clint watson, fine art studio online (faso)
feature interview july & august 2017

Software Craftsman, Art Fanatic, and FASO Founder, Clint Watson

Even as a child, his two main passions were tinkering with computer programming and creating art. After graduating with an Information Systems degree in 1993, Clint became a director and, later, a partner at Greenhouse Gallery of Fine Art, a major national art gallery. He spent the next eleven years learning the art marketing game. As one of the gallery's primary salespeople, Clint gained experience by helping clients connect with artworks and artists that they truly loved...resulting in total personal sales in seven-figures, and, more-importantly countless lives enriched through artwork.  This experience gives him an authoritative platform from which to now advise artists on art marketing and sales....teaching them what really works....and what to ignore as hype or fads.

Realizing that the Internet was destined to play an ever-increasing role in the marketing strategy of artists, in 2001, Clint launched FineArtStudioOnline.com, a website creation tool and marketing system for fine artists - professional art websites. He subsequently left the gallery business and now focuses all of his attention on helping his artist clients create websites and providing them with marketing ideas, opportunities and advice. He firmly believes that artists can change the world with their artworks and strives daily to help them make that a reality.  Clint lives in Texas and the virtual world. He often takes time out to enjoy the great outdoors.

Editor's Note:  Clint responded to our interview with detailed answers important to all artists.
Because of its length, PSST presents his interview in two parts.
Enjoy this Part One for mid-July and click back in for Part Two mid-August.

why artists need a website

PSST:  Clint, the simple yet complicated question first: why should an artist bother with a website?

CW:  There are 3 main reasons that you need your own artist website:

1.  to ensure that your art is taken seriously
2.  to project a professional image
3.  to control your own marketing assets.   

Most businesses need a great website to be taken seriously.  When an artist makes the decision to market and sell her artworks, she is making the decision to start a business.  That might not be obvious in the moment, but that’s exactly the decision that is being made.  And, since every serious business needs a modern, professional website that serves as its online hub, it follows that artists, to be taken seriously, also need great websites.  Think about your own experiences:   Surely you’ve had an occasion where you were interested in a business that you’d heard about, only to be disappointed when you couldn’t find a website where you could learn more, contact the company, or make purchases.  Or, perhaps worse, you found an old, ignored Facebook page, which was of no help and likely presented woefully out of date information.  Don’t do that to your potential customers!  Make sure you have a modern, professional, up-to-date website so people can find you.  Doing so will instill your prospects with the confidence that you are a serious artist.

The second reason you need a website, and it flows directly from the first reason, is to project a professional image.  Most artists are extremely discerning about the design and the type of frames that they will utilize around their paintings.  Most artist are also concerned, when exhibiting, with the quality of the other artworks that hang near their own pieces.  They worry that poor frames, or poor exhibits will reflect poorly on their own works and, conversely, know that great frames and great exhibits will reflect positively on their own artworks.  Understandably, artists are concerned with safeguarding their hard-earned professional reputation.  Many artists work for years, even decades, to perfect their artworks, so it makes sense to protect their professional image with great frames and great exhibits.  This same idea extends to your website.  When you don’t have a website, or, perhaps even worse, when you have a poor website, it can greatly harm the perception of your artwork by association.  And, of course, a great website, by association, will elevate the perception of professionalism about your art.  FASO takes this idea even a step further and has built a reputation, similar to a great art gallery, of being “the” place for great artists.  So when collectors see that red fleur-di-lis logo at the bottom of your site, they know you are in good company. For example, just take a look at the beautiful, professional website we built for (and in collaboration) Jeremy Lipking:

Your site can look that professional!  In fact, we recently released a template inspired by the work we did with Jeremy called, creatively, the “Jeremy” template.  And if you are a FASO member, or you join FASO, your site can look similar to his today.
 
The third reason you need your own website is to control your own marketing assets.  There is a huge problem with relying on third party services such as Facebook, Instagram, Etsy, etc for your online presence.  And that is this:  you have no control over the presentation of your artwork, no control over changes that the third party site may make to the look of your listing, and no control over who is advertised on your page.  For example, Facebook will gladly advertise your competitors’ ads on your Facebook page.  This makes you a “digital sharecropper”, where you are working to build someone else’s platform.  Think about this:  there has never been a great online tech company built solely on another online tech company’s platform.  But the history of tech is littered with failed companies that tried.  I can think of two that you might have heard of:  Zynga built games on top of Facebook, and eHow built content sites that relied on high Google rankings.  Both were high flyers in their day, and both are struggling today because Facebook and Google pulled the rug out from under their business models. Don’t let that happen to you.  Sure, utilize third-party platforms for marketing purposes, but make sure that you have your own website with your own domain name that can serve as a place that is always and forever under your control.

the differences

PSST:  The FASO web platform is dedicated to artists only. What are FASO's benefits compared to other systems?

Clint:  Great question!  And, in a way, your question contains the answer. For artists, and artists only, FASO is superior to other, generic website builders, such as SquareSpace, exactly because FASO is dedicated to artists only. 
 
Everyone on the staff at FASO is either an artist, an art marketing professional or an art lover.  We are all dedicated to making a platform for artists to be successful.  If you’d like to see who these artists and art lovers are, check out our team page at:  http://faso.com/about/us.  We use it as a space to explain a bit about each of us and what our artistic passions and pursuits are (beyond building the world’s best artist websites.)
 
The reason our hyper-focus on artists is important and why it matters to you is this:  Any company that tries to be “all things to all people” must make compromises that unfortunately keep their offerings stuck in the neutral “mushy middle”.  It’s the same reason why some politicians try not to take extreme positions.  They know that taking a strong stand on an issue, while making them a better candidate for people who agree with their stand, diminishes their appeal with everyone else.  Generic website builders suffer from the same problem:  they must make compromises and make generic widgets that work across all industries.  Meanwhile, at FASO, we don’t have to compromise anything.  We happily take a strong stand that we are for visual artists, for visual artists only, and for visual artists forever. I specified visual artists because FASO is only for visual fine artists, and primarily for painters.  That is all we focus our time and mental energy on.  In fact, it’s actually against the FASO terms of service to use a FASO website for anything besides primarily displaying artwork (although we sometimes grant an exception if someone asks in writing).  This frees us to spend all of our time working on and perfecting those features that artists need.  Unlike SquareSpace and friends, we don’t have to worry if our websites work for restaurants, fashion models, right-wing websites, left-wing websites or automobile mechanics.  So while they’re supporting and building new features for restaurants, we’re ensuring that every feature we build is finely tuned for the needs of fine artists.

Here’s an example: our mobile app allows an artist to photograph, upload and exhibit a new piece of art on his or her website, ready to sell, with full ecommerce enabled, in three easy steps.  Try that with a generic website builder.  You simply can’t do it, I’ve seen their mobile apps and it’s just not possible.
 
You see, every artist needs marketing channels and marketing tools.  By focusing solely on artists, we are able to build solutions to both of those needs right into your website.
 
Here’s another example:  We built an entire system to solve a huge problem.  That problem is this: while most artists know that email newsletters are a great marketing channel, many artists never actually send them.  They either don’t think they have anything to say, or they don’t think they have the time to write, design and send a newsletter.  This problem works against artists’ success, because research shows that, in general, the more often you send newsletters, the more successful you will be with your marketing.  So, at FASO, we solved this problem with an integrated system that sends new art alerts.  Here’s how it works:  every FASO artist website has a feature called “Get New Art Alerts”, which makes it super simple for a collector to sign up to receive a small email newsletter announcing new artworks.  And here’s the important part:  this system is completely automated.  You, as the artist, don’t have to do anything except add artwork to your website (which is super simple both on a computer and a phone) and our system will take care of the email marketing for you.  And, even better, each subscriber is also given the option to join your regular mailing list, so when you’re ready to send a longer newsletter, or have the time to write something, you’ll have a list of subscribers who are ready, engaged and looking forward to hearing from you.  And lastly, we send these alerts beautifully formatted as part of our prestigious InformedCollector online magazine platform.  That provides each new art alert with a bit of third party validation.  You don’t have to toot your own horn!  We’ll toot it for you!  You’ll never find this feature on a generic website platform.

---

Here’s an example of what one of these beautiful and effective New Art Alerts looks like:

Here’s a third example of why artists should choose FASO:  Artists need places to exhibit their artworks, get in front of potential collectors, get feedback from peers and colleagues, and keep their name in front of the public.  Every FASO website comes with free monthly entries into the BoldBrush Painting Competition, one of the largest online art contests in the world. 
 
I could go on, we have many more artist-only features, and, we’re always working on more.  But the point is this: by trusting FASO with your website needs, your artist website will always remain cutting edge and a step ahead of what artists can get elsewhere.  That’s because we work directly and closely with today’s elite master artists, such as Jeremy Lipking, Kevin Macpherson, Tibor Nagy, Kathleen Dunphy, Brian Blood and many, many others to continually design, refine and host their websites.  As we work with these professional artists, we ensure that the system we have designed is perfectly tuned to their needs and, in turn, we backport and add those features to all of our templates.  That means our system is constantly refined and tuned for marketing art in a way that other, generic, web builders will never match. 

PSST:  You continue to expand FASO templates with fresh looks and adaptable colors. Why is this better for artists than all the bells and whistles and options offered by other web editors?
 
Clint:  We do continue to add templates rapidly and, in fact, I’d be wary of working with any web builder who isn’t continually adapting their templates.  The technology world changes rapidly, and it’s necessary for websites to adapt to those changes.  As an example, our original FASO templates didn’t adapt to smart phone screens, that’s because smartphone screens didn’t exist yet!  But as soon as the iPhone appeared, we started working on templates that work for art lovers who want to see great art on their phones.  This is a never ending process.

Here is why our templates continue to work better for artists than other services:    As I mentioned above, we work closely with many of today’s elite master artists and custom design websites for those artists.  We take what we learn by working with the masters, and create templates that any artist may utilize.  We’re not guessing what artists need, where discovering it and refining it by working directly with the world’s leading artists.  This ensures that artists always have the latest, greatest and PROVEN options available. 
 
Regarding the “bells and whistles” part of your question.  Perhaps I’m not totally understanding the question, because I feel we have as many, if not more bells and whistles than nearly anyone.  We usually beat the competition to market in offering new features.  For example, FASO was the first major website builder to offer free SSL certificates in early 2016 (SSL is important for security, Google rankings, and peace-of-mind for customers).  SquareSpace and Wix finally caught up with us late in the year, although most other competing still don’t offer free SSL.

We are ahead of all the generic website builders in that we bundle a free domain, a free email account, free analytics, and a free newsletter marketing platform with every website.  (Squarespace announces they offer a free domain, but if you read the fine print, it’s only free the first year and you must pay extra if you want a professional, branded email account).   This is a FASO pattern, we usually are the first in the space to integrate new technologies into our websites. 

I am going to take a stab at what you mean by “bells and whistles” and there is one place where we are quite different from generic web editors and it’s a strength or a weakness, depending on what you’re trying to do.   As I mentioned previously, a generic website editor has to work for all industries, therefore, they are a bit like Microsoft Word.  They have to be a sort of “blank page” that you can do anything with.  That can be very appealing and, for some, it can even be fun.  So generic website builders place a lot of time and development on being a “what you see is what you get” drag-and-drop kind of page editor. This is very flexible and fun when designing a website and if you’re a website designer, it’s great.   FASO is more opinionated.  Since we ONLY work with artists, we already know from working with thousands of artists, what types of elements artists need and we don’t have to make any compromises.  This eliminates the need to start with a “blank page”.  We’ve already built and professionally designed the site with the elements you need to further your art career. So you don’t need to start with a blank page.  Instead, simply input your bio and add some works of art and we can simply present the full site, ready to go, ecommerce enabled.  While this might, initially seem like a weakness, for the serious, working artist, it quickly turns into a strength.   For example, setting up ecommerce on a generic site, involves adding your artwork image, creating a new page to house the image, creating a “product” to associate with the image, linking to your product from your image’s artwork page, linking to your artwork page from your image gallery, etc, etc.

Conversely, setting up a new artwork for ecommerce on FASO involves, well, uploading your artwork.  That’s it.  That’s why our mobile app lets you update your portfolio with new artworks in three steps and theirs don’t allow you to do it at all.  I believe, for the serious artist, the less time you spend having to update your website, the better.  Generic website builders directly work against that idea, which means they take time away from your creative studio time.  I shudder to think of the masterful works of art that are denied to the world because an artist, somewhere is fiddling with a finicky page editor trying to get that page to look “just right.”  We’ll make it look “just right” out of the box.  In fact, I envision a day where a new artist can build a full FASO website directly from their smartphone in just a few minutes.  That’s an advantage we can only offer by being opinionated.

Special FASO Offer to PSST

Build a FASO artist website with special promotion pricing to PSST members. Available on Members Only, Sponsors.

FineArtStudioOnline - Professional art websites made easy.
FineArtViews - Daily email newsletter about art marketing.
BoldBrush - Online painting competition.
BrushBuzz - Current top art/marketing/inspirational stories.
InformedCollector - Newsletter for art collectors