It is my understanding that Google is headed toward wanting sites to be completely HTTPS, not just checkout and customer info pages. Is this something that is being considered for ViArt?

It's up to you how you would like to run your site.
If you will decide to run your site completely on HTTPS then for both Site URL and Secure Site URL in System Setting you will need to specify your site url starting with https://
 
Also you will need to add redirect to HTTPS for all your pages.
In case of using .htaccess it will looks like:
 
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^80$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} your-site-domain.com$
RewriteRule ^(/)?(.*) https://www.your-site-domain.com/$2 [R=301,L,QSA]

Cool beans! That seems simple enough. That will take care of all images and everything?

Hi Metz,
 
If you go to your settings page, you'll notice a use full url in product images - this will work for newly added photos. For existing ones, you can run a script that will apply these changes, but that script will be dependent upon if you're using the multi-store functionality or just one.
 
hth.
 
Dan

Hi
I am also moving to full https but what can I do to stop 404 errors when a page is loaded with http - for some reason it is not forwarding. Please help me this is not good so short before christmas!
 
Thanks
Jessica

set up a .htaccess file to redirect all NON port 443 (ssl/https) traffic to your https url
 
You can google a few examples