You spent years studying the way light falls on the human face, or learning how to sculpt the semblance of motion into motionless clay. You have poured your time, money, and dreams into your art. You may have discovered the Internet early on and understood how important it could be in showcasing and selling your work on a website. But most likely, you haven’t. Your focus has been on your work, which is where it should be.

A piece of art represents a unique expression of your time and effort. You may finish a particularly work-intensive piece and then have to do considerably more work to get a gallery show. And then, what happens if your seven-foot sculpture doesn’t sell during its one month in the spotlight? You have to Uhaul it back to your workspace and pray for a studio visit from the right person.

A website shows your work to a collector, a gallery, or an admirer at their convenience and with no trouble to you. These can be people you reach out to or people who have never heard of you but find your site on the web. Your website is your storefront, your perpetual gallery to the world.

The only real question for you is: "What kind of website is right for me?"  There are a lot of different choices, some costly, some not, and they have different levels of functionality.

Here are 4 basic options:

1. Do-it-yourself website
2. The well-meaning friend website
3. Custom website (profesional designer)
4. Template website (ready-made website)

1. No matter how artistically and DIY-inclined you are, creating a website yourself, as a beginner, will almost certainly lead to a woefully unprofessional look. And it will take you away from your art.

2. Asking a web-savvy friend to create your site might seem like a great collaboration at first, but it can take awhile for your friend to get around to actually doing the site. Also, websites need to be updated frequently to keep them fresh for repeat visitors and higher-ranked for search engines. There may soon come a time when your friend can’t prioritize your website as much as you think they should. That can lead to frustration on your part and annoyance on theirs.

3. A custom site is the website that may (nothing guaranteed) give you the look that best reflects your work. Drawbacks are i) initial cost (can easily be $1- 2,000), and ii) you will have a tough time updating the site unless the developer has designed a control panel for you. If you depend on the developer to update the site, you will most likely be paying the developer’s hourly rate. This will cut down on your willingness to update the site and add new images. 

4. Template websites are the best option for artists who want to have a professional website, keep their friendships, and not spend a lot of money. Most providers of template websites give you a fair number of design options. Artspan, for example, has templates that allow the artist to choose colors, fonts, and font sizes. You can create different galleries for your work and you have an unlimited number of pages and images. Most importantly, these sites are easy to update and manage. They are designed for people who have very little computer expertise.

While Artspan is the oldest provider, there are quite a few other providers of artist template websites. The most prominent are Foliolink, Big Black Bag, SiteWelder, Qfolio, FineArtStudioOnline, and Foliosnap. Pricing can range up to almost $60/month, but most packages are less. Artspan pricing runs from 13.95 to 19.95 a month (10% less if paid annually). Artspan.com also stands apart from other website packages as it is, in itself, a real community of artists and a major art destination with plenty of content of interest to collectors.

Once on the Artspan site there are a number of different ways those visitors arrive at the individual member sites: searches by keyword or by drop-down categories and genres and by alphabetical, regional and category/subcategory directories. Visitors also visit the Artspan Portals which focus on specific genres (i.e. Nature Photography or Landscape Painting). These portals offer articles, events, and many different kinds of artist resources associated with the genre covered. And, of course, member images with links to the individual sites.  Interested in becoming a member of Artspan?

It is hard to bring visitors to your website and you will have to work to promote it. Many artists have mixed feelings about promoting their own work, but in today’s art market, artists need to be their own advocates and agents to the art world. There is no shame in self-promotion, especially when done with professionalism and style. Creating a personalized, templated artist portfolio website is the smart way to do it. Even smarter is to also be part of a larger community attracting the kind of traffic that no individual artist website can.