When the WWW conference was in Banff this year, I did an interview with the World Organization of Webmasters. They’ve finally posted it on their website. Oh, the fame, the glory!

For the past several months, we’ve been working hard on putting together a new website for a Contemporary Cuban Art Gallery. The ArtéSol Gallery project evolved from a simple SEO job into a full-fledged e-commerce site! The original site was done in Flash, with hardly a word of text on the entire thing. Thus, search engines basically skipped it. The new site is a ground-up rewrite done completely with web standards, such as valid XHTML and AJAX.

At the start of the project, back when the job was to do SEO for the Flash site, I added some meta description tags and proper titles to the html files, and in no time, the search engines indexed it and ranked it somewhere in the depths of search results, for all but the most niche search terms. It will be interesting to see how it changes, and how long that takes, going forward. It has been a couple of days now, and although I know that the spiders have crawled the site (there were over 500 hits from Yahoo!), the new content has not yet shown up in the search indexes. The old meta-description results are still there though. Patience, grasshopper, patience…

It has been an interesting project. The owners are great to work for. As well as a genuine romance with Cuba, they have a true entrepreneurial spirit. They developed a new technology for art reproductions, a technique generally known as "giclée", that involves the use of ultra-high resolution — something like 200 megapixel — digital images of the original paintings. They also spent a fortune on some new, cutting-edge printers that can reproduce the colours and the textures of the original. One of the famous Cuban artists whose paintings they reproduced said of them:

I’ve never come across such quality reproductions such as these. The degree of detail and the print quality are so good that one could confuse them with the originals.

Another famous artist said:

I think these reproductions are of excellent quality, and in many cases, they’re even visually superior to the original, giving the impression they are originals painted by the artist, and not reproductions.

So they have a killer product. From what I’ve heard recently, the art market is really booming, so there are great prospects for this company. We will be launching an ad campaign for them soon, to kick things off for the website.

ArtéSol have wasted no time in drumming up the bricks & mortar type of business — they have already cut some big deals with established Cuban art & culture retailers, and are working hard to fulfill large orders. We are putting together another website for them as well, which will be run from a partnership with a Cuban company.

Not to say that the ArtéSol Gallery project is now complete! There are a lot of new features that we plan to add going forward — viral marketing/social networking types of features. They will be the icing on the cake, and for NetMojo, the most interesting part!

We have a new logo! What do you think?

It is way past due that NetMojo has one, to start establishing brand identity. I’ll be overhauling the website soon as well, to give the site a snazzy new look. For humans, not search engines :).