Company Profile
Discover Original Art is an online art gallery that provides high quality original art to those who share the joy of collecting art and enjoying its beauty in their homes, offices, and other surroundings.
The partners at Discover Original Art are collectors and mentors for newly discovered and emerging artists. They have a passion for art and want to pass that passion on to others. As members of the Collectors’ Circle of the Museum of Fine Arts in St Petersburg, Florida, they have been involved in the selection and acquisition of major works for the museum.
Business Situation
Discover Original Art is a brain-child of the two managing partners Brian Wiltshire and Susan Taylor. Both partners have extensive experience mentoring emerging artists and are themselves collectors. The thrust behind their idea is to offer emerging artists the opportunity to expose their work to a world-wide audience elegantly and at a much lower cost than participating on exhibits and hosting events in art galleries. Furthermore, they wanted to offer art collectors an easy and convenient way of experiencing some of the incredible artwork produced by emerging artists.
Susan and Brian had started promoting the idea to some of the artists they have dealt with over the years and had an incredible show of hands.
Technical Situation
The wide embracing of the artists brought up the following concerns: speed of deployment and the concern of any sacrifice of elegance and ease of use.
Brian and Susan wanted to leverage the level of commitment and excitement behind their idea and so time was of the essence. They needed a quick storefront deployment that would engage current artists and further future commitments with artists.
Because of the nature of the offering, an emotional and very personal purchasing decision, the solution had to flexible enough to be able to experiment with different approaches on presenting and marketing the artwork. The solution had to help to overcome the problem of instant gratification inherent from selling on the Web.
Solution
The solution involved the deployment of an out of the box solution called Catalook, an inexpensive, configurable, and extensible catalog application. The application runs on top of DotNetnuke, an open source content management and web application platform.
Catalook offered most of the functionality Discover Original Art was looking for and its extensibility allows all the flexibility they would need in the future.
DotNetNuke (DNN) offers a number of out of the box modules that provided some of the missing pieces in the Catalook application. Some of these include a built in blog, AdSense, and YouTube video embeds. In addition to managing their storefront, Brian and Susan had the ability to manage their own content allowing them to quickly post fresh information to keep their site relevant to potential buyers.
The solution provided Discover Original Art a process whereby they could quickly and easily sign up new artists and begin selling their artwork. Artists can monitor their sales online and while not implemented in this first phase, artists will be able to enter and maintain their own inventory in the near future.
Benefits
Accelerated deployment
This solution provided a quick deployment within budget and made it possible for Discover Original Art to take advantage of the opportunity without sacrificing elegance and ease of use.
Flexibility and extensibility
The solution allows Discover Original Art the ability to implement fresh and bold ideas using out of the box modules. Furthermore, any additional functionality not available in the platform could be purchased by leveraging the ever increasing DotNetNuke developer community.
Products and services
Microsoft .Net Framework
The .NET Framework is Microsoft's comprehensive and consistent programming model for building applications that have visually stunning user experiences, seamless and secure communication, and the ability to model a range of business processes.
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server is a comprehensive, integrated data management and analysis software that enables organizations to reliably manage mission-critical information and confidently run today’s increasingly complex business applications. SQL Server allows companies to gain greater insight from their business information and achieve faster results for a competitive advantage.
DotNetNuke
DotNetNuke® is the most widely adopted open source framework for website content management and web application development on Microsoft ASP.NET. DotNetNuke has been downloaded over 6,000,000 times, is in use on over 400,000 production websites, has a thriving user community, and features a huge array of available third-party extensions.
Catalook for DotNetNuke (DNN)
A complete easy-to-use, search engine optimized shopping cart - eCommerce solution includes multi language support, real-time delivery of digital goods, subscription management, recurring billing, inventory tracking, 60 credit card payment gateways, real time shipping rate calculation, package tracking with UPS and USPS, and more.
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