Planning your website pages
Here, we’ll talk through the pages you will definitely need on your artist website, plus a few optional extras that might come in handy. The pages you need on your site will depend entirely on your mission statement. Take a look at what you came up with earlier and ask yourself, what are the pages that will help me achieve my objectives?
Essential web pages
- You will of course need a Home page. This is your shop window or the doorway to your artwork and will provide simple navigation to the rest of the site.
- An About page is always a good idea, particularly for an artist; people have a ferocious appetite for stories and want to engage with you on a personal level.
- A Gallery page is probably the most important page for an artist website no matter what the objectives. You may want to have various sub-pages for your Gallery to categorise your work by technique, style or purpose. For example, if you work in more than one medium, you may have a Gallery page devoted to Sculpture and another devoted to Wall Hangings. Daren Redman produces two very specific types of art (Art for the home and Installations for public spaces) so her gallery is sub-categorised appropriately.
- To ensure that you’re accessible and potential fans or buyers can easily get in touch, you’ll also need a simple Contact page.
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Other possible pages
- If you teach on a regular basis and your mission statement includes ‘Increasing the number of students who attend my classes’, you may need a page entitled something like Workshops or Teaching.
- If your aim is to engage visitors with the story of your artwork, an About page might not be enough; you may want pages with the headings Artist Statement, Inspirations or My Studio.
- If you plan on using your website mainly for marketing purposes, you may want a Diary page (telling people about Events and Exhibitions you’re involved with).
The possibilities are endless; I would suggest that you don’t get too carried away to begin with. Keep it simple; using WordPress (the platform we suggest you build your site on) you can easily add more pages at a later stage.
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Now make a clear list of the pages you want to include on your website (at least in its first incarnation). Remember to include any sub-pages.
Go to Chapter 4 – Creating the content of your site >>>
<<< Go back to Chapter 2 – Choosing a domain name
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