CeramicArtsDaily.com Wins 2nd Annual Mequoda Publisher of the Year Award

PRLog (Press Release) – Oct 29, 2007 – Mequoda Group announced today that Ceramic Arts Daily, a website serving daily tips about ceramic artists, their work, techniques and artistic prospective, has won the second annual Mequoda Publisher of the Year award.

Charles Spahr, President of Ceramic Publications Company accepted the award at the 4th annual Mequoda Summit last month in Waltham, MA.

“For us, [Ceramic Arts Daily] was not just a matter of a new website, or a new product. Ceramic Arts Daily will be the center of our communications with our customer base going forward. We have magazines, books, conferences, affinity groups, etc. but how else do you keep in touch on a daily basis with every single person that is in any of those groups? I am absolutely convinced this is the way to go,” said Spahr during his acceptance speech.

Voting was open to the more than 6,300 Mequoda Daily subscribers who were asked to select which of the 5 Mequoda Systems that went live from June 30, 2006 to July 1, 2007 best met the needs of their audience.

The five nominees were: CeramicArtsDaily.com, FlightBliss.com, GolfVacationInsider.com, HRDailyAdvisor.com and KnittingDaily.com.

“Ceramic Arts Daily offers its users the most diverse set of community features of any websites we've worked on to date,” said Don Nicholas, Mequoda Group’s Managing Partner. “The Gallery and Potter's Council are the seed for what we feel will be big traffic drivers for the Ceramic Arts Daily Online Marketing System. If you take care of your users, they will take care of you,” said Nicholas.

One of the major benefits of Ceramic Arts Daily is that it allows its audience to "do a lot of things from one place," Spahr said. Anyone wishing to learn more about creating or collecting ceramic art does not have to look far. The site brings together books, magazine subscriptions, Potter's Council memberships and workshops—all designed to teach people about ceramics.

Other educational tools include free downloadable books on the site, which come with a free subscription to the daily email newsletter. "The free products are actually pretty robust," Spahr said. "They have a wide appeal to attract as many people as possible." The website is also becoming a forum for artists and collectors to meet and interact. People started commenting on posts and answering each other's questions less than six weeks after the site's launch.