Category: Articles

Artist Website

We offer working artists special deals on our content management systems and ecommerce products tailored to the needs of an artist.  There is sometimes a sponsorship link associated with discounts on our services.  Why do we offer discounts and sponsorship to the artist client?  Because of our experience in artist management: we can offer advice and online ecommerce methods for marketing art work on the web.  The actual marketing is up to the individual’s own social media footprint and/or willingness to invest in advertising.

  1. Software Antelope Ltd make an agreement with an artist to host their content at a discounted rate, via sponsorship or management and licensing.
2. The artist may design a simple holding page – just an outline with an image or two, and prepare content for it.
3. We will install a fresh and up-to-date version of WordPress using Woocommerce and a basic template called shopfront which links to the client’s paypal or stripe account for accepting payments.  We include a basic site build in WordPress to host your basic content to get it going.  The artist should provide or design a logo (horizontal and square formats), slogans, and prepare content for the site basic pages (e.g. about the artist, contact, perhaps a simple gallery).  We provide some content building with the initial install.

Products: https://cms.softwareantelope.com/shop/server/software-server/ or https://cms.softwareantelope.com/shop/hosting/cloud-hosting-introductory-1-year-subscription/

3a. The artist can build pages and content.  Or book time at an hourly rate.
Products: https://cms.softwareantelope.com/shop/online-development/5-hour-mini-sprint/
4. To sell prints of your visual artwork, we can either attach a drop-supplier or your ecommerce shop or the artist can take orders in conjunction with their own printer.
4a. In rare cases, Software Antelope Ltd may offer an artist a licensing deal, including royalties against sales and a percentage of profits to the artist.  A contract is required and usually runs for two years.  All sales and advertising costs are handled by Software Antelope Ltd, and costs of hosting are met during the term of license.  
5. Alternative templates for layouts in WordPress with Woocommerce are available to extend the large range of standard features available in the base product.  Some of these require payment to third parties.
6. If the artist wants to sell and offer original work, you can make the products with images and descriptions, and offer a framing service.  We work with a prestige framing service https://dstudiouk.com/ who provide an excellent service for artists with an extreme quality of craft and attention to detail.
We do like to support the arts online.

New Clients

As a seasoned contractor I got used to a market paying good rates for my skills and now I believe I am able to deliver faster for more clients remotely. It stands to reason that the market for remote teams is a better one than a market for a remote individual. There is nothing to stop software development being more effective and efficient online than it is to house employees. Avoiding massive costs to both sides of the negotiation. Costs can be productively invested.

The issue has been, in the past, trust and credibility. I believe strongly that I have a commercial answer to the problems posed by managing a remote team. By building small teams of developers, linking them into teams and managing projects real value can be delivered. The Open Source community has done this for years. It has driven knowledge progress.

New clients for Software Antelope’s development services will be the first customers of our latest project: www.remotedevelopment.co.uk. Read more about how this works.

Making your site secure

You may notice this site is only accessed via SSL. There are many breeds of SSL you can use, including EV (Extended Validation) that basically carry a level of insurance against fraud if someone were to actually crack SSL. Most levels of SSL are secure enough for the average site, and the Everyday Security level of SSL we recommend for most applications is highly secure.

On this site we use Stripe for Web commerce, which is fully secure as you are entering your credit card details effectively on their site and we never record those details. We just receive payment without any exposure of your financial details “in the open” on the web. We also add SSL to our entire site as that makes it hard for hackers and trackers to see anything of what you are doing as all pages are encrypted.

1 Year SSL Subscription (including install on our servers)

WordPress attacks

Millions of sites in the world use WordPress to build and manage their sites, from individuals to multinationals. An exploit using the ability to post to the site from mobile devices can be closed off if that functionality is not being used.

Add these lines to the .htaccess for the site:

<Files xmlrpc.php>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Files>

A number of 3rd party plugins use this function, so blocking it may break plugins. Some of the most well-known plugins that require XML-RPC are:

WordPress Mobile App
JetPack (just some parts of it)
LibSyn (for podcasts)
BuddyPress
Windows Live Writer

But for the vast majority of WordPress sites the XML-RPC function isn’t used and can be used as an exploit, hence it is best to disable it.

Let us know if you need this security measure applied to your Antelope hosted CMS site.