Hello to everyone and thanks for looking. It's been quite a while since we sent out any sort of communique, and there's a few reasons for this. Mainly that we've been busy on a few other things and haven't been trading very much.

The lead up to Christmas was very busy and we got a lot sold and turned out quite a swag of custom images for Christmas stockings too. January was pretty much a month off due to a couple of interstate trips and weddings and since then we have been fine-tuning a few things.

As you can see, we are now providing recycled timber framing and making our own thicker stretcher bars and we have also completed a number of new images to increase the product range. We have created this new html based website as it was becoming apparent from the web statistics that either people weren't waiting for the Flash site to load, or they didn't have Flash player to view it. We also realised it wasn't particularly search engine friendly.

Some advertising has been tried through ebay, Google and a couple of odd auction-type sites. However, none of this has been successful. So it seems the most important thing is just to be "out there". We're not entirely sure though, that the markets are the best place for us. Many customers are either tourists or curious locals and so are not necessarily there to buy a big canvas to decorate their home with. We stopped trading at Manly on the Sundays back in December as it was providing very little in terms of sales or orders, and we were also desperately short of time.

Combining this business with some bread and butter design work has proved to be quite difficult as the natures of both are quite erratic. However I am sure the more practice we get, the better the time management will become.

During the next few months we will experiment with some other markets and will also begin approaching galleries, cafes, stores and various other businesses as well as talking to some interior decorators and art buyers. Hopefully this will help us develop our products and service to be more efficient and reach the right customers.

There is also a lot of design work on the horizon for both Art by Cowboy and our associated Studio Rouge, and sorting out this html site has been good practice for Mike as it has been a few years between jobs and all of a sudden there's a flood of sites to be built.

One last note from the Barnyard, please pay attention to Earth Hour on March 31st. We don't feel that turning all your lights off for an hour is going to make much difference, but the important thing is to realise how your everyday action affect the world around you. Do not waste the things that you take for granted like water, energy and food, for all of it is a drain on the planet and it is hard sometimes to remember how a simple flick of a switch can have a knock-on effect to the rest of the planet in some other time and place. A simple rule to live by, produce more, consume less.

As always, your feedback or ideas on our products and service would be greatly appreciated.