Create artist website easily: Here's how!

Art can look back on a long history: people have always wanted to be creative. From cave paintings in the Stone Age to art epochs such as Gothic, Baroque, Romanticism, Impressionism and Expressionism to contemporary art, painting and the like has always impressed people and still enjoys great popularity today.

Looking at the past of art, that of the Internet seems almost banal. But despite its comparatively short existence, it is just as hard to imagine society without it!

With this guide today, I want to give artists a bit of an understanding of how to make their art fit for the Internet age and ensure that their works get the hearing online that they deserve. To do this, it is necessary for an artist's website to contain some important elements, which I will elaborate on a bit below. I'll also go into some tips that will help create a particularly meaningful and user-friendly website.

After the design process, I'll show you what benefits the newly created artist website will bring to your studio!

Let's start with the home page: When a visitor lands on your site, they are most likely to land on the home page. And as we know, first impressions are immensely important! So you should convince here, for example by an appealing but simple and timeless design of the page or short and meaningful texts. Less contemporary and rather disturbing are for example background music or a lot of texts and many animations. The user, who visits your site for the first time, should not be overwhelmed and overwhelmed, but get the chance to get an idea. But you as an artist are probably the bigger expert in design than I am writing this text.

TIP: You can choose from a variety of design templates for a good first impression. For artists we recommend "Semantic" or "Flexible".

A personal story makes your work much more interesting, whether oil paintings, paintings or sculpture. You may be able to explain what inspirations from your personal environment have gone into the work or what personal experiences have made you an artist. I have summarized some ideas for the personal section of your website in the following checklist.

What you could (and should) reveal about yourself:

• Pictures of you at work / the process of creation.

• Your niche in the artist scene

• What makes you special

• A brief outline of your resume

• How you got into painting

• What you plan to do in the future

A classic resume, i.e. when your enthusiasm for art started, your art studies, at which art exhibitions you have exhibited etc. makes you as an artist personal, individual and approachable. It gives your works an individual touch and art lovers can understand your motives or your art more!

Let's get to the heart of the site: In this section you can display anything online, whether photography or paintings. Maybe it makes sense to upload the pictures in chronological order, because this way new artistic inspirations you found over time, changes of mind or even life lines flowing into your art become visible to the viewer!

INFO: The homepage builder has recently raised the limit for uploading media files. Now premium users have the possibility to upload up to 15 GB of image files to their site! But even as a free user you have 1 GB of storage space for images on our servers.

TIP: Make sure your pictures look nice. So use a good camera and pay attention to lighting conditions or even better: Have your work photographed by a professional photographer!

If you have works for sale, you should note this in the following menu item. No matter to whom you have already sold, be it restaurants, medical practices, or even renowned art exhibitions: you should definitely note it on your website! Especially paintings that are currently for sale should be listed here. You can also price them if you wish. If you don't want to mention the price of your works on your website, you can also note that prices are only available on request.

A link to artmajeur is of course also a good way to give enthusiasts of your art the opportunity to directly purchase a work of yours.

In principle, this means everything that you consider useful. If you want to give your users something special to take away with them, then you should include it here. I have compiled a list of points that may be interesting for visitors to your art website.

Checklist: What could be interesting for visitors of your website

• How do you create a work of art? Do you have a certain procedure?

• Links to other artist friends

• Where do you get inspiration for a painting?

• What advice would you give to young painters without experience?

• What fascinates you about art? Do you have favorite artists or eras?

If such a menu item on your website is not enough for you, you can of course also have your own art blog as a creative outlet. Here you can blog at any time and much more extensively about everything that comes to your mind.

INFO: By activating the "News" extra, artists have the chance to add new news entries to their website at any time. This way you integrate your own little blog on your own site!

In the following video you can see how you can activate the news module for your artist website with just a few mouse clicks!

Last but not least: the legal protection of your website. It's important that you take care of this, even if it's less attractive and not as much fun as a creative activity like determining the design of your site. To make it a little easier for you, here's a list of items you should include in your legal notice. But be careful: the list does not claim to be complete, which is why you should update yourself again regarding the topic of imprint on your own website when creating your art website!

Checklist: Some key points of a meaningful imprint

• The owner of the website and his business address

• Contact details (telephone number, e-mail address, fax if applicable)

• Sales tax identification number

• The chamber affiliation

But don't worry: Online there are imprint generators, with which you can easily create the imprint of your site quickly and securely, so you can devote yourself to your artwork again faster.

It is also important for interested parties to be able to contact you quickly and easily. If you already have a Facebook or Instagram account, you can link it directly to your homepage. It's also a good idea to include a contact phone number and email address. This makes it easy for everyone to get in touch with you. This saves stress and may bring you one or two more contacts to interested parties!

To give your art website a professional touch, we recommend you your own domain. When you create a free website with us, only the .de.tl domain extension is available to you. By upgrading you will unlock your own .de domain. This gives your website much more professionalism. In addition, .de pages are clicked on much more often in Google searches!

The second important thing to pay attention to when creating your website for artists is the name of your domain. This is important because the domain is, in a way, the figurehead of your site on Google. It should therefore be short, concise and catchy.

INFO: For artists, for example, domain names according to the following scheme would be suitable: www.atelier-nachname.de or also www.vornamenachname.de, if you are already a well-known and famous artist.

To showcase your artwork on your website, you also need enough storage space. Especially large and high-quality photographs of artworks can take up a lot of disk space. At webme.com even free users have the possibility to upload up to 1 GB of image material. That corresponds to about 15,000 pictures. For high-quality images with high image quality, it is of course correspondingly less. But nevertheless: Artists get their money's worth with at least 1 GB of storage space for their images!

With our homepage builder system there are many extras that are useful to create a good website. For artists, the extra "Gallery" stands out especially, with which you can present your pictures perfectly. For example, images can be rated by users of the site and then sorted by rating. This offers the artist a valuable insight into the wishes and preferences of art lovers!

INFO: The extra "Gallery" is activated with a few mouse clicks in the extras section of the homepage builder and can then be customized as desired.

Nowadays, the majority of visitors to a website no longer come via a desktop computer, as was traditionally the case. In the age of smartphones and tablets, mobile devices are increasingly taking the place that desktop computers used to occupy. To prepare the artist website for this, it is necessary for websites to be designed responsively. Responsive web design in technical jargon means that the website is adapted to all mobile devices and is displayed appropriately everywhere. If the design of the page is non-responsive, you run the risk of mobile users having an unsatisfactory experience on the website. On the right you can see an example of a non-responsive site.

INFO: In the homepage builder, all websites are optimized for mobile devices by default. So you never run the risk that mobile users have a bad experience on your site!

The headline may make you wonder, but you should not include works by other painters on your website. By this I mean either your models (except for very famous works) or even artist friends.

The idea behind this is that visitors to your site could easily get confused, especially if they have no experience with your art. Imagine visiting a page of an artist you don't know and seeing 5 paintings: 2 by the artist, 2 by his friend and a Picasso. This would either confuse you a lot or you would get a completely wrong picture! So, to avoid mistakes, you should only put your own pictures on your page.

Even worse than no website is a website that is not kept up to date. A page with outdated entries says a lot about the user: The site owner could be accused of inconsistency or not taking much care!

So it's important that if you decide to have your own artist website, you continually tinker with it. Your homepage is not finished with the creation!

It's important that you take enough time when you're putting your website together. Like a piece of art, you'll probably come up with new ideas to incorporate into your site throughout the process. So take your time and think about what you want your site to say. Answering the questions in the following checklist may help you gain clarity about the artist website design.

Checklist: Questions you can ask yourself when creating an art website.

• Why do I actually want to create a site?

• What do I want to communicate to my users? What is my goal

• What is my target audience? Who will be interested in me and my art?

• What requirements a construction kit meet for website design?

Unfortunately, your studio has limited space: you can't hang hundreds of oil paintings and acrylic paintings on your walls. The gallery of your website, however, offers space for an infinite number of pictures. Here you can easily upload more pictures than would fit on the wall of the local art museum!

You can also add explanations and comments to your portraits directly on your website. In addition to more space than all your walls, your digital gallery also offers more space for guests than the Tate Modern or all Munich Pinakothels together!

If you already have a profile on Instagram or Pinterest, that's good for promoting your images. There are only two major drawbacks here: The feed function on Instagram, for example, ensures that the most recent posts are always displayed. On the one hand, this is beneficial, but it also has the disadvantage that old posts are almost completely forgotten. In the case of paintings, this is of course annoying, since they are not consumed or go out of fashion very quickly. On the website you can upload all your pictures at the same time and they will all be displayed together.

The second major disadvantage is that you can hardly write any text. The image should speak for itself, of course. However, if you want to give the user some information or, as mentioned above, include a short biography of yourself, you will have a relatively hard time on social networks.

On a website, on the other hand, you have enough space to put all your thoughts into words and record them!

I have already anticipated this somewhat in the previous section: With a website, you have the chance to write long texts in which you can go into detail about different points of view. This is an advantage over social media, and also helpful for interested parties in that they can already get a deep insight into your understanding of art and your works by reading.

Of course, you should also be available in person by providing contact information on your website. However, detailed texts often clarify many questions for visitors to your site. This saves you as a site operator a lot of unnecessary effort in the form of answering customer inquiries, but is also pleasant for users, because not everything has to be asked extra. So it's a win-win situation!

Website operators give their users the opportunity to contact you in various ways: Social media channels as well as phone number or mail address are the most common options. Through a website, the artist is, so to speak, available around the clock and is always virtually available to customers for questions.

Through his own website, an artist can reach many more people with his painting than with a studio in a good location. Through globalization, the world has grown together and intertwined. By the entrance into the Internet one profits from it as an artist, since users from everywhere can be washed on the own web page. If you distinguish yourself through special artistic talent, your artwork spreads rapidly in the art community and you can quickly make a reputation for yourself.

In dem Artikel habe ich versucht, dir als Maler, Bildhauer oder anderweitig künstlerisch Tätigem nahezubringen, warum eine Webseite heutzutage so essentiell ist und wie du das Projekt eigene Künstler-Website am besten angehen solltest.
Zuerst bin ich auf alle Elemente eingegangen, die die perfekte Kunst-Homepage enthalten sollte. Darunter befanden sich alle Referenzen, die Kontaktdaten oder auch ein persönlicher Bereich, um nur ein paar Punkte zu nennen.
Anschließend habe ich dir noch einige Tipps für den Feinschliff deiner Seite gegeben. Es ist beispielsweise empfehlenswert, die Webseite mobil zu optimieren, aktuell zu halten oder keine Werke anderer Künstler auf die eigene Seite zu packen.In this article I tried to explain to you, as a painter, sculptor or other artist, why a website is so essential nowadays and how you should approach the project of your own artist website.

First I went into all the elements that the perfect art homepage should contain. Among them were all the references, the contact details or even a personal area, just to name a few points.

Afterwards I gave you some tips for the fine tuning of your page. For example, it is recommended to optimize the website for mobile, to keep it up to date or not to put works of other artists on your own site.

Last but not least, I outlined some of the benefits that a well-designed and tips-enriched website brings to artists. Among them were, for example, increasing the artist's reach or offering a range of contact options for customers through their own website.
Zu guter letzt habe ich einige Vorteile dargelegt, die eine gut gestaltete und mit den Tipps angereicherte Webseite für Künstler bringt. Darunter waren zum Beispiel die Steigerung der Reichweite des Künstlers oder auch das Angebot einer Reihe von Kontaktmöglichkeiten für Kunden durch eine eigene Webseite.