I just set up a friend with a free artist site on MosaicGlobe.com and it was as pleasant as I thought it might be just from looking at their website and a couple of sample artist sites. The new site can be found at frankcraven.mosaicglobe.com. They have a good help site so if an artist or their good friend has a little Photoshop and Internet skill they can get a nice-looking small site for free. Another site that looks good (though not as slick) is artistsearch.net.

More important for myself is the discovery that DeviantArt.com has a 111 ranking (83 in the USA) as of 9 August 2008 on Alexa.com. That's pretty good for a non-Fortune 500 company that you don't even see in the news. While individuals start with a low profile in bigger sites, more traffic at a site means you probably have a better chance of being noticed than you do with your own website. (This site is ranked 15,222,297!) For musicians Alexa's #2 (in the USA) MySpace.com is the first choice to find an audience, #3 YouTube.com is first choice for artists working in video, and #19 Flickr.com is first choice for photographers. But for artists working in 2D in any medium that can be digitally encoded, from painting to Photoshoped photography to Flash animations to manga, DeviantArt.com is the top site.

Besides free artist websites, they offer several paths for artists to sell their work online, from framed fine art prints and wrapped canvas to calendars and postcards, and, in competition with CafePress.com, coffee mugs. It's hard to find out much abouut the commercial aspect of the site, but I saw something indicating that they pay art's percentatges of print sales every quarter.

The biggest downside seems to be the name. The site seems to have started as a home for non-traditional arts. They have a section titled "Traditional Art," but for conservative or "avant garde" fine art you should go elsewhere. A lot of the photography would fit in the traditional genres, though. The fine art site that keeps being mentioned in my world is Artnet.com (Alexa #12,144), but that's not even free. I'm deviant-friendly — I think I'll join up as soon as I can think of the right screen name.