How to plan an artist’s website

On this page you will find some useful tips and advice on how to plan your website.

Websites come in all shapes and sizes, and costs can range from a few hundred pounds to several thousand pounds  depending on the size and functionality required. Before taking on any project, we always provide a full written estimate that sets out the costs of your website, optional extras and the support services that we offer. But before you get in touch, it’s worth spending some time thinking about what you really need and doing some research on Google to identify what styles you like. Our artist’s websites examples page is a good starting point.

Questions that you’ll need to think about

Aims: what do you want your website to achieve for you?

Target audience: who do you expect will visit your website?

Main pages:  what are the main pages that will appear on the main menu of your site (e.g. home, about me, gallery, news, contact etc).

Galleries:  how many galleries do you require and how many images in each gallery? Do you require clickable enlargements?

Selling your artworks online: do you plan to sell artwork from your site? If so, the options are:

1) Email – i.e. invite customers to email you with the name of the painting that they are interested in (simplest, cheapest and most common  option).
2) PayPal ‘buy now’ buttons – suitable if you have up to 20 works for sale.
3) An online shop – if you have more than 20 works for sale, you will really need a proper shop with a shopping cart and payment system. This will have a large impact on the cost of your site (websites with eCommerce facilities start at £1500 for a template base site and can run to many thousands of pounds if you want a bespoke shop).

You can also consider using third party sellers such as Etsy, Not on the Highstreet or similar if your budget does not stretch to an online shop.

Updating the website:  how do you want to update your website? The options are:

1) Paid-for updates – if you are less confident or short of time, we do the updates for you say once or twice a year.
2) Self-editable website – where you can edit the text and images on your site yourself.

In general text pages are easier to update than image galleries. You could consider a hybrid site where you maintain your text-based pages such as profile and events pages and we do the gallery updates for you on a ‘paid-for’ basis.

What do you want your website to look like?: it’s important that you do some research and look at other websites so that you can decide what you like and don’t like. Our artist websites examples page is a good start. When you get in touch, it’s helpful if you have some ideas of how you want your site to look as some styles are more complicated to design than others.

Do you want complete control over how you want your website to look?: All our sites are created in WordPress. The starting point is always a pre-designed WordPress framework or theme that we then customise to meet your requirements. If you want a site that is designed exactly to your specification, we will include a design phase where each screen is laid out and agreed to in Photoshop prior to development. To keep costs down, most people simply choose a pre-existing theme, but if you want something that looks a bit different, a bespoke theme might be for you. Of course including a Photoshop design phase will increase the cost of your site.

Images: can you provide the images for your website cropped and ready for inclusion? The more preparation you can do yourself, the lower the final cost of the site.

Other content: will you be providing all the text and links required for your website, proofread and ready for inclusion?

Approximate total text on your website: e.g., one page of A4, two to three pages of A4 etc.

Approximate number of images on your website: we’ll need an approximate total

Branding: do you have any logos or any other branding graphics that you want to include on your site? If so, we’ll need copies.

Social Media: do you have any social media pages such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter? If so, you will need to provide us with the links to these pages so we can include a link on your site. If you don’t have any social media presence, you should consider setting up a Facebook page at the very least. Read more about the importance of Facebook for artists and our Facebook customisation service.

Your budget: it’s useful for us to have some idea of your budget. The cost of a site depends on the amount of content, the functionality required (e.g. what it does and how it works) and whether or not the site is individual or fixed framework. Our websites range from simple, low cost starter sites to high end, bespoke sites. We can design to suit any budget.

Timescales: Do you have a date in mind for the launch of your site?