Artist Site Options

Artist sites aren't all the same. Spend some time thinking about what you want to publish on your site. In addition to images of your work, here's what you might include:

Text

You or someone else could write an "About the Artist" page. Alternatively, many artists put up a résumé, curriculum vitae, biography or autobiography.

Many artists publish their history of exhibitions. You could also list major collections that your work is part of.

You can publish news about things like awards, residencies, upcoming exhibitions and events.

Have you written any artist statements or other essays? Some sites have the artist's thoughts about every piece. Others have a statement for every grouping of work.

You could have someone else write about the work, if that would be better.

Reviews are good. Links to reviews that are on-line are great. Same thing with essays.

A user-friendly quick-reading option is to provide representative quotations that give readers a verbal context of how people have seen your work.

A bibliography invites people to do additional research off-line, but by itself it gives a general idea of the depth of your career.

Editing

Websites are like a publication of an illustrated book — good writing and editing are essential, along with the layout. If you want the help, I can edit materials provided in English. I can adapt typography so you like the way the text looks.

Alternate Languages

Some artists may need non-English versions of their sites. My designs of josianesoder.com and andresramirezgaviria.com show two approaches to this requirement.

Links

Most small sites benefit from maintaining a links section. You can link to your galleries, to artist friends and associates, or to other places on the Web that relate to your art. If you trade links with other sites, those links help Web surfers discover you. Some search engines like Google judge the popularity of sites by how many other sites are linked to them.

Do you have any gallery connections that you want to mention? You could just post them as links, but you could also give contact info for galleries that carry your work. You could also trade links with these galleries as a way of driving traffic to your site.

Contact information of some kind is essential. You will get an e-mail address like info@yourname.com with your Web Hosting. Publishing that on your site is enough if you want to maintain privacy, but some artists also post complete phone and address information. You can also ask people to contact you through a gallery.

Images

A picture of the artist is another element that many sites have — I've even seen one or two with baby pictures. Pictures of gallery installations, the artist's studio and the artist at work also add atmosphere and give the viewer a sense of scale.

Do you want to show larger images on your site? They take a little longer to download and they expose you a little more to copyright infringement, so many sites avoid them. But I think that larger images help the viewer fall in love with your work.

Should you include your older work on the site? That's appropriate if the site is your online museum, but probably not if you want to promote your current work. I've seen a few sites that show older work, and in almost all cases it was a little less interesting than the new work, and therefore a waste of time. If that's NOT true for you, then it could make your current work look bad. On the other hand, one or two good pieces in a different style or medium could illustrate how broad an artist you are.

Multimedia

I can produce and install multiple media such as Adobe PDF files, Flash animations, and audio and video clips. But would be better for you if I concentrate on design and implementation of the website, not scannning files and typing in documents. Finished MP3s, slides transfered to Photo CDs, text in e-mail or Word, or JPEGs from your camera, it's best if you provide the materials in digital format.

Sales

If you have current relationships with galleries, it may not be possible for you to sell work directly. Even if you can, you may not want to deal with selling and shipping your work, and you may want to avoid the appearance of commercialism.

Many artists have success auctioning their work on eBay. Your website gives eBay bidders a broader view of your art and ideas, as well as showing additional work that they may prefer to buy.

For selling art directly on the Web I suggest the simple solution of using PayPal, as I did on safren.com. If you have a lot of work to sell and different categories of work, and you want to be able to update the website by yourself, I can integrate Miva Merchant into your site.

An artist's website can be a portfolio, a sales catalog, a personal museum, or a ...