Website Design Information for Artists.

• Get a Domain Name. Your domain name (e.g. www.fineartsweb.com) is the business card of your site. Look for a short name that fully describes what someone in need of your talent or goods is going to remember. There are many Domain Registers on the web. They all charge to register your chosen name, if available. Domain name registration is a recursive fee (once a year at least). Do not pay yet, continue reading, you might save this money.

Get a Server on the Web. There are two main flavours. Servers that work on Windows, and servers that work on Linux. If your site has a database, dynamic HTML  and/or scripts,  it is advisable that you check for compatibility before paying for your site. There are many Free space offers. Beware of anything "FREE" if you are serious about your site (you will end up with a lot of distracting advertisements  and popups, and your visitor is going to avoid your site).

You will pay for two basic things on a Web Server: Space and Bandwidth. Normally this is a monthly fee, but you will want to pay for a whole year in advance because it  is cheaper. You might have to pay extra for parking your domain, that is, assigning an IP address to your domain name. Some web servers offer free domain registration if you subscribe to their service. This offer can be of benefit to you since you will save the registration and the domain parking fee.

There are two main terms you need to check beside the operating system of your server.

1-  Space (Megabytes) in their server you are paying for. Depends on the size of your content. Images are the bulk of your site content. Take into consideration not only the size of your artwork,  but also the background images, banners, buttons,  separators, that cute e-mail Clipart  image, animated pictures, etc.  Calculate at least double the space needed, and leave space to expand the site.

2- Bandwidth (Megabytes per day, or month of information flowing from your site). This figure depends on the traffic on your site. The more Megabytes of traffic chosen, the better. You want many people using, browsing and referring others to see your site, that's why you are creating your website after all. Image rich content is also bandwidth rich. How many pages of information you have? How big are those pages? How many users are you expecting ? Think big, and do your math, otherwise you will be penalized ($$$) for going over your limit, and/or even get your site banned from your server.

Design your Site

As an Artist, your site is probably going to be built around an image gallery of some kind. Most HTML  based image galleries are Framed. We are not talking about that beautiful and expensive wooden frame around your painting, we are talking about your page construction. Have you ever heard about this site contains frames.. or this site is better viewed with a browser supporting frames...?

Frames are a good solution to the problem of showing actually two or more pages on your screen, and scrolling them independently, but have a serious drawback. SEARCH ENGINES have a hard time indexing your framed pages, and guess what? You will have a hard time getting somebody on the Internet getting to your site when they are looking for something you might have.

That brings us to the term KEYWORDS. Keywords are the words someone looking for your art is going to type when using a SEARCH ENGINE (GOOGLE, YAHOO, MSN, ALTAVISTA...). You will need to anticipate those keywords in order to optimize your pages before submitting them for inclusion to the search engines (otherwise nobody will ever find you on the web).

Site Submission is not free anymore. Search engines are charging for including your site on their database, this is also a recursive charge (yearly fee, plus expedite processing fee) Site optimization is  very time consuming, it involves making changes to your pages until you get the place you want on the search results (read bellow).

Back to your art gallery: there are ways around the frames problem, one of them is using a normal html page to introduce you and your art to the visitor. This is like a gateway page to your gallery, with an ENTER  button (you don't want an automatic redirecting page; otherwise you could be penalized by the search engines). This is really the page that needs to be optimized since all the traffic to your art gallery is going to come via this page. The page has to be simple, attractive and informative, leading the visitor, full of expectation, into the realm of your magical art gallery. Keep this page small so it will load fast. Most of the people surfing the net will exit your page if it takes more than approximately 8 seconds to load.

This part of your site creation is important. Not only because it is the face your visitor sees, but also because it has to reflect your personality as well as motivate your visitor into going further into what you want him to admire from the beginning- your art! But is even more important because, depending on this page construction, the search engine is going to give you a place in the list of the results related to the keywords the visitor typed. You will want to be included as near the first place as possible. Anything beyond the 30th place (3rd page),  in this search results list, reduces the possibility this visitor will ever click on your link.

You want visitors to look and admire your artwork, but your motivation could be something less altruistic, and you want your visitor to buy it too. Nobody will buy an expensive item if they don't know anything about you. So, you need to include another page explaining who you are, giving information about how to contact you if things go wrong with the shipping or delivery, refunds policies, etc. The more ways the visitor has to actually contact you or talking to you, the more confident will be that his/her decision to buy is not going to become a nightmare.

Visual arts are relatively easy to market because visitors know that what they see is close to what they will get, nevertheless, you will have to include your artistic biography, a list of exhibitions, etc. This information is valuable to collectionists. You have to demonstrate this kind of visitor that it is a good investment to buy NOW, because your art is going to be more valuable in the future. You have to be attractive not for your present value as an artist, but because of your potential of becoming a celebrity.

The first step to build a sense of " good investment" into your work  is being known by many people. The Internet is a very good way to get there if your site has been well designed.

You will have to include more pages in order to optimize your site for more keywords. With only one page it  will get too cluttered with keywords and you will end up losing the precious place you've got in the search results, and the interest of your visitors. The more pages your site has, the more expensive it will become in  space, bandwidth, design, optimization and submission time and money (you have to pay for every page submitted to the main search engines). Also keep in mind that  the more pages submitted the more chance to get the right visitor to your site, you decide, sometimes it is better to wait and see the results of a modification before deciding to commit more money and time.

By the way, a page dedicated to links to other sites (related in content and quality to your site) is a must if you want to get better rankings in search engines results. One way to get ranking is by Link Exchange. Links on your site are valuable to other sites, what you really want is your link on other sites because of the traffic those links will redirect to your site, and because the search engines assume that there is something valuable on your website if others are linking to you. Create an attractive banner to display in link pages of other artists, suppliers and galleries. Link only to sites related to your site in content and importance. Don't use LINK RINGS or you will get penalized by the search engines. Links can attract sometimes more traffic to your site than search engine results.

My advice: beware of "FREE" offers, do yourself as much as possible if money is a concern. If you are a computer friendly person (or you know somebody who is) you can do a lot with less money. And, take your time to browse around and familiarize with the bold terms in this page, you will end up paying for not knowing what  those words mean.

Show your work as professionally as possible, visitors are going to judge you and your art by  looking at your website and  the information about yourself you placed there. If you are a good writer you can write articles about your work, share some tips, know how. Those articles are a good reason why others might want to link to your site.

So, resuming all of the above, the process of website design and construction consists on the following steps:

Choose a Domain Name.
Register your domain.
Webhosting.
Design your website pages.
Build your website and upload to webserver.
Submit your website to Search Engines (Marketing & Promotion).
Website Maintenance and redesign (in order to keep the ranking and visitor interest).

The last  steps (6,7) are repeated in a loop in what is known as website optimization.

So now, everything is finally working, your site is beautiful, you have lots of visitors who want to buy your art. In order to make things easy,  you will want  to include a little database, a catalog with prices, a shopping cart kind of experience, accept credit cards or use PAYPAL or something  similar.  THAT IS THE THEME OF ANOTHER TUTORIAL...Good Luck!!

Use the e-mail link bellow to give me feedback or ask questions.

Thanks,

The webmaster at fineartsweb.com