The Look Of Our Aws Has Changed?

As I recall, there was no title under the artwork; the title showed in a box, which it still does, and the art was spaced closer together.

Mine does look a little different. I like the changes. Titles are sort of important for me.

http://cynthia-decker.artistwebsites.com/

There used to be a heavy bar below image, gallery and about tabs, Now there are 5 galleries across. There was a separate background around the galleries, now no more. It's a cleaner look. Nice

http://jessicajenney.com/

My background is white in the snip, as you can see above. Now it is gray and matches the rest of the page.

Guess things are being worked on.

No update on mine for mobile viewing yet... Will need to check that out when I am back at the MacBook

great, my background and custom things are gone...


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

The gallery and image title name text along with the "Galleries" and "Images" tab text are much darker now. My background has always been pretty dark, and those text used to show really well against my dark background (much like it is here on pixels at the bottom footer). The changed (darker) text color are now barely noticeable against my dark background, I may have to change my background if they keep this color scheme for our aw. -W

doesn't look like i can put it in that main window. it covers everything now...


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

You can change the color of the text instead of the background

ok, thanks Jessica, I probably just took the default text color and changed all the other stuff when I first set the site up. -W

Mine is different, too. It did not look like FAA/Pixels once I customized it. It does now. :(

I changed the homepage background color back to what I had chosen earlier. Now I have to figure out how to change the border around the gallery pics and titles.

More busy work!


Kathy K. McClellan
http://keppenart.com

To me, my website is next to being sacred, and it pains me when changes are made without my approval.

It reminds me of this incident years ago. Painters can identify with this.

I was dating a girl and I took her to Malibu to visit with a painter friend of mine.

He was working on a large portrait of a female celebrity when we arrived, so he stopped work and we all went in to hang out and smoke a joint.

After a while, Barbara got up and left the room and returned to tell Nick that she really liked his painting, but she had changed the eyes a little bit!

The silent energy that emitted from his body caused Barbara's poodle to yelp and jump into her arms as he got up to survey the damage.

He came back with "the eyes" in his hand that he had scraped off the canvas, and we politely made our exit without anyone saying one word.

"it pains me when changes are made without my approval."

I have never once tried to customize my AW because it's not mine. As long as there are outside links and lists of things I don't sell, there's no point.

Great story, Chuck!


Dan Turner
Dan Turner's Seven Keys to Selling Art Online

Yesterday the Gallery page on the AW was fine but the artwork page was messed up. Today the Gallery page is messed up and it won't allow me to fix it. Why? Is this another glitch or did someone decide to override our customizations? Either way, it would be good to get an answer.

To be honest I cannot see any difference. I'm more than happy with my custom website for under a dime a day...

Richard Reeve
ReevePhotos.com

Chuck;
Your portraiture is among my favorites. Your talent and computer art skills are quite solid and strong! A real pro I can see.

Thanks, Dan. I have about half a dozen unbelievable Barbara stories.

Like when she told a cameraman, who was one of six shooting the Monterrey Jazz Festival, that she was there to give him a break and took over his camera.

The director almost went crazy and I almost lost my job for letting her on the premises.

Thanks a lot, Vincent. I appreciate that.

Glad I never bothered. Just have to bother all over again...........sigh.

I checked mine out earlier when it was mentioned, and viewing my AW site on the desktop everything looks good-to-go. On the tablet, and maybe I'm just noticing it due to it being brought up, but the shadows I chose around the gallery thumbnails do not show. On the desktop they still do. If there were any changes made by HQ (Sean / tech people) they're slight and not very noticeable to me. The dark background I chose is still intact.

I had borders with rounded corners around each gallery in a color that complimented the black background. Now there are no borders and each gallery logo is just a rectangular thumb on a black screen. Why did they decide to take the borders away? I wish they'd put things back the way they were or at least tell us why this happened and why we can't repair the pages.

This is rather annoying, because I put a lot of work into that site. What's the point of allowing us to customise our AW sites, if somebody's going to come along and change them again?

Hmmmm... I don't think anything has changed on mine, or it's just been so long since I last messed with it, I don't remember how whatever's changed looked before.

PRO TIP: If you're playing for cash, always bet on my poor memory.

SMS Fine Art

I'm not seeing (or noticing) any changes. But, when things like this happen around here, I've learned to wait for an official announcement before bothering to try changing or repairing anything. No need to be chasing my tail when things might pop suddenly back into place; there's lots of other things to do with my time.;

Good luck, all!

Trouble is I never have a screen grab of how things looked before but looking at it now, now mine is nice and clean looking, the heading above the gallery thumbs is smaller than on FAA so the gallery images come higher up the page. I'm very happy with mine.

http://GillBillingtonArt.com

"...when things like this happen around here, I've learned to wait for an official announcement before bothering to try changing or repairing anything. No need to be chasing my tail when things might pop suddenly back into place; there's lots of other things to do with my time."

Ditto on that, Wendy. I might mention a change, discuss the change, and sometimes even complain about it, but waiting seems to cause less stress for me. :)

Abbie,

I wish there was no home page. Instead just Images, Galleries, Shop.......

The set up as it stands now is too redundant. JMO

Or when I opt to have galleries as my opening page that the selection drop out. Opt for images than the images
selection would drop out.

If I opted for Galleries, when someone clicks on images, then galleries would reappear. Etc.

Or better yet the upper menu bar....drop it out entirely....and fill out the lower Images, Galleries, About bar with more
options as the main menu.

Then give us the upper old menu bar for customization, such as a blurb....

Dave

i'm not really sure how these websites can be considered customizable any more. no borders, html extras, backgrounds, etc - makes it harder to stand out against the other sites.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Very nice, David! I got rid of the double lines around the images, galleries and about tabs.

For those just now tuning in and you jumped right to the latest post:

If you have an AWS and have not looked at it recently, then you will want to do that.

Changes have been made that will affect the look of text on backgrounds, as well as text on your About page.

So do yourself a favor and inspect your website. And have a nice day!

Wait Chuck....I want to hear more Barbara stories!

I agree, Mike. A couple people reported that my AW profile page was messed up so I opened a ticket and was told to check my html. The only html I'd added was to define the font size and color for my bio text. I didn't add any links or slideshows or anything else. I took out the html and the print was so tiny I couldn't read it so I put it back. We can't even add a tiny bit of html for the bio or it screws up the whole page? Apparently so.

Kathleen, we have had a rush of people with screwed up pages and it was all the html they were using. THAT is why you were told it was that.

It is not the border that were screwing up the AW it was other things also so they had to be streamlined more

i can't even put a © logo without it adding extra text. i can't have my stat counter work, so i'm shooting blind. i think if its about iFrames and such, then those should be restricted. if a shopping cart is the issue, then prevent that. and let us have the other links.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Sydne, did you want the Crazy Barbara stories, the Sex Maniac Barbara stories, the How my ex-wife and Barbara almost killed each other stories, or the one where my Mother exclaimed:

"This is better than watching a live soap opera" story?

There are so many.

So Abbie, does that mean that it's not the html that messed up my profile page? Not sure I understand.

Seriously, for $30 a year, you're not going to get the level of customization some of you apparently want. I can't imagine this amount of obsession about borders and shadows and all that. It's like losing sight of the forest for the trees getting tied up in knots about this stuff.

The sidebar text and other text sizes can be changed already without needing to resort to inserting random html code in the bio. The font size is right below where you put the text in. Too small, increase the size...

You can get some of the effect of a border around the images/galleries still by putting in a shadow on the images. Choose 0px 0px for the two offsets and then something like 10px for the spread and make the color black. It's not a uniform border but it does help set the image off the background just a bit if you feel the need.

The point is make the best of what you have and spend all that energy on something more productive. Be thankful that FAA offers an option to send your customers to a stand-alone site instead of having to send your potential buyers to the mother site. I'd hate for all of these complaints to end what is a good set-up. And the more of a pain-point it becomes for the people responsible for supporting it, the less attractive it is to offer it at all.

My two cents for what they're worth.

Mark

Thanks for the lecture, Mark. Otherwise I wouldn't be clear on the order of my priorities.

I resorted to adding random html code long before all those cool customization options were made available. The point is that a little string of innocuous code should not mess up the page.

Maybe you weren't around for the huge promotion (was that just this year?) when all these wonderful customization options were finally unveiled. I'd hoped it was meant to make honest the marketing pitch (still on this site) about their inclusion of a "fully customizable" web site with premium accounts. In the big picture, of course it means nothing if things have now changed. What I'd been looking for and asking for, for well over a week was clarification. I wanted my questions answered. Abbie has answered them and I'm good with that.

Oh, and thanks for the tip about adding black shadows. Those black shadows on my black background pages will be a great workaround for my issue.

Kathleen, I've been there since 2010 and yes, if you read the thread when it was released, I provide a lot of feedback when the new look was released. Still light years ahead of what it replaced.

You'll see I was the first to ask to try it...

http://fineartamerica.com/showmessages.php?messageid=2159912

If you choose to dwell on the negative rather than work with what you have, so be it. I mainly replied not so much to offer advice but because I really can imagine the negative voices outweighing the people who think this is a good deal.

We now have two threads about changes on the aw... I think the last one should be closed.

Crazy Barbara stories.....I suppose though it would not be on topic!

My problem with this isn't the loss of customization features, it's that the changes were made without notifying us. I don't know how long it would have been before I noticed that the text on my AW was illegible if Chuck didn't start this thread. They do advertise these websites are personal and customizable, IMO we aren't quite getting what's advertised, especially when changes can be made to "our" website without us even knowing.

You're right, Sydne. I'll let you know when the book comes out. ;)

I am still laughing about Barbara, she must have been a blast, anyway sometimes.

David hit the nail on the head. The problem isn't so much with the changes, as with the lack of communication. It must be especially annoying for those who were encouraged to redirect their own domains to the AW sites. If anything like this needs to be done again in the future, could somebody from FAA please let us know about it?

I just noticed that the cart logo has changed on our AW sites.

"Very nice, David! I got rid of the double lines around the images, galleries and about tabs."

Jessica,

Just noticed this complement. Thanks. Your AW looks feminine and somewhat softer keeping with your image quality.

Mine with the lines looks a bit like a polished newspaper. It fits my ideas a bit better.

I strongly like the upgrades to the AW systems.

Dave

Jessica: "I just noticed that the cart logo has changed on our AW sites."

I see that. It looks anemic. And the word CART is gone. Another "improvement"? I personally liked the larger cart logo with the word CART there.

Under Improvements: What I think would be an improvement for our AWS is that instead of showing: "FineArtAmerica.com" or "Pixels.com" at the bottom of links we post, such as the one below, it had our AWS link showing, or nothing at all.

For a while they did away with the FineArtAmerica link in the footer but it was brought back. I wish something would be done with the flash of another color background when you go the the AW site. What is that? I have a white background and it flashes in black.

When looking at an art page--a single piece--and I click to go to the next art page, I have gotten a flash of the 5 first images for ages now on FAA.

On my AWS I get a quicker flash and have commented on it several times in the bugs discussion.

Jessica,

I need to check that out. I remember early on you could turn the background somewhere or other transparent so that the white was all that shone through,
but I could be confusing that with my WP site development.

I will look into it.

Dave

Jessica,

Just checked it out in depth. The background image is gray, black or a dark navy blue. We need there to be the option of a starker white.

Soon I hope the AW is powered by Pixels, not FAA. I just prefer the name for marketing purposes. It is generic enough that people
will be more likely in many ways to leave it alone. Yet broaden outs Sean's sales reach into the EU better than FAA.

Dave

I will close this if no one has anything to add.