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Artists Corner

What Is The Best Online Art Gallery For Artists

I totally get that some people will have their personal favorite for creating an art gallery. Yet hands down WordPress is among the best platforms for an artist.

If you are looking to self promote your artwork and grow an art audience, there really is no better way. I will give the highlights of what makes WordPress so valuable to independent artist marketing when compared to other options.

For clarification, the WordPress I am detailing here in this article is the server installer which comes from wordpress.org. This is not using their in house free blogging service.

If your webhost has a one click install then this process is dummy proof. Places such as A2 Hosting and Bluehost will have this but is not limited to these providers.

Important Questions And Information About Online Galleries

If you question that you need an online gallery, the answer is a very clear yes. Get out of the dangers of social media. Understand why artist often fail.

You can learn how to be noticed as an artist. Having an online gallery is the ultimate art portfolio if you learn how it should be used.

Consider this as a permanent art exhibition that is tailored just for you.

Third party art websites cannot provide this ability for you no matter how much you wish. It is important for artists to grow beyond the beginning stages.

Flexibility is the name of the game. I am not talking about development. Rather I am speaking to the infrastructure.

WordPress can be installed onto virtually any hosting environment. Many providers offer a one click install, so you do not need to be hosted on WordPress servers.

Compare this to something like Wix. If you wish to use Wix, you MUST use their hosting solutions. This locks you into their environment.

You can never change providers, and if you do, you must redesign your entire site. That is a serious problem.

This can be a nightmare for anyone. Yet it is especially a nightmare for artists who focus so much on visual appeal and recognition. You need to be in control of the entire support infrastructure behind your artwork.

I began long ago with Drupal. It is not for beginners, and can be extremely complicated if you are not accustomed to code or how platforms interact.

An environment like Drupal is where artists that do not have much technical capability can get burned quickly. Yet WordPress offers a completely different environment.

I dare say that near 95% of the WordPress environment is point and click within its settings. There have only been a few times that I have had to edit things like php or css, and it was because I was picky.

Allow me to put things like this. With Drupal it took me a few weeks to set up my first art gallery. In WordPress it took me one day to set up the same art gallery with ecommerce included.

If you are new to these systems, do not expect to do it in one day. I have a lot of experience. Yet this should be an indication of how much easier WordPress is by comparison.

Things WordPress Just Does Better For Art Galleries

If you are setting up your first online platform for promoting your art, then there are a lot of things you do not know. Defining canonical tags or giving meta descriptions are among them.

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The nice thing about WordPress is that it will handle many of these things for you automatically. Meta descriptions are really a thing of the past and nothing to stress over, yet a plugin can handle this dynamically. By default WordPress will define a canonical post.

Ecommerce integration for your art gallery is handled seamlessly. The page that is selling your artwork will look the same as the rest of your site, unlike some platforms out there.

Search engines simply like WordPress. It is designed to work with them in such a way that it requires little fuss and a lot less mess. Plugins do the bulk of the work for you with things like sitemaps.

Where An Artist Will Benefit The Most With WordPress

You can spend more time promoting your artwork rather than in the development and maintenance of the platform. That is the greatest benefit.

If you have no technical ability whatsoever, WordPress offers a ton of online documentation and forums. You can watch videos and dive into deeper education behind the platform if you desire.

If you are looking for the easiest path possible, look for a hosting provider which has a one click install for it to your server.

If you are heavy into social media, plugins exist for allowing individual pages to be shared with a click. Be aware of what these can do to page speed.

Many bloggers have discontinued the use of these systems as they are not beneficial enough to have. Nevertheless they do exist for you if needed.

Most likely if you are reading this, then you do not know how to design or code. So how do you get your art gallery looking the way you want it to?

Personally I like the Astra theme. Pay to get the upgrades in what they offer. It unlocks the most simple gallery I have ever seen.

You just drop it to the page and put in your artwork. Its appearance is like a tiled mosaic, yet it has other settings if you prefer.

This gallery will be separate from your ecommerce section where people will purchase your artwork. Something like Woocommerce will control that side of the platform.

Nevertheless the transition and appearance to the ecommerce side will be visually the same. In other words it will not look like someone was taken to a 1990’s grid style shop.

The appearance in Woocommerce is much like visiting a regular web page on your site. You lose no visual appeal or aesthetics.

This really helps to maintain the professionalism for every part of your gallery platform in how you present yourself. Things in the past were not always this easy.

I remember the early days of platforms like Drupal. My first online art gallery looked like it was a completely different site.

Today I run my wood art blog under its own domain, and my gallery under another domain. This is by choice, not necessity. Yet within my gallery the entire site has the same visual aesthetics.

Some Caution To WordPress Is Needed

When you begin using WordPress some caution is needed. Every plugin you use will want you to pay for premium service. Do not do this. It is NOT worth it.

Only pay the premium for what you actually need to support your art gallery, nothing else. For example, I use no premium SEO tools within WordPress itself. I use other tools outside of it for SEO.

Do not worry about paying a premium for email, newsletters, or many of the other features. Do pay the premium for what it takes to have a functioning art gallery such as theme, payment systems in ecommerce, and shipping calculation.

You can add other premium services down the road if you actually need them. Until then, use the free versions. Normally the free version of a plugin will do the critical functions you need without paying.

To give you an idea of what I mean I will explain how I use a couple plugins. I use AIOSEO merely for the dynamic creation of a sitemap. That is it, nothing more.

I know a lot of people use Yoast instead of AIO. I disliked how power hungry and controlling Yoast was and opted for the lightweight AIO as I only needed one function.

I use Defender for its free tools only. Originally I only wanted it to mask the admin login portion of the site. Yet it has a lot of other useful free tools that you do not need to pay for.

I give you these examples to show you that you do not need to over-complicate this. There is no need to pay a fortune. Yet there are some things you will need to pay for.

To get everything you need will cost you something. Nothing is totally free. So how much should it cost you to have an online art gallery?

If you have nothing right now, as in you are starting from scratch, it will cost a little more. Typically hosting on a decent server that will provide a little speed and processing will run a few hundred dollars.

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Many like A2 offer a first time sign up discount that is really worth it. A domain will run you between 10 to 30 dollars depending.

The Astra theme with its gallery support can run near 200 dollars. Then some of the Woocommerce add ons you may decide that you need are maybe around another hundred to 150 dollars.

These prices are by the year. So when you break it down it really is inexpensive. If you are serious about SEO know that you will spend a lot more on art marketing research than your online gallery.

In terms of marketing research I spent at minimum 100 dollars per month. This really is peanuts. Yet for a new artist merely wanting to get started with an online gallery, this can be very expensive.

Yes you can… but. You will have some frustration if you have never done anything like this before. Take your time, read documentation, and do things one step at a time.

Let me put it like this, if you an use Microsoft Word then you can use WordPress. It is like Microsoft Word, but for the Internet.

The forums can help you a lot due to the ability to ask specific questions and get answers. Just be sure to ask very specific questions about your situation.

WordPress by itself is free to install and use. So if you try it and cannot handle it, then you have lost nothing. If you take your time and can read, then you should have only a handful of minor issues.

The biggest problems people who are new run into revolve around how the system is broken down and categorized. Then also how the parts interconnect and communicate can take a short time to learn.