Readers and contributors to the Artists UK DotNet blog are well aware of the controversy surrounding the AVATAR film by James Cameron.  Roger Dean fans all over the world have been clamouring for some kind of justice over what they see as the theft of Roger Dean’s ideas and designs by James Cameron for his AVATAR film.  Now it seems that Cameron is getting attacked as a hypocrite as well.  His seemingly bold environmental stance portrayed in AVATAR and in other ventures appears to be totally out of step with his high carbon footprint lifestyle.  Are we surprised?  Not really I guess.  But if  David Attenborough, who has done very good environmental documentaries, clocked up masses of air miles in the process at least it was for his professional work and not just for fun as it seems to be with Cameron.  What do you think?  Should we hold all celebrities accountable for thier lifestyles or just those like Cameron who are telling us we must do with less while they keep piling up more?  Read all about Cameron being a hypocrite and watch the video here.

Customers who have visited to order from us a few times over the last month may have had the surprising experience of paying in three different ways although selecting the same option.  As you would expect, we are always doing our best to keep our systems up to date and to comply with the ever more stringent banking legislation.  The challenge for many online retailers has been to offer a PCI DSS compliant system that is efficient and easy to use both for the business and the customer as well as not being too expensive to run.  After all, if you are paying high fees for transactions it is the poor old customer who ends up footing the bill.  That is one reason why, like many other main retailers, we have tended to not have PayPal as a main payment option although we do review this from time to time.  Anyway, a customer could have paid through our old Shared SSL a month ago and then via HSBC Secure ePayments a week or so later and now via Actinic Secure Payments.  Why?  Well, nobody at Actinic or HSBC saw fit to mention that there is an incompatibility issue (known for some years too!) between Actinic and HSBC Secure ePayments.  We had to find out the hard way.  We also found out that a number of the ways we had previously made customer purchasing easier would no longer work.  That is why it had to go out in favour of Actinic Secure Payments.  There are now just one or two minor design issues left and then, really, when you think about it, what we achieve is to end up back where we started since our track record for efficient card processing and security was excellent to start with.  Anyway , at the end of all the hassle and hair-tearing it all works and we can say we are PCI DSS compliant.  Does anyone care?  Who knows?  I expect most of our customers come to us by recommendation and all they are concerned about is how soon their order will arrive.  If you’re not already one of themk and you’d like to join them then click here.

We know what it is like.  You go to a new website and you have to type in all those personal details and then your address, blah, blah, blah and get the package, wrap the present, label it, blah, blah, blah and there aren’t enough hourrs in the day as it is. Well, we’ve already sorted the last part ages back since at Artists UK you can order anything, even a framed picture, and have it gift-wrapped with your choice of gift-wrap, add a free personalised gift label and have it sent directly to the recipient.  But that still left having to type in both those addresses so now we’ve teamed up with Postcode Anywhere, an Internet services company who do what it says on the tin.  They take your postcode and give you a menu to choose your address from so you’ve filled out both addresses in a fraction of the time it takes to type it all in … not bad, eh?  If you think we’ve missed out any way of making it easier for you then let us know.  We do our best to get you the most unusual and interesting products you can’t find anywhere else and our packaging is second to none as our customer comments show over and over again.  But if you have a clever idea of what we could do to improve then please let us know.  If it’s a really clever idea you might get us sending you a freebie!