7 Mistakes You’re Making With Your Artist Website (And How To Fix Them)

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So you’ve uploaded all your artwork and designs; published on your artist website for all to see. You’ve put a lot of hard work into your art and putting together a beautiful website with all the components that a good art portfolio should have.

And… crickets..

Where is everyone? Where’s all the traffic and art sales? What happened to “build it and they will come”?

Well my friend, as you’ve probably gathered, sometimes it can be difficult to get your artwork ‘out there’ and make good sales on top of that. The truth is, first impressions count for everything. It’s the reason people come back, and the reason they decide to buy.

People looking for artwork to buy are searching all over the web and social media, where they have an abundance of options to choose from. A serious art buyer is most likely going to choose from a serious artist. An artist that is passionate about their work, consistent, and has high quality work. Art buyers will also buy from trusted sources and secure websites or platforms.

The truth is, an art website that looks trustworthy, professional and secure is more likely to convert to more sales and even better, return visits and recommendations, adding value to the work you do.

Improve Your Artist Website By Design

So how do you go about creating your artist website that looks great and is representative of your personality and artistry? One that people are actually interested in looking through and purchasing art from?

If you want to make a better impression with your art, devote some time out of your day towards improving your artist website or online art portfolio.

The tips outlined below are easy to do and may only take a few minutes to implement but will drastically improve your website and online persona as an artist, which can eventually lead to more sales on your artwork.

1. Your navigation menu is confusing

Your menu bar should be clear, intuitive and straight-forward.

As our founder Lauren explains:

“I used to have a different page for every collection title, as well as every medium. It was too much! I only realised this was not intuitive at all when I went to someone else’s site that was also arranged this way, and I found it impossible to find what I was looking for”.

Think about it… Imagine you’re a mixed media artist that makes drawings, paintings and sometimes sculptures. You’ve arranged the ‘Art’ tab of your menu like this:

Example of an unhelpful menu:

Artwork >

“Some wordy title of my art collection, 2019”

“Flowery title that only I understand, 2019”

“Another title of my new art collection, 2020”

A visitor is looking for your newest drawings they saw somewhere on Instagram. But where are they going to look? How will they find it? Chances are they’ll dig around a bit and exit before they find it. If you work in the same medium, but you work on different themes, you could organise your menu by theme. A much better approach to your menu might be something like this:

Example of a better menu:

Art>

Drawings > 2020, 2019, 2018

Paintings > 2018, 2017, 2016

Sculptures > 2018, 2017

This way, once the visitor is on a page, they can see all your artwork under the appropriate collection title. Similar to what Scott Listfield has done on his brilliant website. Be warned though, his artwork is so addictive, you might need to carve some time out of your day.

Have you heard of Coolors? It’s a free online colour picker that can generate colour palettes and satisfying combinations that can really help you bring your brand to life. It lets you know the HTML code for the colours you like so you can use and find the same colours across all your art making and brand marketing needs. Lauren explains how she always go back to Coolors for artwork colour inspiration or if she’s designing something for a client. Their website can do a lot, so we recommend scrolling right down to the footer menu to see just how much you can do.

3. You use too many fonts

Streamline all the fonts on your website and other marketing material, we can’t stress this enough. Fonts and colours act like a signature for your brand and potentially stand as the most important part of the overall visual identity. It’s good practice to only use up to 2 clear, easy to read fonts. One for Headings or Menus and one for Paragraphs or Artwork Titles. If you MUST, use 3 fonts at the most.

There’s really no need to have too many different fonts in your website. Even though it’s fun to play around with the look and feel of your site with different fonts, if you end up using too many it will make your website and marketing materials look crowded and confusing.

4. Your logo could use a little help

Need somewhere to design unique graphics or impactful logos for your website? Canva is a free online design tool that lets you create anything and everything basically. You’ve probably already heard of it, but it’s truly the best online tool that creatives can use to make social media graphics, blog banners, facebook images, instagram stories, ads, and everything in between. In regards to fonts, Canva has some great options and even suggests font pairings to keep your designs looking cohesive.

5. Your layout is too busy

Artists submit their work to Dark Yellow Dot everyday, so looking at artist’s websites is a reoccurring activity over here. One thing in particular that really stands out is when a website is just far too crowded. As soon as a viewer lands on any website, they want to know exactly what it’s about without having a load of other obstacles getting in the way.

Don’t overdo it with items and calls to actions that are asking visitors to click here, there and everywhere. Keep it simple with nice large images of your art that people can immediately browse through.

Need more help with your layout? Take a look at this website template for artists.

And remember, clean doesn’t have to mean boring. We are artists after all and like to be creative. But there are ways to make your website unique without being too overwhelming to first time visitors interested in seeing your work, like Shantell Martin’s website for instance.

Looking for creative website inspiration? Take a look at another example, a unique and playful website template for artists.

6. Your SEO needs improving

SEO is everything! Achieving good SEO is a slow burn type of thing and can take a while to build up, but really this is so important if you want to be found on Google and get traffic to your website. The more people that find your website means more potential sales! The next steps are some simple and practical ways to improve the SEO of your website and in turn, improve your artist website in general:

Simple ways to improve your art website SEO:

Different website builders will have their own ways of integrating SEO into the backend of your website. For example, if you’re using WIX, they make it super easy with their SEO Wizard checklist. If you’re using WordPress, they make it easier with the Yoast SEO plugin.

Alt Text

Make sure all your images have the ALT text filled in. This is a short and simple description of the image with the most important keywords. Think of it as closed captions for your pictures. It also helps Google Images find your site content.

Keep a Blog

This is not 100% necessary, but blogs are pretty good at allowing Google to realise your site as legitimate, informational and regularly updated.

After all, Google IS information. Think of each post as like adding layers upon layers of content, subsequently building up good SEO. Your blog doesn’t have to be extensive, 500 words is sufficient for Google to like you. Anything under 300 words is kind of pointless.

Don’t know what to write about? Anytime you make something new, write a little reflection on it. Talk about what your influences were, why you created it, what challenges did you have? What is the title about? People love to see little ‘behind the scenes’ and studio insights from artists. Consider posting shots or videos of your works in progress too.

Update your site regularly

Google loves when a site has newly posted pages. Each time you publish your site with new content it’s like alerting Google you’ve got things going on over on your site. Chances are it will pay more attention, and rank your site higher. An abandoned, neglected website will not perform well, so if you want to improve your artist website, you have to feed it content. You get back what you put in!

7. Your Images Aren’t Protected

if you’re posting original art on your site, you’re going to want to protect them. This is a simple way to improve your artist website and make your life easier.

Watermarks

While there isn’t really any 100% effective way to stop people from using your images online, there are a few precautions you can take. One way you can protect your images is to put a watermark on them. There are many, many tools out there that make this easy. Apps like iWatermark and PhotoMarks which is supposed to let you watermark all your pics at once. But it can really just be as simple as Photoshopping a text overlay of your name or logo, and reduce the opacity. If you’re not a Photoshop person, Preview on Mac works just as well.

Disable Right Click

Another way to protect your work is to disallow the ‘Save Image As’ upon right clicking. WIX does this automatically. We believe Shopify does too. If not you can download a ‘Javascript Right Click Disable’ plugin for WordPress. Keep in mind though, this can be disabled by turning Javascript off.

Copyright Notice

The most common way is to add a copyright notice in the footer of your site. Something like this is adequate:

© Your Full Name (Brand Name), Current Year or Year Range.

You could go the extra mile and put a notice like this along side it:

Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to [Your Name] and [Your Blog Name] with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Improve your artist website with these popular website builders

Do you need a website builder to help you get started? Check out our list below.

Wix

Wix is a great place to start when creating your artist website, especially for beginners! Dark Yellow Dot begun its days on Wix and later upgraded to WordPress, but it’s ease and user-friendly website design mode remains unmatched! With over 100 million users it’s obviously popular for a reason. And it’s free to join (yes!) and you have access to all their beautifully designed templates. Although, if you want your own domain URL or add your own online art shop you’ll need to upgrade for that, but upgrades begin at only about £8 /month!

Wix literally does everything and has the capability to do even more. It’s easy to use and the upgrades are far more affordable than many other website builders out there. You don’t need to know ANYTHING about code or building websites to use it. So it’s a great place to start (in our opinion). But don’t take our word for it, try it for yourself.

Weebly

There is also Weebly, another one of our recommendations from back in the day. It’s also super easy to use, affordable and does the job. It has many of the same features including a drag and drop layout that’s helpful when you’re not too tech savvy.

Weebly has a free, basic use subscription so you don’t have to pay a thing to get started! The subscriptions then increase price wise depending on what uses you have for your artist website. Connecting a domain will cost £4/month, Pro is £9/month, Business is £18/month and their Business Plus option is £28/month.

Squarespace

Then we have Squarespace; you must have seen them advertised somewhere! They boast an extremely quick and easy website designer tool helped by their extensive catalogue of templates. The good thing about Squarespace is that it was predominantly geared towards designers, artists, photographers and creatives alike, meaning that as an artist, you’re almost guaranteed to enjoy their visually orientated design features.

Squarespace also adopt a drag and drop style website builder with no coding skills required, perfect for anyone needing a website.

Their price range for their packages are slightly higher than Weebly with no free option, but perhaps as a creative, you can justify paying out for a website that champions style and design. Personal Use begins at £10/month, Business is £15, Basic Commerce is £20 and Advanced Commerce is £30.

Self-hosting with WordPress.org

WordPress is the best option if you’re looking to grow and improve your artist website. It can have a daunting interface and steep learning curve to get your head around with the clunky backend and all the plug-ins being confusing at first, but it’s definitely worth investing in the time to learn the basics. You may find, as your traffic and websites grows, that you need to upgrade as we did, and WordPress accommodates all of Dark Yellow Dots needs. Unlike Wix, Weebly or Squarespace, WordPress is self-hosted meaning you own your own website. If Squarespace went out of business, you’d no longer have a website, but with WordPress you won’t run into that problem.

It’s been said that as much as half of the websites on the internet are self-hosted through WordPress. As Wordress.org is self-hosted, you need to sign up for your own hosting plan. A great place to start is Bluehost, its one of the most popular hosting platforms out there and only starts at £2.18/month. It integrates seamlessly with WordPress and you can get setup and started quickly.

Ready to improve your artist website?

In conclusion, improving or creating your artist website really doesn’t have to be a difficult task! These 7 simple errors can be easily overlooked but rectifying them could make all the difference to your websites user experience. The overall message is use a website builder that suits you, keeping the layout clean and clear whilst also covering the basics like SEO and image protection. If you put all these aspects into practice, you should have a functional artist website that lets your creativity do the talking!

Do you have an artist website you’d like to share? Leave a link in the comments below, and we’ll check it out. And let us know how this article helped improve your artist website!

Want to be featured on our own website? Submit an application to become our next Artist of the Month!

If you found this article useful, share it around, that makes us happy. You can also sign up for our newsletter for more posts like this.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to share your art with us by submitting your art or tag #darkyellowdot on Instagram @darkyellowdot

NEED MORE ADVICE?

ARTICLES TO HELP:

Tips On How To Sell Artwork Online

How To Price Your Artwork

How To Explain Your Art To People

SITES TO HELP:

Coolors – Colour Scheme Generator

Canva

WIX – Website Templates

COURSES TO HELP:

Graphic Design for Beginners: Learn the Fundamentals Through Poster Design

Making a Fun Animated Logo Using Procreate 5X

How To Properly Make a Website With WordPress for Beginners

Wix Website SEO Basics For Beginners