BIYO Business Update

Business Update; 2005
It's March again, 2005, and this past year of BiyoArt has brought about many firsts for the business. The first and foremost was getting the expense ratio down 4 to 1. Still not in the black, but sales are progressing in the right direction. Second was completing a logo design for an international fashion design company based in Pittsburgh. The third was finally getting unsolicited internet sales and establishing the shipping and handling criteria for the artwork. Fourth, was finding shows in areas where the expense ratio warranted a return the following year. Finally, establishing the proper framed website criteria to have content and images listed top ranked on the search engine Google.

To begin, our expense ratio had to do with keeping shows basically within the Northeast and at a show entry fee of less than four hundred dollars. We are now authorized as a business to complete on-site sales transactions in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and New Hampshire. We had pretty good shows this past year in Buffalo, Cleveland, Glastonbury (CT) and Pittsburgh. These states will be the focus of establishing new shows that support the style of artwork produced at BiyoArt.

On advice from various artists on rejected slide submissions from the various festival jury processes we went ahead and purchased studio photography equipment to produce our own flash slide work. It would appear that despite certain unwritten rules about submitting slides of artwork without framing, it was concluded by general consensus of other artists to submit slides that will best reflect your work. The slides that we were using did not include having the artwork framed, which produced a very washed-out appearance. So, this years slide submissions appear less washed-out and more focused on the artwork as a whole due to the border framing. Plus, now we can do a photo shoot on our schedule as the need arises.

While attending the Pittsburgh show on Walnut Street, a young Jamaican lady had admired the BiyoArt and asked if a logo could be done for her international fashion design company. Now we get all types and promises at these festivals and one can never really be sure as to the likelihood of a follow-up, but one should always error on the side of possibility. Well, she followed-up on her interest and sent me in the direction of such fashion designers as Baby Phat and Versace. One week later we had a preliminary design and proposal of the Sartos logo utilizing the Swallow-tail Hummingbird from her native island of Jamaica. Now all that is needed is an update to the website to include logo designs.

As for finding BiyoArt content on the internet, at least Google has established itself as being able to crawl through framed based sites once all the proper keys and routes to the page content doors were mapped and made available. The BiyoArt Sports page contents are listed on the search engine web and image searches as its top spot or first page content. It was determined in the design phase of the site that we could not compete with the keyword 'art', but we could with 'artwork'. The content monitoring site Hitbrain lists each with a search frequency per month of 3.1 million hits versus 1.0 million hits respectively. It was also determined from all of the festivals attended that our little niche in the art world just might be the Sports Artwork. The search string people have used to find BiyoArt has been the two keywords 'type-of-sport' and 'artwork' (i.e. running artwork, or golfing, tennis, skiing, biking, football...). Now it's all about getting more content pages, and artwork designed, for all of the various types of sports; think Olympics.

We also have yet to establish the ability to transact business on-line with credit cards. It was determined a while ago that based on the current framed structure of the site and the free shopping cart menu available that it would require the building of a separate on-line catalog of artwork selections. This new window catalog would be invoked by a buy button on the artwork content page. (But as I sat here and wrote this it occurred to me that a majority of the purchases would be for a single piece of artwork. The invoked shopping cart window should reflect this with its information options and cgi script entries. A catalog of artwork would not be necessary, just the ability to select other pieces of artwork from drop down menus as a separate line item if more than one purchase is required. Wonder if Agoracart can be configured this way?) Guess it's time to revisit the script and secure e-mail settings again.

It's been real
We'll have to do it again real soon.
Talk at ya.

-yO