Websites for Artists
The internet provides an almost limitless means of communication to a worldwide audience. If you haven’t thought about using the internet to present – and communicate about – your work, it’s that time you did.
Although there are a number of technologies that are necessary to make the internet what it is today, you don’t have to understand any of them to present your work on the World Wide Web. But there are some things that you should know.
Basic Definitions
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A domain name is a unique name that identifies a website. For example, currys.com is the domain name of the Curry’s website. The letters after the period, in this case “com”, represent the domain, and the word “currys” specifies the website in that domain. There are many domains – .com, .net, .biz, .info, and .org, among others. .ca is the Canadian domain, meaning that only a bona fide Canadian business or citizen can own a domain name in that domain.
A website host is a business that provides a computer where a website resides. This computer is called – not surprisingly – a web server. A website host also provides high-capacity telecommunications lines to that computer so that people can access the website with a web browser from anywhere in the world.
Your Internet Options
There are basically two ways to present your work on the Internet: you can present it on someone else’s website or you can present it on your own website. The focus of this article is the second approach, but here are some options under the first:
www.artistscanada.com will host a gallery of your work. In return, they ask for a percentage of the revenue from work sold.
At www.canadianartistsontheweb.ca you can get a free listing that provides basic contact information, or you can pay for a listing that includes additional information and the display of a representative artwork.
www.canartscene.com offers free listings to Canadian artists that include display of some artworks.
You’ll find one of the best arrangements at www.art-agent.com, where you can display as many artworks as you like, and they facilitate communication between you and a potential buyer.
There are other websites that specialize in displaying the work of artists. Some charge a fee, some don’t; some ask for a commission on sales, some don’t. You are welcome to display your work on as many of these websites as you like, even if you have a website of your own.
These websites provide much-needed exposure for artists, but they leave a lot to be desired. Since these websites host the work of thousands of artists, it will be difficult for you to be found by the typical website visitor. If you want to stand out from this crowd, you need a website of your own.
Your Own Website
Your Domain Name
The first step in getting your own website on the internet is to select and acquire a domain name. When you acquire a domain name you are actually leasing that name for a year, so it represents an annual cost, usually $10-$20 per year, depending on the registrar you use.
The actual choice of a domain name is a personal one. Many artists choose their own name as the domain name (e.g., www.patricestanley.com), however, if your name is not unusual, there is a reasonable chance that the domain name is already taken.
You can check the availability of domain names and secure yours at many registrar websites on the Internet. Among them: www.domainsatcost.ca offers excellent prices on domain names in the .ca domain, and www.godaddy.com, which has good prices on domain names but is not licensed to lease .ca domain names.
Website Hosting
The cost of website hosting ranges from under $10/month to over $200/month. At the low end, you should expect that your host will provide poorer service: your website might be unavailable for periods of time and when it is available it might be very slow to display in a browser. What should you expect to pay?
You should be able to get good website hosting for about $10/month, if you pay in advance for 12 months. Rather than spending a lot of time seeking out a solid hosting company, you should rely on your web designer to set you up with a good provider. Chances are good that he/she can either provide the hosting directly or has a hosting company that they use. If the designer has been in business for more that two years the chances are also good they he/she has found a hosting company that provides reliable service and availability.
The Goal
There are a number of decisions you need to make before you talk to anyone about developing your website. Foremost among them is determining what the goal of your website is. What is it you are trying to achieve through your website?
Generally speaking an artist’s website should have one of these three goals:
- to display your work,
- to sell your work online, or
- to provide information about art and the artistic process.
You should determine which of these is the primary goal, and keep your focus there. Obviously, these goals are not mutually exclusive – a website whose goal is displaying art can also provide information about how to buy pieces. But keeping the primary goal in sharp focus will help you make decisions while your website is being developed.
If you find that you are covering all three of these goals in equal measure, you are likely to end up with a website that is a muddle and confusing to its visitors. If you want to achieve all three goals, it might be best to do this through more than one website.
When you have a good idea of what it is you want to achieve through your website, you should start talking to web designers.
What to expect from a web designer
There is no widely accepted methodology for developing a website. Nonetheless, there are some things that you should look for from your designer.
Your website designer should ask you about the basic design elements that you want in your website, such as colours you want or want to avoid. It is useful for a designer to know which websites you like, which ones achieve the tone or mood that you want to achieve. He/She should invite you to provide examples that illustrate the tone you are after.
The website designer should produce a mock-up of your home page and one other page that is a typical representative of a “content” page. The mock-up will probably not be a working web page – it is more likely to be a picture of a web page – but it will use the photos, graphic images, logo, and colors that constitute the web page, and will give you a precise idea of what the website will look like when it is built.
The designer should incorporate your feedback on the mock-up into the next iteration and the actual website when it is built. Keep in mind that the more iterations you ask for, the higher the price of your website is likely to be.
There is one technical angle that needs to be mentioned. All website designers will test your website in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, because this is the most predominantly used web browser. But you should ask him/her to ensure that your website works correctly and looks the same in Firefox. Firefox – which is being promoted by Google, the most dominant search engine on the Internet – is gaining market share and is being used by an increasing number of website visitors, so it is important that your website behaves as desired in Firefox as well as Internet Explorer.
What does design and development cost?
The one question that simply cannot be answered definitively. It is not unlike the question, what does a painting cost? It depends. A lot of factors can contribute to cost: the quality of work, how famous the designer is, how big a company it is, the number of pages you have, the number of artworks you present, the business function you want (such as online purchase), the number of iterations and changes you ask for, how much work he/she must do to make your photographs presentable.
However, you should be able to get a good-looking website for in the neighborhood of $500. Such a website would provide basic information and present 10-20 artworks in an online gallery.
Once the website is complete, you might want to make some changes, such as adding an artwork to the gallery, changing prices, and hopefully putting “sold” on some pieces. This is called website maintenance and your developer should charge you an hourly rate for work actually done. The rate varies from $30-$50 / hour. Some developers ask for a monthly or annual maintenance fee, to be paid whether or not they have to make changes to your website. Do not accept this approach. Your developer should agree to charge you only for actual maintenance work done on the website.
What should be on your website?
If your goal is to display your work, your website should at a minimum include 5 pages:
- Home. This page gives an overview of the website, and lets visitors know what’s in store for them. You should include news items such as upcoming exhibitions.
- About the Artist. This page presents your bio, collections your work is in, awards received, your solo and group shows, and other “credentials”.
Artist Statement.
- Contact. This page lists all of the means of contacting you. It is reasonable to ask your website developer to provide a form by which website visitors can send comments to you.
- Gallery. There are as many ways of presenting artworks on the web as there are website designers. In general, the gallery page will contain thumbnail images of your artwork. When the visitor clicks the cursor on a thumbnail, he/she will be presented with a larger image of that work, sometimes in a pop-up window, sometimes on a full page of the website.
This means that if there are ten artworks on the Gallery page, the website developer needs to create an additional ten pages, one for a larger version of each of these artworks.
Of course, if your designer is particularly lazy he/she will create a Gallery that is one long page that contains large photos of each of the ten artworks. This page – many screens in length – will often take so long for a browser to present that your site visitor might well have surfed to the next website before your first artwork arrives on their screen.
Incidentally, it is good practice to retain high-quality photographs of each of your works. These will save the designer’s time, your money, and will enable you to show your work in a good light.
There are other pages you can consider:
- Exhibitions. If you have exhibited your work in a variety of venues and it appears in a number of collections, you could devote a web page to this subject, including your current and upcoming exhibitions.
- Links. It is not uncommon to provide a page containing links to websites that you would encourage your website visitors to have a look at. You should provide a brief description of what people will find at these websites, so that they can decide whether or not to surf to the website.
- “Explanation”. If you are using an artistic technique or process that has recently been developed, or is not well known or understood, you might want to include a page that explains the technique or describes the process, so that website visitors can fully appreciate your pieces.
If the primary goal of your website is to provide information, then you will also want to consider these pages that are devoted to:
- Tips
- Techniques
- Lessons/Tutorials
- Books
- Newsletters. If you produce regular newsletters you might have a web page of links to online versions of the newsletters, both past and current issues.
How to present your work
A key aspect of presentation is the organization of your work for your audience. Organization is an artificial construct and will influence how your work is perceived, so you need to choose an organizational scheme that makes sense for you and adds to the visitor’s understanding of your work.
The most common organizational schemes:
- Chronological. This simply a presentation of your work in chronological order, always from the most recent to the earliest works.
- Subject. Landscapes, portraits, still life, etc.
- Medium. Implied in this scheme is that you have a reasonable number of pieces to display in each of the mediums.
- Thematic. In this approach you group your works in much the way you would for a gallery exhibition – they are united by a theme that can cross media, subjects and a long period of time.
Each artwork in your gallery should be described in a standard way, and should include
- Title
- Year
- Medium and surface
- Dimensions
If the works are being offered for sale you should say whether they are unframed or framed (and, if so, how they are framed). There is no fixed rule regarding whether or not to include prices, but if you include it for one piece, you should include it for all.
In addition, there are website design considerations for presentation.
- Background colour. The background colour should not distract from or compete with the artwork being displayed. You will find black sometimes used as a background colour on websites. Why? When was the last time you saw an art gallery with black walls? Art gallery walls are generally of a neutral colour, so you should use a neutral colour for your website background.
- Graphics. As with the background colour, you want graphics that do not distract from or compete with your artwork.
It is fine if your art is funky, playful, and wildly colourful. But that doesn’t mean your website has to be as well. The nature of your work will be easier to perceive if the website is simply a vessel for presentation and not an attempt to replicate the elements of your art.
Protecting your work
Implicit in presenting documents and images on a website is a copyright on the material presented. Nonetheless, it is a good practice to include a copyright note on each of the pages of your website.
There is no cost-effective means of ensuring that the website images of your work will not be downloaded by a website visitor. People need only to right-click the cursor on an image and select the “Save Image As” option in the drop-down menu. Some web designers will disable the right-click to prevent this in Internet Explorer. But there are simple ways around this gimmick – use another browser, such as Opera, or disable Javascript.
The good news is that the image people download cannot be put to good use in print. Typically, the website image will be optimized, meaning that the quality of the image is reduced so that it will load quickly in a browser. In addition, the image should be presented at 72 pixels per inch, which is the standard for monitors. High-quality prints of images need to be about 300 dots per inch. This means that if some one captures from your website an image of your work that occupies 5” x 5” on the screen, a good quality print of that image would be smaller than an inch-and-a-half square.
Getting found by search engines
Finally, once your website is live on the Internet, you should ensure that it gets on the search engine radar, so that people surfing the web for art – or for you specifically – will find your website.
It is reasonable for your web designer to do this as part of his/her service, but if they want to put a special price tag on this, you should decline and register your website yourself.
There are literally hundreds of search engines on the internet, but there are three that have a large market share, so it is these three that you need to register your website with: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search. In addition, you should register your website at The Open Directory, since it is used as the base directory by some search engines, including AOL Search and Netscape Search.
Here are the links to the actual pages where you can register with these search engines or learn how they accept submissions:
Google – http://www.google.com/addurl/
Yahoo! – http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
MSN Search – http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD
The Open Directory can be found at www.dmoz.org. Navigate to the section of the directory where you would like your website to appear, then click on “Suggest url”.
I hope this article has eliminated any roadblocks that might have been standing between you and presenting your work on the internet. Time to start your engines, and get on the Information Highway.
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