A website is an essential platform to promote your work or art business. Here’s what you are doing wrong.
Everyone has a website these days, but unfortunately not everyone gets it right. As an artist or arts organisation, your website is usually the first port of call for those seeking out information about you and what you do. If your website is lacking it can cost you time, money, and make you miss valuable marketing opportunities. Some journalists will avoid stories on artists if they can’t readily find their details via a simple Google search and a bad website can hinder rather than help.
But it doesn’t have to be all that difficult, and by following a few simple rules you should be able to have a fast, functional and successful site. Here are five common mistakes to avoid when getting your website off the ground.
1. Forgetting vital information
Okay, so you might know the address of your gallery, but we don’t. It might seem like a no brainer, but there are many gallery websites strewn across the information where basic information is nigh on impossible to find. Contact information and addresses are absolutely essential – and the most important part of information you can have on your site.
But there are other pieces of information that are easy to forget that are specific to art form. If you are a writer, show some examples of your work. Photographers should list the publications they sell to as well as have an online portfolio of work. Bands should have gig lists and visual artists should have exhibition dates.
Some good examples of people who have cultivated a website for themselves that details the above mentioned information in an easy to find format are that of freelance writer Clementine Ford, and the Brenda May Gallery.
Think about what parts of your work that people want to know about, but don’t overdo it, and then make a list to ensure you don’t forget vital information. You’re only shooting yourself in the foot If you do.
2. Avoid the well-meaning friend or relative
Yes you have a nice friend or relative who has dabbled in design and who offers to build you a website for free. Thank them politely and then move along quietly (unless they are an actual designer).
‘If they’re doing it for free they probably don’t build websites very often and you might need to question whether they are the best person for the job. Paying for a website means you’re more likely to have some dedication and expertise behind your build. Websites needn’t be expensive but more often than not you get what you pay for,’ says Kelly Gentle, Director at Catacomb Creative and the brains behind artist websites such as that of country music songstress Melody Pool.
Once you politely declined the offer of your friend or relative you should spend some time researching the designer/developer you end up choosing. Do you like their work? Click around some of their previous sites and run a bit of usability testing and you’ll soon start to determine what their style is and more importantly how strong their coding abilities are.
‘Don’t be afraid to ask for an itemised quote from your developer based on your initial conversation with them. This will give you an idea of the time involved in the build, and where your costs are going,’ says Gentle.
3. You are overdesigning or designing inappropriately
‘A theme with tons of tripped-out functionality, busy graphics or way too many options just creates a learning curve that’s complicated and way too long. Your time is better spent in the studio producing work than it is trying to turn yourself into a web developer because you need a short course in CSS and HTML in order to use your theme,’ writes artist and designer Kim Bruce.
Instead, keep it simple. You want your work to be the star of the show here and not the website design. Choose a design that highlights your work, rather than works against it. Not only will it be better for displaying the great stuff you are doing, it’ll be easier to update and maintain, and make it easier for people to find you too.
‘Getting tricky with your site can sometimes distract you from basic considerations to your user – if nothing else an obvious navigation menu is essential. You might think you’re being Avant-garde but sometimes a convoluted design can turn a visitor off. Flash websites are not very compatible with mobile devices, are terrible for Search Engine Optimisation and are difficult to update. I always recommend a Content Management System (CMS) to my clients like WordPress or Joomla to manage files and to make sure that it is easy for us both to update,’ says Gentle.
An easy CMS then means you don’t always have to ask the designer to help you update the site. Once they’ve built you the basics, it should then be pretty easy to update on your own.
4. Not integrating with social media
Social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter often already have the audience that you are looking for. Sign up. Register your artist or organisation name and then start to update, but make sure you have integrated them into your website so that people know where to find you on social media. How you choose to do this is entirely up to you, and you don’t have to use social media at all to have an effective website; however, it certainly helps.
‘Things like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are not essential to your website but they really give the appearance of activity without having to do much at all,’ says Gentle.
At the very least get yourself a Facebook or Twitter feed so fans can keep up to date with what you are doing without having to constantly check your website.
5. Your images are wrong. All wrong.
Your images need to be the right size and we cannot stress this point enough. As artist and arts organisations photographs are usually a big part of showing off what you do – get that wrong and you’ll find people clicking out of your website almost immediately. No one has time for stretched or poor resolution photos. All they will do is make you look unprofessional and your site will become like the Docklands in Melbourne – nobody will go there.
Another thing that nobody has time for is waiting for images to load. Learn how to save things at a size that is optimal for the web.
‘If your image takes 30 seconds to load most people will have left your site by the time it finally shows up,’ writes Bruce. ‘This is the most challenging part of managing your website. Photoshop is not only expensive, you have to learn how to use it; yet another learning curve.’
Name your images with an appropriate filename to help with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as well as accessibility for the vision impaired – many of whom use screen readers to access content. A search engine can’t determine what is in an image just by looking at it, and neither can a screen reader, so you’ll need to help it along by giving it an accurate file name, and possibly even throwing in a good alt-attribute as well.
Currently the National Association for the Visual Arts are running a Build a Basic Website and are now taking enrollments. For more information visit the NAVA website.
