Don't have a website yet? No problem - a one page website (like this one) is easy to make using photos of your paintings.
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How to make your artist website
1. Prepare your photos:
- photograph your art with good lighting (bright shade), no shine spots, image only (not frame, background, etc.)
- edit your photographs with software (straighten, correct colour, crop, etc.)
- save with name-title-size-medium format in full size, i.e. YourName-Sunset23-30x40-oil.jpg.
- Keep a copy of this file in a safe place!
- Use image resizing software to reduce the photo image for an appropriate internet size of about 200 to 500 kb. Then the website loads fast and your image cannot be printed by others right off the internet. Possibilities: jpeg-optimizer, resizeimage or picresize
- A quick and easy way to shrink your images is to email them to yourself - set the attachment size to medium or small. When you receive that email, save the attachments and they will be the size needed for posting on a website.
- Create your account with a web creation company. Weebly.com is used for this one and for the 'Artist Website Example' in the menu on the left. Other drag-and-drop companies (i.e. easy to start up) are Wix.com and Jimdo.com.
- Start with the free website version to try out the software. To save yourself some time, see websitebuilderexpert.com/ for a comparison chart of website building programs.
- Set up the home page with your name and a picture gallery as a test. Add your photos, put appropriate captions on them, with price if you are selling.
- Add Contact information that you are comfortable having online. You may want to create an email account just for this website contact, e.g. gmail, to separate it from your personal email.
- Set up online resources - Facebook "page", etc. Make sure you use SEO to help online searches find you.
- Maintain your online presence with regular updates on Facebook, Instagram, etc.
- Send your website address and one resized image with its caption info to your contacts.