The Asmat people of Papua, New Guinea are an ancient population that developed great skill at carving wooden artifacts. Trade with the rest of the world only began in the 20th century. Collectors from around the world greatly treasure native Asmat carvings, which are often produced to honor the memory of ancestors. The tragic death of Michael C. Rockefeller occurred during one of his collection visits to Papua. His collection is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Another important exhibit of Asmat carvings can be found at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam.
In addition to public collections, there are numerous private collectors of Asmat art throughout the world. While some remain anonymous, most private collectors are proud to display their collections online. This requires a suitable website, one that invokes the history of the Asmat and the rarity of the collected items. Asmat collectible brokers and auctioneers use these websites to promote the purchase, sale and/or gifting of these valuable pieces.
There are three main steps an Asmat art collector must perform to create a suitable website:
- Design the overall site and have it programmed. Many people choose to create a WordPress website because they are both easy to set up and also offer a great variety of themes. Your webmaster should create a site that makes it easy to access photographs of your collection, and any other related media.
- Create the written content. You can write it yourself or farm it out to a freelance writer. In either case, you want to make sure the writing is of the highest quality, so as not to detract from the overall presentation of your collection. A blog is recommended – you can relate your knowledge concerning the pieces in your collection, how they were collected, and general stories about the world of art.
- Optimize the site. Learn (or hire an expert at) search engine optimization (SEO). You want your website to attract visitors, and the best, most cost-effective way to do so is to apply SEO techniques to your site. Besides creating and structuring keyword-rich content, you will also want other authoritative websites to link to yours. These backlinks help to improve an important metric, your Page Rank, which indicates how near the top your entry will appear in search engine result pages. A higher Page Rank translates into more traffic. You can check backlinks by using an Internet tool to display who is linked to your site. The higher their Page Ranks, the more your site will be helped.