Is Your Website Doing It's Job?

Is Your Artist Website Working for You?

Your website has an important job. As an Artist, a website is one of the most powerful ways you can control how you want to ‘Show Up’. 

Websites make it easy to introduce yourself and your work in the way you want. You get to showcase your work to your audience in a relatively controlled way – you decide what to include and exclude and how it is all laid out.

A great online presence via a website can expand your reach exponentially because it can be visible to anyone in the world with an Internet connection, any time of the day or night.

It’s also a way to grow your earnings, opportunities and audience.

Like everything in your art business, your website has a job to do.

But do you know the actual job YOU want YOUR website to do for you?

And do you know if it is doing that job?

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As visual people, we can get fixated on the ‘right look’ – which is totally understandable because we and our followers are visual and the right look is so important.

But for a website to be of value, there is so much more to consider than how it looks, and we need to be mindful of what we need our website to do for us. Knowing the primary job of your website helps you make all sorts of website related decisions.

Scenario 1…_Artist has a ‘selling’ site, its ‘job’ is at least in part, to sell his art. He isn’t managing to sell anything through his website. So he decides to lower his prices, and possibly change the art on offer.

But – if they aren’t getting any website visitors, neither of those actions would have the desired effect ie generating more sales. Sometimes the problem we think we have, is not the problem we actually have – in this case prices aren’t the problem, getting visitors to his site is the problem and in particular the right visitors.

It can be easier to spot the problem when we are talking about someone else’s website.

Do you know how many visitors your website gets and where they come from?

Do you know how long they spend on your site and what pages they visit?

Do you know what actions people take when they visit your site?

If not, it can be hard to know if your website is doing its job.

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To have a website that works for you and your art business – whether you have a portfolio site, a selling site, or a mixed approach – your website should present you and your art in a cohesive, clutter-free way.

‌You need to know who you are, what you stand for and who your audience is (yep, none of that is tech), and then, a good website needs as a minimum

 A platform that meets your specific needs
Ease of Navigation – how simple is it to move from place to place?
 Content and structure that helps your website get found (SEO, Alt tags etc).
 Responsiveness (how does it look and work on mobile, tablet and computer)?
 Quality selected images – well organised and not a collection of everything you have ever done
 Quality Copy – relevant and well-written text and not too much of it… or too little, including information about you.
 Design – both a consistent cohesive ‘branding’ (AKA look, feel and sound) and how you arrange your site to guide visitors to the pages you want (rarely do people visit all of your pages)
A current SSL certificate so people don’t get security warnings and stay away

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Scenario 2…_Artist is submitting proposals and applications for grants, residencies, or exhibitions BUT their website is out of date. It is inconsistent with the proposals they are putting forward, hard to navigate or not responsive – rightly or wrongly, they may have a harder time getting selected. Because your website is a mark of your professionalism and how you are choosing to present yourself to the world.

‌Websites are iterative. They grow, change and evolve and these days the systems are easy enough that a basic website can be created, or updated, in a very short amount of time, and you can add, remove and update as often as you like.

If your website is out of date, give it a quick facelift and then work on getting it up to standard. 

If you feel overwhelmed by the task, focus on one section, one paragraph or one page at a time.

Don’t forget to schedule in time for regular website maintenance and updates so it isn’t out of site out of mind. 

BTW you will also need

A way to turn visitors into repeat visitors, contacts, leads, and buyers so they don’t visit your website and simply vanish

And of course, analytics to learn more about your website traffic.

A lot of this is far easier than you might think.

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