The mantra for a successful art or artist website has been and
continues to be "Keep it fast, simple, easy, and organized." Navigation
and content must be straightforward in order to attract visitors in the
first place and keep them on the site once they get there. First-time
visitors to any artist website should know as quickly as possible where
they are, who the artist is, what his or her art looks like, what that
art is about, why the art is worth seeing (and hopefully worth buying),
and how to move around in order to get wherever they want to go. Sites
that lack these basics or make other common errors won't be able to
attract and hold visitors, and will likely end up lost in the vast
morass of nonfunctional and confusing art websites that overpopulate the
Internet. So in the interest of better artist websites everywhere,
here's a list of what to do and what to avoid in order to assure
yourself maximum visibility and an effective web presence online:
Get your own domain and avoid free web hosting services.
Free web hosting is never free and it's always lame. "Free" websites
torture visitors with all kinds of distracting advertisements and other
obtrusive graphics. At worst, maybe half of the screen shows your art
while the other half, controlled by the host site, looks like a circus.
Your art is in direct competition with all kinds of commercial crap and
hardly any art looks good under those circumstances. Furthermore, free
sites give the impression that either you can't afford your own website
or domain name or worse yet, that you don't care enough about your art
to bother making it look good online. The good news is that basic
websites with good functionality hardly cost anything these days.
Don't use third-party advertising on your sites, especially for goods or services unrelated to your art.
Sure, you may make a little pocket change from click-throughs, but any
advertising is distracting and your art will suffer for it.
Be sure your website looks the same on Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
The same website can look great on one browser and terrible on
another, or worse yet, work on one browser but be completely
nonfunctional on another. Test yours on all major browsers before going
public.
Link your website to all of your social networking pages (and
vice versa) so that visitors can move between them with as little effort
as possible. Social networking websites have evolved into one of
the best ways for driving traffic to your website, and they're only
getting better. Your website is all about your art; social networking
sites are more about you as a person. The two work exceptionally well
together.
Present yourself and your art so that anyone can understand what you're up to.
People who already know you or who are familiar with your art will
navigate your pages to get to wherever they want to go. So they're all
taken care of. It's the complete strangers who you should be most
concerned about-- those who land on your site by chance, accident or
happenstance. The Internet is all about broadening your fan base, so
when someone lands on your website who knows absolutely nothing about
you or your art, you want to do your absolute best to keep them there.
Make your site easy to navigate. Some website formats are
far too confusing, have dead-end pages, or have gallery sections that
seem more like medieval mazes. Visitors get lost, and lost visitors
mean lost sales. Make sure every page on your site is linked back to
major pages like your homepage, bio, resume, contact information page,
purchasing information and your image gallery main page or pages.
Keep texts to a minimum. This includes your statement,
bio, explanations of mediums or techniques, and so on. Use too many
words to inform visitors about yourself or your art and you'll bore them
right off your site. Quick concise introductions and descriptions are
best; anything over 300-400 words gets tedious (unless there's a strong
cognitive component to your art). If you want to provide detailed
information about either yourself or your art, link to pages where
people can read more rather than placing boatloads of text on
high-traffic areas like your homepage. People who want to know more
will click over to the text pages; those who don't won't get slowed down
by oceans of verbiage. Remember-- people visit your website to see
your art, not to read your life story.
Think seriously about accompanying each series or body of your work with its own explanation or introduction.
Again, keep the content brief-- perhaps two or three paragraphs at the
most. Briefly explaining or elaborating on your art deepens people's
understanding and experience of the work. Keep in mind that Google and
other search engines cannot search images, but they can search text.
Providing textual explanations of your art, either accompanying groups
of similar works or even of individual pieces, increases the chances
that they'll come up in searches and may be clicked over to.
Keep image sizes reasonable. Large detailed images of
your art may look great as they download over high-speed connections,
but remember that many people still have slower connections. Long
downloads frustrate visitors and force them off your site, so use images
no larger than 100K-200K, preferably smaller. Photoshop and similar
digital imaging programs have formatting options to reduce image sizes
for websites or emails without significantly compromising quality.
Learn how to use them.
NEVER require visitors to join, register, get passwords, or fill out any forms of any kind in order to see your website.
Forcing people to identify themselves before they can see your art is a
horrible idea. Imagine if people had to show their driver's licenses
or other types of personal identification in order to visit
bricks-and-mortar galleries or artist studios. If it doesn't happen in
real life, it shouldn't happen online.
Don't overuse "cookies" (small files that attach to visitors'
computer hard drives, track their movements around your site, and
collect personal data). The worst offenders are websites that
refuse to let you in unless you allow them to set cookies in your
computer (I have my cookie options set to notify me when this happens,
and rarely stay on these sites). Certain types of cookies are intrusive
at least and an invasion of privacy at most. However, cookies are
occasionally necessary when filling out certain forms, when buying art
using "shopping cart" services, or for purposes like tracking visitors
around your website to see which pages they visit the most. Again, when
people want to contact you, they will. Don't overdo efforts to extract
information out of them.
Avoid plug-ins, special effects, audio, complex visuals, and other gimmicks
that have nothing to do with your art. These often take a long time to
load, require special software or, at worst, crash visitors' computers.
Unless your website is designed to be a work of art or a performance
piece in and of itself, and exists primarily for entertainment purposes,
avoid the fancy stuff. Web designers may push for special effects, but
when you get right down to it, they're totally unnecessary,
counterproductive to your ends, and mainly about those designers showing
off their technical skills rather than you effectively presenting your
art. Remember-- people visit your website to see your art and see it
fast, not to sit through your web designer's masturbatory fantasies.
Provide adequate contact information. The more you tell
people about yourself such as your studio address, cell phone number,
email address, or other details, the more accessible you appear. Don't
give potential buyers the impression that you're hard to communicate
with by showing nothing or just your email address, and not even telling
them where you live. Some artist websites provide absolutely no
contact information whatsoever, but rather have these awful feedback or
comments forms that you fill out and submit. People who fill them out
have no idea where they go, who gets them, if they even go anywhere or
whether they'll ever get replies. The questions that always go through
my mind on these sites are, "What is this artist trying to hide?" or
"Why are they making themselves so inaccessible?" The overwhelming
majority of people who buy contemporary art appreciate a sense of who
they're buying it from, so don't be a stranger; anonymity is not a
selling point.
If you have no consistent long-term gallery representation, price every piece of art on your website for sale
assuming you have no conflicts with galleries or others who
periodically represent or sell your art. If you have representation,
discuss options and preferences with them regarding wether or not to put
prices on your website; if they don't want prices, don't price. For
the rest of you, not pricing your art on-site, but rather asking people
to email or otherwise contact you for prices, is always a big mistake.
You'll lose potential sales if you do this. As in real life, many
people prefer to shop for art quietly by themselves, decide whether they
can afford it, and then make contact. People are reluctant to ask
prices for a number of reasons-- they think that doing so will obligate
them in some way, that they'll get a hard sell, that they'll get a
barrage of emails, that they'll be embarrassed if they find out the art
costs more than they can afford, that artists will quote as high a price
as possible just to see how much they can sell it for, and so on. When
you're out shopping, do you like having to ask how much something costs
or do you prefer to see the price in advance? Do unto others...
Be able to justify or explain your selling prices when someone asks.
Everyone likes to feel that they're spending their money wisely--
especially these days-- so either provide basic information about your
price structure on site, or be prepared to field questions about value
when people call or email you. People who don't understand how you set
your prices or why they're as high or as low as they are far more
reluctant to buy than people who do understand.
Offer approval, return, and refund policies. Online art
shoppers may want to see art on approval first and be able to return it
for complete refunds (less shipping costs) if it doesn't look like they
thought it did when they saw it online. No approval, return, and refund
policies mean fewer, if any, sales. The more willing you are to work
with buyers, the greater your chances of selling art.
Provide clear concise instructions on how to buy. Tell
people what payment options you accept (accept as many as possible), how
you pack, how you ship, how long they have to view the art on approval,
and so on. The more professional you appear, the more comfortable
people feel about buying from you.
Offer art in a variety of price ranges. Online shoppers
tend to be conservative, tend to start out by buying less expensive
pieces from artists they're not already familiar with or who they don't
already know, and will likely get discouraged if every piece they see
costs thousands of dollars or more. This is especially true of people
who happen upon your site for the first time-- and impressing
first-timers is critical to your online success as an artist. So make
sure that pretty much anyone who likes your art enough has a chance to
buy something regardless of his or her budget.
Don't show too much sold art. Some artists think that
showing numerous sold works of art will make them look good, incite some
kind of buying frenzy, or give people the impression that they better
buy now "before it's too late"-- but the effect is often the opposite.
Potential buyers instead think that the best pieces are already sold and
all that's left are the crumbs. They get frustrated when a selection
is too limited or when all the "good stuff" is gone. It's kind of like
going to a garage sale at the end of the day.
Show sold works in a section titled "Select Past Works" or something similar.
Here you show the best of the best-- art that's won prizes or been
exhibited in prestigious shows, art that's in respected private or
institutional collections, art that's been covered in reviews or
pictured on websites or in hard-copy publications, and so on.
Discreetly using past works in this way speaks to your credibility as an
artist.
Don't show every work of art you've ever created. We do
not need to see experimental pieces, one-offs that you don't intend to
follow up on with additional related works, older pieces that have
little or no bearing on what you're doing now, or the first drawing you
ever made for Mommy. Too much art and too much variety is confusing to
visitors because they can't get a sense of who you are or what your art
represents or is intended to signify or communicate. Remember-- people
rarely buy from artists who they can't get a sense of, or buy art that
they can't understand.
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