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Kimberly Kradel posted an update in the group
Blogging Here! 1 year, 3 months ago Just spent a few moments over on WordPress.com exploring what the site offers bloggers on the backend in the way of permissions and features. I have a test blog over there, but I’ve never used it. It’s making me rethink some things from a user perspective. If you’ve got a secondary, or primary, blog on the WordPress.com site, I’d love to hear what features you like or don’t like, or actually need. Need being the operative word. I know @richardburke and @wampoline have blogs over there …
Questions I have for you:
Do you need a lot of handholding over on WordPress.com? We use the same system as they do, so I’m wondering if a lot of the handholding might be eliminated if I up everyone’s user status.Would offering more themes be attractive or distractive to the site? I like the idea of everyone making the theme we are using beautiful by using their art work/photographs to do so.
Is it really important to be able to edit your sidebar? Giving you the ability to do that also gives you the ability to muck with the theme, which I am hesitant to do.
My primary blog is http://imagery49.wordpress.com/. I switched to this as my primary blog but still have a blog on blogger. I haven’t needed any “handholding” although I have yet to figure out how to install plugins. I think this is because I don’t have my own domain name and use the wordpress domain. It is not so much the themes that are important to me as it is statistics. Yesterday I sold a T-Shirt and I can trace that sale directly to a click through on my blog. It is is absolutely necessary to be able to edit the sidebar. This is where we can place ads and again on a Wordpress blog track those ads to sales. It is absolutely necessary to embed video. I would imagine this is needed even more by artists who have Gallery shows. Videos of gallery openings could be a great sales tool. I am still posting on artist-at-large but not as frequently. The reason for this is that I am spending more time on my primary blog. I like what I read on artist-at-large and I like it as a place to hobnob with fellow artists, although I don’t consider myself to be an artist but rather an artistic photographer and primarily a photojournalist.
OK, so what you’ve said has helped me get more clear about how to sell the idea of having a blog on the site.
As far as the sidebar – ads are exactly what I don’t want in the sidebars. I think if an artist or photographer wants to sell their work from the site, and that bit I do want to encourage, they should make posts or pages and write about their work that is for sale, in whatever form it is for sale. For instance, if one of your photographs in a post is also on redbubble, add a link at the bottom of the post to the image’s sell sheet on redbubble. You have a book for sale, do a sell page for the book.
I agree that stats are important. I’ve lost a lot of my stats with the combination of the site redesign and the new format of the stat system on WordPress.com coming into play at exactly the same time. Stats for this site come through WordPress.com, but the stat feature at WordPress.com is broken. I think someone, somewhere is working on a way to workaround this problem, but I haven’t heard anything yet.
Having videos for Editors would be nice … still looking for the workaround on that too.
Hey Kimba – i was mostly interested in wordpress for the theme choice – but my underlying goal was to completely re-do my website, and i was trying to find the best template to do so. For the moment my wordpress blog is fairly dormant – i am only using it right now to post writing, not much in terms of photo or art (or not at all). So i guess my best answer would be – let me tell you in a few months, when i’ve gotten more involved in the site-building process. As far as handholding – i’ve worked with wordpress before so i know the basic format, and i’m finding the wordpress help community pretty good about plugins and such (but again, i am still not doing much of that yet)
OK :) Yes, solutions that work in the WordPress.com (or more rightly the .org) support community should work here as well.
As far as artist-at-large, i think the simplicity works, i don’t know if it would be good to have lots of competing themes going on…
Yes, I’ve always thought so – the site would not be a cohesive group if there were willy nilly themes …
I think I need to go edit the “Become A Member” page …