Website Construction for Visual Artists
Website options: outside resources
Before pitching my argument for personal web-design skills, here are some solutions for getting a Web presence underway.
Media-sharing systems such as Flickr, Picasa, YouTube and Vimeo have often sufficed for an artist's web-presence. The upside is that these systems tend to be very forgiving of an uploader's technological shortcomings, not to mention the ability to tag entries with keywords and have them inhabit a system with powerful search capabilities. The downside is that this can create a very pedestrian atmosphere for your work, with an obvious "user account" demeanor.
Finding a web-designer, especially a web-saavy acquaintance who will work for cheap or for bartered goods. You can also try contacting
web-design or New Media departments of local universities, as students in
these programs need to build a portfolio of real-world clients. The usual
problem here is that once a website is made, it slowly falls out
of date because its owner does not know how to change it, and doesn't want
to keep imposing on other people for help.
If someone does build a site for you, be sure you have control/ownership of the server space where the site is hosted. If an outdated site does become a source of irritation, you'll want the ability to pull it down.
Free web-hosting services such as
Google Sites, or any other system attempting to draw in a larger flow of the population by offering website templates. These harken back to the days of Angelfire/Tripod/Geocities, but now use a
content management system (CMS) so that an audience needn't learn HTML to create pages, place images, etc.
If you rent server space from a web-hosting provider, they may have their own automated system for generating websites, which would likewise employ a CMS.
Blog accounts such as
Blogger/Blogspot,
TypePad,
WordPress and
Tumblr have been a common solution among artists, and favored due to ease-of-use, audience interaction and RSS feed capabilities. The downside is that the internal architecture of the site is based upon "posts", and older posts do want to "shift to the back". Some of these systems are getting better about circumventing this and allowing users to implement something resembling a traditional portfolio site.
Pixelpost is a photoblog template that can be downloaded free to your own server space. It requires that the server be equipped with PHP and MySQL, which -- if you're actually paying for server space -- is generally the case. Here's
more info.
Need I say that MySpace should be out of the question?
In any case, the online-publishing and social-networking structures may be the best solution for artists who would prefer absorption into the latest communication flows, and would feel less serviced by a more static portfolio.
Other Peoples' Pixels: I've seen more and more artists use this company, since it allows the easy creation of a Flash-site that can be more handsome than other automated systems. Like other automated systems, it employs auto-resizing of images and demands no HTML skills, and allows respectable manipulation of the template structure.
The downside is the cost: it's more than twice as expensive as simply paying for server space to host a self-made site (and it gets pricier if you're adding audio/video files). In addition, the product conveys the "OPP look" that is becoming more and more recognizable, and could diminish the professional impact of the site. This last point may be negligible for artists trying to get their portfolio online for the first time, or ween themselves from social networking systems.
Other portfolio services for hire: I've never felt any cause to recommend these, especially considering all the available options above. These products carry a whiff of a late-90's naïvité regarding the Internet, with promises the site will make the portfolio available to an exclusive online superhighway of collectors. They have also tended to attract artists whose styles predate the last several decades of contemporary art.
Next: DIY: Why and how? Top