User Guide for Arts Organizations & Artists

Welcome to the Bloomington Arts Directory User Guide for Arts Organizations & Individual Artists. Here you will find help and documentation about the front end user’s dashboard, creating your user account, and how to manage your artist profile.

Creating A User Account & Logging In

From the Arts Directory homepage, click “Register” at the top of the page to create your new user account. Once you have set up your account, you can click on “Login” to sign into your Welcome Dashboard.

When creating your new account:
- Do NOT use an email address for your new username.
- Your username may only use lowercase letters (a-z) and numbers (0-9); no spaces.
- Your password must use more than 5 characters.
- Your password may include a combination of uppercase (A-Z) and lowercase (a-z) letters, numbers, and the following special characters: !@#$%^&*()
- Our password login field is case sensitive.

Once you have registered/created your account you will then be taken to a “success” page. From there you can click on the link provided or click “Login” in the top right corner. This will take you to the Account Login page where you may enter your username and password to access your new account and user dashboard.

Once logged in you’ll be on the main account dashboard.
Next, select “Organization/Business” from the left navigation to add your profile. This will expand the sidebar.

PLEASE NOTE: If your arts organization or artist profile already exists on the site, please email the site administrator mentioned on the Login page so they can associate your new user account to the existing profile.

Submitting Your Profile

The Organization/Artist Profile form allows you to post your:

Description/bio
Address (optional)
Contact info
Web, blog, and social media links
Designate yourself as an Artist or Arts Organization as well as category types
Art shows and exhibitions
Affiliations and awards
Outreach and arts education programs
Upcoming events and general ticketing/admission information.

VERY IMPORTANT: ALL content added to this form will be visible to the public once published. If you DO NOT want your street address or phone number visible to the public, please omit them from this form. However, we encourage you to select your city and zip code; this helps site visitors narrow down their search when using our search filters. Please note, there is a “Contact Info” section at the bottom of this form that is for Administrative Purposes Only that must be filled out but WILL NOT be visible to the public.

Once you have completed your profile form and clicked the Submit Record button, it will then be received by our administrative panel for review and approval. Once your profile has been approved by the site’s content management team, it will display on the Arts Directory and search result pages. You can come back at any time to add/edit/remove information from your profile form by logging into your Dashboard and clicking the Profile tab on the left sidebar. Be sure to click the blue Update button to save your changes.

Now that you have submitted your profile, the next step is to add a primary image and gallery images – see Adding Images below.

Adding Images

To add a primary image to your profile, select the Photos tab from the navigation bar to the left in your dashboard. You will also have the opportunity to add up to 15 additional gallery images.

When you open the Photos tab, you’ll notice the Copyright Acknowledgement checkbox. Checking this box indicates that you understand and acknowledge that you have the rights necessary to submit your image for display on the website. Once checked, you can move forward with uploading your primary image. Please note:

All images MUST be at least 400 x 400 pixels in BOTH directions and .jpg, .png, or .jpeg format only.
Each image should not exceed a file size of 5 megabytes (mb).
Image file names must NOT contain spaces between words, question marks, exclamation points, apostrophes, quotation marks, or most other symbols (hyphens and underscore marks are OK).
The system automatically rejects images with bad file names.

Again, click the Copyright Acknowledgment checkbox. Next, to upload your primary image, click the Upload Image button. This will open a desktop window where you can select an image from your computer.

Once your primary photo has been uploaded you should expect to see a screen similar to this:

Note: You can add a caption or photo credit to your photo in the field shown above.

After uploading a primary image, you can now click on the Gallery tab and begin uploading up to 15 additional images. These gallery images will display as thumbnails near the bottom of your profile page.

Adding Video

To add videos to your profile, select “Videos” from the left sidebar. We suggest using Vimeo, as it provides the highest quality image playback, but YouTube or Brightcove share links are also acceptable. We do not accept any other video service links or embed code at this time.

To add video to your profile, click on the Add Video Link button to display the video fields and simply copy and paste the share link. You also have the option to add a brief description for your video.

To find the “share” link provided by these services, we have provided examples below:

YouTube share link example:

Vimeo share link example:

Brightcove share link example:

Adding Audio

To add audio to your profile we accept audio “embed” code from various services, including SoundCloud, Zing, CD Baby, and audio URLs with the “.mp3” file extension.

To add audio to your organization profile, select ‘Audio’ from tabs at the top of your form.

Then click on the Add Audio button to display the audio fields and simply copy and paste the audio link, iframe embed code or javascript embed code. You also have the option to add a brief description for your audio.

See sample embed code below.

SOUNDCLOUD sample:

ZING sample:

MP3 file extension sample:

“http://www.stephaniequinn.com/Music/Rondeau.mp3”

CD BABY sample:

Once you’ve saved your audio embed code or links your profile’s audio section should appear something like one of the following four examples: