Name: Lisa Thornton Whittaker
Location: Ohio, USA
EBSQ member since: 2006
Accolades: EBSQ Juried Artist and EBSQ Award Winner
Profile Google Page Rank: 4/10
Portfolio Page Rank: 3/10
Commissions Page Rank: unrated
Shows Page Rank: 3/10
EBSQ Marketing Blurb: "Contemporary Modern Art Paintings"
Marketing links: contact email, eBay, Imagekind, Cafe Press, and personal website. No blog listed.

Lisa's highest ranking page is her profile is, understandably, her profile page since it's a static page and has a good amount of content. Her artist statement is a combination of bio/philosophy. It's neither overly long nor overly short, and gives visitors enough reason to click through to see more of her work. The one noticeable issue with this page is that she references several links that are plain text rather than html so that someone viewing the page would have to cut and paste the information into their browser rather than clicking through to these pages.

Looking at Lisa's portfolio pages, her work is nicely organized, well-titled, and showcases a fairly cohesive body of art. All of her images appear to be well-photographed. On clicking any individual piece, a meaningful artist statement is included. The text pertains to each individual piece and gives further insight as to why she created it. The only issue is the inclusion of the Imagekind widget in the statements for pieces which are available on that venue. For some reason, the widgets are interfering with EBSQ's site code, rendering the our code unable to include her name and contact information that automatically follows her art as part of each statement when her work appears on the site in any context outside of her personal portfolio (i.e. EBSQ Galleries, Shows, Art of the Day, etc). We recommend she work with our tech team to see if the code incompatibilities can be overcome on our end or whether she needs to remove the widgets from her individual art items and just use a general promotional widget on her main profile page.

The weakest page of Lisa's profile is her commissions page. This is the sole top-level page in her profile that is completely unranked by Google, meaning they consider this page totally irrelevant per their search algorithms.

Her complete statement on this page:

Please contact me if you are interested in an original piece created just for you.

Prints of all the works in the portfolio are available from imagekind.

No prices are given. Nor an indication of what types of commissions she accepts, nor time or payment guidelines. Her inclusion of this page in her profile feels more like an afterthought "just in case" rather than someone seriously pursuing commission work. We recommend that she either give some serious thought to either greatly expanding upon or entirely removing this page.

Overall assessment: This is a very strong portfolio from a highly active member. Her stats reveal her work receives excellent traffic via her personal pages and EBSQ galleries, with the bulk of her traffic being through the EBSQ Shows, where she has received numerous peer and patron awards. To bring improved traffic via the search engines, we recommend she find something a bit less generic than "Contemporary Modern Art Paintings" which could describe a full third of the work that appears on EBSQ. She could focus on region, her style, or her recurrent themes in her work such as bold florals. We also recommend that she add blogging to her repertoire as an additional outlet to announce new pieces (and this would be a great place to use her Imagekind widgets) and to drive interest and a fan base directly to her work. It will take very little work to bring Lisa further success.