Five Ways to Get Started on Your Artist Website

Still don’t have a website? Don’t fret, the following list will help you get focused so you can hit the ground running when you either decide to bite the bullet and create yoru own or hire someone else:

1. Write Your Goals:

Define at least 5 goals for your site and write them down. For instance, do you want to sell products like a store or just have visitors come and view your tour dates and new work?

2. Define Your Audience:

If you want to sell merchandise, who is your intended buyer or audience? A site for a children’s entertainer would look very different than a site for a painter whose work costs $25,000 per painting.

3. What’s in a name?:

 “.com” is still the way to go, though it’s not as important.  “.biz” and “.net” and .”org” will still do in a pinch. What is important is that the name is memorable and you don’t have to spell it out. Most artists use their name as their url, so see if that’s available first. Once you find it, I recommend buying it from Yahoo domains.  Q: Aren’t other places cheaper? A: Yeah, but do you really want to buy your next car from the used dealership on Jefferson Davis Highway, the one beside the Papoosaria?

5. Key words:

Write down 20 words you think someone would use when they are searching for a website like yours. Here are some samples of my keywords: Richmond, Virginia, Slash, Coleman, Slashtipher, storyteller, etc 

If you’re curious about what other sites use for their keywords use the “view source” tab at the top of your browser window. It should actually become your best friend. Once you visit a site, open the tab. Another window will open where you will see the html that other web site builders have used to create their site. Scroll down until you find the words “keywords.” Beside this you’ll see the key words.

Five Ways to Make Your Artist Website More User Friendly

1. Go white or go home: You want to keep visitors in your web site as long as possible, especially when you have merchandise to sell. If you look at the number one tea selling site on the internet, http://www.stashtea.com, you’ll notice that the background is white and the words are black. The site won’t win any creativity design awards, but they will sell a million dollars in tea in the next few months. There’s a reason why Yahoo! and Google use a white background with a black font. It’s easy on the eyes. It’s something to seriously consider.

Recommendation: So many artist websites use funky, unreadable fonts and dark backgrounds. Ditch what you know about art aesthetics. It’s a website, not a painting or a poem.

2. Navigation Links: Use only 3- 5 links at the top of your site. Don’t put them on the side and don’t put them on the bottom if they’re already at the top (it’s redundant). Give the viewer too may choices and they end up taking less. Is that a problem? It is if you want them to see something important.

Recommendation: Your website shouldn’t feel like a diary and slide show of your boring trip to the Baltimore Aquarium. You don’t have to include everything you’ve done since the beginning of time. Links to include in keeping with 3-5 are: work samples, your artist bio, contact information, your store, and press. This makes it extremely simple for your visitors to find important things on your site.

3. Bells and Whistles Suck: The amount of extras you include on your site is directly related to the amount of irreverence you have for your visitor. As artists, we’re already working in a visual or auditory medium with a site that can be loaded with graphics. Start adding pop-ups, blinking text, mouse overs, and it just adds load up time to a page and becomes another reason for a visitor to leave your site. Don’t make it easy for them to do this.

High end advertisers are famous for creating flash splash pages that just tell me they have too much time on their hands and aren’t really thinking about me when it comes to their site. Do you know how many visitors you lose while pages are uploading? If you did, I think you’d reconsider these annoyances.

Recommendation: That bell and whistle and music clip that I thought was cool the first time I saw it or heard it becomes a superfluous pain by the third time I visit your site. There’s something to be said about traditional means of connecting with others. It’s not old skool. It’s old kewl. Simple is simply better, period.

4. Encourage Interaction: Including a guest book, an interactive blog, or a page that changes regularly will keep visitors coming back for more. Viewers are more hungry than ever to be involved in an on-line community. Facebook proves this.

Recommendation: Make it easy for others to sign up for things on your site and include things like e-letter sign-ups or calls to action on your front page.

5. Your Homepage is your Ocean Front Property: How will you capitalize on this valuable property? Will you use a useless splash page that includes an extra click that says, “Skip the introduction” or will you include your web site name (usually your own name) so people know exactly where they are? Also, remember to include your most important information on the upper part of the screen above the scroll.

Recommendation: You have to make a decision of why you’re using your site. Is it to sell more? To refer venues to? To just have for your web presence? Depending on what your objective is will determine how it will function?

The Challenge of the Artist Website & Search Engine Spiders

The words on your website are used to feed “search engine spiders.” These spiders spend their days (and nights) crawling into websites and looking for words to bring back to the search engines. The search engines then store these words and wait for people to type these words in places like Google or Ask.com. When the search engine gets a word, it gives the person who asked a list of sites that utilize these words.

Artist’s websites, which tend to be heavy on visuals and lite on words often struggle to feed the spiders a sufficient amount. How you meet this challenge will dictate how visible your site becomes.  If you use your site strictly to refer venues to, this won’t matter.  Otherwise, it’s good to visit sites that are not related to art, to see how they meet this challenge. The official term is web site optimization.

For instance, on my own website I was challenged to create searchable words for my Storyprints which is my line of whimsical art prints that portray an image and a story. Take for example my art print, Holy Cow!

(You can actually check out the page at my website too http://www.slashcoleman.com/whimsical-art-print-three-cows.html)

I use the following tricks to help make the image "read” more like a word and less like a photo:

1) I give the image itself an appropriate title. In this case, whimsical-art-print-three-cows

2) I use the word “cow” in the title itself.Ie. "Holy Cow"

3) Beside the image I use the following description: “Whimsical three cows take over Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.”

4) I also use a generic description such as “Each beautiful limited edition art print is attached to a 11"x 14" mat, wrapped in a poly sleeve, signed and dated by artist Slash Coleman.”

It’s worth it to go back through your site and think about how you can make some of your photo’s more search- engine friendly.