How to build your first website on a budget

Many artists are super talented with their art making, but it can be overwhelming when it comes to building a website.

Nowadays, when someone come across your art whether in a magazine, on the street, or in a gallery, if they want to know more about you, they are likely to search your name on the Internet. To be available when people search for you, it is crucial to have everything you do in one place ready on display. You can certainly pay another person to build your website, but it will be limiting and often expensive. Even if you do finally get your website built, it will get outdated as new technologies become available, and if you do not know how to edit and build on your site, you will miss out on many opportunities.

Use social network tools to find your audience

The popular social networks can give you a lot of insights on what works before you invest a lot of time and resource on your website. Even though I have the skill to design and develop any website I like, I didn’t build my website until one year later, when I had a good understanding of who I was building it for. For most of my first year in art, I used blogger for writing, Facebook for news, Instagram for photos, and Youtube for videos. I discovered the people who will be most interested in my contents are the taste makers of the industry: galleries, press, venues, fellow artists and of course, art collectors. So it became clear that I need to make relevant information accessible for them.

Keep it minimal

Sometimes more is less. Anything you add is one more distraction from the rest. So be very careful with what you show and what you don’t. The best way to do this is to list a priority list of things you’d like to do on your website. And think really hard about the items at the bottom of the list. Do you need them? Can they be grouped into one section? Don’t overwhelm the users with too many choice, generally 6-8 choices are enough to choose from.

Don’t re-invent the wheel

Now the design part. If you don’t have the design skill to work with design softwares or have a programmer to implement what you designed, it’s much more affordable (and easy) to find an existing template to work with. There are many “themes” out there which pretty much cover all different types of layout with best design practice. If you find something you like, it’s much easier to tweak it rather than building from scratch.

Tweak it to perfection

Now here is the most technical part. If you have a little bit of knowledge about HTML, WordPress might be a good start. But there are also things out there which doesn’t require any knowledge. HTML is not hard to learn, but learning it will save you tons of time and resources by getting back and forth with a web person just to “add that little word there”. When you are on a budget, it worthy investing a little time in this.

Launching your site

It’s tempting to launch things as you go, and having unattended pages. But it’s not going to look pretty. You never know who will come across your site next so making the best out of every visit you get by polishing your site for launching.

Would you like to know more?

If you are thinking about setting up your own artist website, what’s the biggest challenge for you? Let me know your thoughts in the comments and I can explain more in future posts.