It's been a week, and looking back, I find it highly ironic that I expected Art Jewelry to be the quietest and lowest-traffic of the three new forums.
I've been away from the office for a week on a sorely needed vacation, but I'm back now. For all those who are wondering about the decision to split the forums into three, I'm here to provide it, for one simple reason: It was my decision.
When we first met — the Editors and Publisher of Art Jewelry, Bead & Button, and BeadStyle — to talk with the online department about the prospect of revamping our sadly underutilized Web sites, one of my first requests was that Art Jewelry have its own, separate forum.
I wanted this because I felt — and feel — quite strongly that the forum that Art Jewelry sponsors should reflect the content and identity of Art Jewelry. We are not and have never been a bead magazine, and the forum as it existed overwhelmingly catered to beaders. This is not in any way a negative characteristic, it was simply the nature of the forum, which had first come into being as serving the Bead&Button readership, then expanded to the BeadStyle readership when that magazine was launched. Art Jewelry, as a newer publication, was a late add-on. While there were a few threads that were interesting and useful to metalsmiths and other jewelry-makers, they were added far down at the bottom of the page, and remained low-traffic. The sense of the page, from the permanent "Bead Talk" folder at the very top of the page on down, was that it was a beader's forum, and I did receive comments from metalsmiths and other jewelry makers to the effect that they wished there was a place for them, or that they never felt that the forum was for them. The forum members who were in Art Jewelry's readership scope were simply being drowned out by those who were in Bead&Button's and BeadStyle's.
This was my primary consideration for the change. I made this decision with the expectation that the Art Jewelry site would lose traffic, which I was willing to chance, and knowing that we might lose ad revenue, since the majority of the advertisers were bead-specific. And I still think the decision was necessary to best serve our readership. The forum was already huge and unwieldy for the moderators, so the option of adding Art Jewelry-specific folders to the already overlooked cluster at the bottom of the page didn't seem workable.
As far as adding bead content here, in the form of additional, specifically bead-related folders, we have no plans to do so. The discussion folders we set up are all topics that we cover in Art Jewelry magazine, and that's the deciding factor for their inclusion.
And finally, I ask you all to be courteous and respectful to Katie. She is the moderator, and the official voice of the Art Jewelry forum. She does have the authority to remove threads that are off-topic or out of line. The moderator is the voice of authority on the site, and her decisions need to be accepted by the site's users. With such a major overhaul there are bound to be glitches, and with an online department that is responsible for maintaining the sites of 15 separate titles, all problems are not going to be solved instantaneously — although they will be solved as quickly as our Web wizards can do so. Katie has been gracious and kind and she has my full support, as Editor of Art Jewelry.