc
Artsified.com is a site that provides animal enthusiasts with the opportunity to show their pet’s personality through art and capture it on canvas, and also offers entry into the Artsified.com pet photo contest. 40% of the contest entry fee is donated to the charity selected by the most entrants. The contestants are posted on Artsified.com and voted on to determine the winner, which receives free Artsification, 30% of the contest entry fees and inclusion in the Artsified.com calendar.
What has been the most difficult part of creating and running your website?
Capturing a pet's personality requires coercing a human to think like their pet – to answer questions on behalf of their pet - which may not coincide with their own interests. The difficult, ongoing part is trying to figure what questions to ask that will really help personify a pet – give them a voice, so to speak. Power to the pet.
What has been the easist part of operating your website?
Simply developing the concept of the site. Because of our love of animals and our exposure to all pets – we knew they needed a voice – we just needed to give them the forum to do so.
What was your biggest mistake?
We'll keep you posted... :)
Who maintains your website and why?
We do. What better way to ensure that it's updated and exactly the way you envision it.
Tell us how your business has benefitted from your website?
We'll keep you posted...
What are your views on ecommerce and the future of the internet?
eCommerce has opened many doors for small businesses with great ideas and allowed their entry into the mainstream because of those great ideas. People ultimately decide if your idea is worth their attention, regardless of your business size, which is the beauty of the Internet. The important aspect is respecting the consumer, providing a worthwhile service that a consumer deems valuable and growing that service to remain in line with the consumer’s expectations.
What are your views on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
We have worked with many clients on this very aspect of their business and the reality is that most didn’t have a clue about the importance of page titles or relevant content. While SEO is an ever-changing environment on the web, there are some obvious optimization tools that just define the basis for sound web site design. Once those are identified and optimized, introducing ad words and other marketing affiliate programs becomes an easier situation. People have a tendency to shy away from what they don’t understand – our job is to make all of the SEO “stuff” make sense to them.
What are your views on Search Engines? Have they helped or hindered your website?
For this specific site, we'll keep you posted. Overall, our SEO activities have helped all of the web sites that we’ve engaged. Tracking the results and helping clients understand the outcome is still a bit of a hurdle but being able to illustrate the results certainly helps.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Again, we'll keep you posted. Since this is an internal project, we're going to try all of our SEO techniques and figure what works the best. It's a great exercise to help us determine successful techniques for clients, as well.
What method has been least successful for promoting your website?
N/A
What would you like to see change with respect to the internet?
The Internet offers so much possibility – to attempt to limit the scope now would be short-sited. While there will likely be many more iterations of how we search the Internet, the availability of it to almost everyone certainly has changed how many people understand and access information and make informed decisions, which is priceless.
What is your website address?
Artsified.com