The Cohen Center e-commerce website should function as a means for the promotion of excellence in art from alumni, visiting artists and faculty. It should be a way to give the public a taste of the current, past, and upcoming exhibitions taking place in the gallery, as well as a chance to purchase art being shown in the gallery spaces. A select collection of work from alumni and faculty should be featured on a seperate page outlined with a system of links designating media, artist, etc. In addition to being persuasive, the site will be informative. Viewers will get to know the artists who make the work featured on the site through the meet the artist pages. Directions and contact information will be posted on the contact/info page. As a functioning e-commerce site, there will be a page for account setup, shopping cart and wishlist. There will also be a page giving appropriate people the opportunity to actually submit pieces to be sold on the site. I am also proposing a news page with a blog function and RSS feed to keep audience up to speed with current happenings at the Cohen Center. Another idea that I am presenting is the idea of an E-space. The E-space will be a place to feature art that perhaps could not be shown at the Cohen Center in an online gallery. The most important issue that this site should address is finding a successful means to merge commerce and art. By focusing on the gallery exhibits in the Cohen Center and in my proposed E-space, combined with the abilty to spend money on pieces being offered for sale, the Cohen Center can successfully focus its revenue toward the expansion and promotion of art at Alfred.
My proposed index page would focus on items being sold in the gallery/storefront. The store features would include a “new items” section as well as a place to view customer billing info. To focus attention on the gallery, sections with imagery showing recent and upcoming exhibitions would be shown. Also a calendar with hyper-linked dates when events occur would also implemented. Another important feature of my proposed index page would be a news blog section shown at the bottom keeping viewers up to date with recent happenings at the Cohen Center.
The about page would include a a drop down menu bar featuring all of the five important features of the Cohen Center. A menu with links to the history of the house, about the Cohen family, mission, art at alfred, and the AU homepage would be featured underneath the dropdown menus. The green box in the center is where the information from those links would appear. Every page on this site would include a Cohen Center logo, copyright statement at the bottom, privacy policy, shipping policy and access to a clear sitemap. The top of each page would also include a navigation bar with links to home, store, exhibitions, artists, events, about and contact information.
The contact page will include general information about the Cohen Center, directions, information on submissions, customer service and donations to the center. This info will be included on a drop down menu bar. There will be a form on this page also for general questions to be emailed to the webmaster of The Storefront site.
The storefront page will function as the most important aspect of the ecommerce site. Anyone will be able to set up an account and purchase art from a multitude of different artists. I envision the storefront pages having a menu bar with the option to view work by new items, media and artists. Ideally the images would be arranged in a tradtional table format like the grid shown here. The work will be labeled with title, medium, artist, and price.
The gallery page shown here features my proposed e-space idea. The e-space would be a place where work not able to be featured at the Cohen Center would be on display and available for purchase. The main gallery page would feature upcoming, recent, and past exhibitions, links to bio’s of artists featured in the Cohen gallery/ e-space, an option to take a virtual tour, and the ability to propose ideas for gallery shows.
The artists page would feature short bio’s of alfred alumni, faculty, and visiting artists. There would be a link to feature recent news and happening about featured artists, and a photo gallery to spotlight images of their work. There would also be a link at the bottom of each artist bio page to purchase work, if any, for sale by the artist.
