Can any artists recommend a good website design company ?

[prettywhiteguitar]

So I am starting to get somewhere with my painting, I have a gallery taking four of my paintings and a decent body of work to show, the gallery manager advised that I should be able to sell through my website....obviously this would be great as I wouldn't be paying any commision or standing around in the cold at an art fair !

So I need one. Does anyone have any recommendations and a cost that I should expect to pay ? Also can I claim the cost of running against VAT ?

Don't know what I am doing yet, just learning as I go....

I presume you mean tax not VAT - VAT only kicks in when you are turning over more than £70k

Web designers - search back through this forum
lots of suggestions in recent months

Thanks, just found something on my partners mac which I'm going to experiment with - the iWeb programme

This is mine here. I started using them via our local open studios. I have had much success with that, but no sales via the website which s run by this company for a subscription. It's about £9 a month.

TBH I'm not sure if people really buy art online (would you?). but it works as an onscreen presence. And yes, you can offset the costs against any income on your tax return.

With iWeb I think you still have to pay for the hosting and I'm not sure how people would find you. OK if you give them a card at an art fair maybe.

I've not yet had the nerve to approach galleries, but I would imagine you would have to be careful about setting your online prices the same as the gallery so that you are not undercutting them IYSWIM. This would mean that effectively as soon as you sell through a gallery your prices have to gp up right across the board. This has also put me off approaching galleries I think.

Whilst I might not buy art I haven't seen through a website, I would certainly look at one. There's an artist I love in nice, and back in the uk I have searched online convincing myself to buy her work. It's what people do innit

It is worth spending the money to get someone who knows what they are doing to do the website. One that is amateur will look amateur. And they will also know about search engine optimisation and wot not.

I would build it yourself using wordpress.com -

Costs nothing, easy to update and customise, looks professional.

Pay to register yourself a domain name (about £6) so you don't have a wordpress.com URL.

I would buy art from a website. My mum and brother have bought a lot of art this way.
For the website design try www .hotdogdesigns.co.uk they are a small company and did my website.

I agree with Himalaya.

Wordpress is easy to use, relatively inexpensive and you can update it yourself whenever you have a new piece to show. There are great templates specifically for art works, and you can now integrate a webshop into the 'blog'.

If you selfhost, you will have to pay for the domain and start up costs (I think mine is about $80 a year but would have to check that)

You could also do occasional blog posts showing work in progress or inspiration for your next work.

Give me a shout if you need more info - I have a blog post that goes into more detail.

samanthasnowdenartist.wordpress.com/

I do have a blog but I haven't been giving it the time that it requires, I do get a lot of traffic but not any feedback or sales

Maybe you could crit it for me and help with making it more professional ? That would be very gratefully received, please don't hold back

Honestly, don't think a wordpress blog can look professional. If I am thinking of you as a creative professional, I would expect you to also understand other creative professions. This includes graphic designers/web designers. When people don't use them and kind of wing it a bit, it doesn't make me see them entirely seriously. It makes me think that the person doesn't understand the importance of the creative professions. Does that make sense? I'm not wanting to be unduly harsh, just trying to explain why I think people, particularly in allied fields need to use professionals. Of course a wordpress blog can work for some things, but I just don't think it does here.

If you do go down that road, then shop around. There are good creative professional web/graphic designers, and then there are people who know a bit of code and don't have any design skills. betterwhenthesunshines's looks good to me. Proper artist looking and everything.

Something that does work as a blog is doodlemum's site, which looks like a blog type thing to me. But it works, because she is presenting daily pictures for the format makes sense. There is a narrative, a sense to why what appears where and something to bring me back.

I do like your work btw. If it was shit I wouldn't spend the time saying this.

I've used professionals and I've used wordpress and I would say that wordpress is better!

The ideal mix I think is a professional graphic designer/web designer who will build you a custom theme and site for wordpress. That way you are not paying for a lot of hand built code you don't need and won't be able to update easily.

That said I would get rid of the wordpress URL and keep the wordpress branding on the site down to the absolute minimum "powered by wordpress" somewhere discrete.

You can also change your home page to one of the static pages, so that what you have is more like a website with the 'blog' part as a news tab rather than the main navigation.

The other good thing about wordpress sites is they work on phone screens and are pretty good for accessibility, which a lot of hand built web designs won't necessarily give you.

I don't work for them, honest!

Like Himalaya said, a WP base with a professional theme can look great. I am not talking about a normal blog here. You can buy a theme from Theme Forest and install yourself. Or get someone to do it initially and then it is easy to maintain.

I am not an expert, but I managed to set up www.jumpmag.co.uk myself. I am sure that there is lots more that I could be doing with that theme, but I don't have the time to fiddle with it.

btw, I really like your work, particularly the portraits

Hey thanks for all the suggestions they have all given me a lot to think about , just a short post as I'm off to bed but I think I'm going to play with my blog as you guys said, so i have a static page and then my Dp has a pupil who can code a website so I'm maybe going to ask him for help building a website, apparently his is shit hot....

I really appreciate the professional advice and it's also nice to know people will buy work they've seen online, I think I need to provide a lot more purchase info on and more about my work, just being very lazy to my shame

I agree that you can build you own very easily and with domain name and hosting (I get mine through hostgator.com) you can do it for £10 a month for unlimited hosting (so as many sites as you like as long as you own the domain name).

I built a great website with serif Webplus Starter Version which is free software and then upgraded to their X6 software for £40 so I could add a sales page and other extras. I now have three sites, one of which is something I would never have dreamed I could do a year ago, the others are still in progress!

You dont need to understand coding to build a site with Serif and that was the biggest selling point for me.

If you literally just need a gallery try flavours.me I believe it is free.

If you are ok for people to come to your studio to buy you could try www.artolo.com which lists local artists.

Sorry to gatecrash a little, but a lot of what is being said here is what I have been wondering about. Would some of you mind having a wee look at my website and see what you think. I have a lot of work to do on the content, making it clearer to understand and sell things, but its more the look I am asking about. I am currently looking to get someone professional to design a proper logo for me, but I am not sure whether to go to the expense of a full website designer as well.

I have namechanged so as not to fully out myself in rl. Thanks.

Would help if I told you my website wouldn't it .

It's here.

Hey just wanted to say I work with some lovely website designers at Zoodle Media who offer bespoke web design services and can work around your budget :)

If you would like a free (no obligation!) website assessment we can meet you for a chat. PM me for more details/examples of our work.

If you would like any advice on web design just ask. Thanks!

Hi thank you for all the suggestions and info, I have found a good website building company called wix.com which I think I will use when I have a bigger portfolio of work that i'm happy with.

I really need more work that i'm happy with representing what I do but I did update the style of my blog so can you see if i'm more along the right lines ?

I've so busy doing commisions (which really arent the style I want to carry on with so usless for the blog !) I just havent the energy to write much but when Ds starts school hopefully I will have more time to devote to marketing and suitable work too.