Hey fellow Untapped Artists!

This is Matthew from www.theuntappedsource.com with an update for all of you on what’s going on with the site lately. Here is a quick run down for you of what is in this bulletin.

1. New look!
2. Advertising
3. Business cards for you!
4.  Protecting your work
5.  Banner for our website
6.  Misc. Thoughts

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1. New Look!
Please check out the new home page and gallery if you have not been on the site lately. Press the refresh button on the main page to see various images from the site appear, as we have made it so all artwork on the site has a chance to show up on the front page at one point or another. We now have separation by digital/traditional/photography. And we have begun to help push the artists with the new “Featured Artist” on the main page, we will be interviewing all of you for this feature in a bit so everyone has a chance to get to be a featured artist. However, if you want to get that status, you must have at least 10 pieces in your gallery at The Untapped Source. We are going to have a news section soon too, which will have our press releases and other important info that we want to share. There are many new features all over the site, just look around and see for yourself. And as always, any suggestions you have are welcome. If we are all to benefit from The Untapped Source as the company grows, we should all be involved!

2. Advertising
We are working to advertise everyone’s work. We have a consistent and comprehensive plan that will soon be taking effect. In the meantime, referring those interested in buying prints of your individual work is beneficial to you and the site as we offer the best profit sharing model available (and quality control and customer service, two things many other sites do not offer). We feel we have a great base developed regarding our website and are always looking to improve. If anyone has any ideas to help get more exposure, sites to link with or whatever, let us know. Everyone gains from site traffic.

3. Business cards
We are now offering business card templates to members of our site for FREE. They are customizable and can easily be taken to a local printer for printing. If there is a lot of interest in this, we will begin to add some other perks for you for being a member. Check them out in the FAQ page of the Artist Access Center, and tell us what you think of their usefulness and whether or not you would find a use for them in promoting yourself. We offer this as a first step in supplemental promotion for member artists. For example, a good use for the business cards would be, if you didn’t want to have your subdomain on your personal business card, this could be a useful and professional piece of reference material for use at conventions or handing out to friends in passing. We have more unique ideas in store for the future, which we hope will be useful to our artists.

4. Protecting your work
I have heard a few emails from artists worried about images on the site being too easy to be taken off the site. The larger images on the site cannot be saved via right clicking, and we are going to be adding watermarks to each larger image to prevent those who would take screen shots. The images are saved through web optimization tools, so the quality of the images appearance goes down almost unnoticeably, but the ability for others to use the image for printing purposes becomes nearly impossible. So no worries, your artwork is safe at www.theuntappedsource.com.

5. Banners
Remember, you can advertise yourself by putting our banner in your myspace pages, personal websites and wherever else it might be useful! The banner is found here on the FAQ page or you can just copy and paste this code after copying the image of our banner.

6. Random Thoughts
Please keep in mind when uploading images to keep them close to normal printable size ratios (ie, 12×33 is not good). If you submit a size like that, we will most likely bounce the piece back to you and ask you to crop the image or add an unobtrusive border. If you are close enough to a printable size, we will fix it but anything way off we will not accept.

We are currently having issues with .TIF file uploads. So for now, please upload your work as either .png or .jpg (.png preferably, as it is a lossless format). We will have the issue with .TIF files fixed soon. The .TIF’s do usually come through, but for some reason, a few of you are having issues getting them to upload properly. We are on it.

A lot is happening at our site, we are off the ground and growing! So stay tuned as we continue to expand our viewership and thanks to all who have been helping us work out the bugs in the upload process, it’s much appreciated! If anyone has any suggestions or comments feel free to email me. See you next bulletin, and as a side note, myself and the rest of The Untapped Staff are working toward a more conversational and fun to read format for our bulletins.

Matthew