The Story of Shared Visions Unlimited is almost as old as the Internet itself.
The Shared Visions Online Art Gallery
I had an interest in art since before elementary school and won a summer art scholarship before entering grade one.
Decades later I took on trying to help emerging artists in the 1990’s and created one of the first online art galleries as the Shared Visions Gallery.
I featured Native Ojibwa artist, Terrance Young, the watercolours of Felicity Morgan, abstract paintings from Italian artist, Carla Asquini, and a few others.
I never had much success at marketing the artists and started painting myself.
Florida Connection
One day I received a short email from Chad saying we had a shared interest and should talk.
On the phone, Chad explained that he and his wife Kathleen owned what they thought was the finest Western and Native American art gallery in America, with the possible exception of a gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona.
They had sold over $1M of Dave McGary’s sculptures on commission. See Video.
They advertised and many of their artists were featured in Southwest Art Magazine.
Someone told them that the Delray Beach Chamber of Commerce had pages on the Shared Visions Gallery on their website.
When Chad searched for ‘shared visions gallery’ on the search engine of the day (AltaVista or Yahoo), the first six pages listed were for my online gallery.
First, he wanted to know what kind of voodoo I used to get the listings (a title and a meta description tag).
Then he asked if I would build a website for his gallery.
Yes.
And register sharedvisions.com for the website.
SharedVisions.com
While it was on my list to register the domain, but had not done it yet.
After covering the mouthpiece and mouthing, ‘shit’, I said yes.
They couriered a box of their printed brochures, art photos, and issues of Southwest Art that featured their gallery or artists.
I created an online brochure site on the premise that people would travel to the gallery to see the art in person.
They offered to put me up at the Marriott Suites in Delray Beach to visit the gallery.
I never took up their offer. However, I did meet them in Vancouver when they took a cruise to Alaska. I drove them to visit the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and to Native Art Galleries in Gastown.
Fate took me to the Marriott Suites for the American Writers & Artists Institute (AWAI) Copywriting Bootcamp and Job Fair in 2015 and 2017.
By then the gallery had closed and Chad had passed away.
I have created websites for artists and photographers over the decades, including:
I have an art and photography site on hold and we are looking for a retail space in Merrit, British Columbia to feature art, photography, story productions, opportunities, and perhaps food and drink.
The Age of Exploring
For ten years or so the main mission was to encourage people to explore a wide range of topics and leave their computer screens for the real world.
Before WordPress, I created a data-driven content management system in ColdFusion and SQL Server that supported searching the data and segmenting with sub-sites that had their own styles and home pages.
Users could log on to add and edit articles for their website.
Here are the exploring segments I created:
- Exploring English (I had created and sold a program called English Structure and Style before the Interweb)
- Exploring Literature (Honours English Literature degree).
- Exploring Libraries (where the books are!)
- Exploring Music (professional drummer and musical explorer on a range of instruments).
The sites were hosted on Superb.net. One day they lost the database and did not have a backup. Then they lost all of the pages too. I would have been happy if they had a backup from any year. Los a lot of great stuff.
Travel Focus
I started a new site for Shared Visions on Godaddy.
There were many articles on travel and a variety of topics.
Goddady lost that site eventually, which led to the current WordPress site.
The Internet as a Publishing Medium
My 15 minutes of academic fame came when I presented a paper in San Franciso called The Internet as a Publishing Medium at a conference put on by the Association for the Advancement of Computers in Education (AACE).
In hindsight, the idea was novel to academics at the time and I should have followed up on invitations to speak at universities.
The academic connections are still present in my interest in creating online courses and membership programs.
Story Productions
I have always had cameras and I bought my first video camera to capture family and other stories.
Recent variations of this include:
- Tell Your Story Productions
My wife Bonnie, her buddy Gerry Smith and I created a website and business to create personal, family, and business Story Productions. - Natural Health Movement
Bonnie and Gerry knew each other through the Natural Health industry, and we set off on a mission to interview pioneers of the Natural Health Movement. We were travelling through the western USA in our RV until Covid-19 shut that down. - Story Van TV
Bonnie and I still do StreamYard interviews with interesting people as Story Van TV.
Shared Visions Unlimited carries on the Story Production tradition.
Book Publishing
Much of my focus in this millennium has been on networking and offering integrated marketing services using Kartra, membership sites, and video.
Betty Withrow did a presentation on her services for writers, including coaching and ghostwriting in a networking meeting I hosted.
That led to collaborating on some offers for authors and course creators.
At one point Betty asked if I had considered relaunching my publishing company.
I had helped people publish and market their books before because they asked.
Now book publishing is a part of Shared Visions Unlimited Publishing, including:
- Editing
- Manuscript preparation
- Uploading to Amazan and IngramSparks
- Assigning ISBNs
- Creating a hybrid book, course, and multimedia collections using Kartra Membership called Digital Experience Editions.
- Combining publishing and marketing with the Publishing Sales Machine.
- Flipbook and Audio variations.
Shared Visions Unlimited Publishing and Marketing
So that is where we are at today.
I offer a comprehensive retainer to help you with your publishing and marketing projects.
Betty Withrow and I offer some Book Journey packages together.
What vision do you want to share?
