Do I Even Need An Up To Date Website?
There are many tried and tested, successful ways of marketing yourself as an artist today, but they all boil down to doing one thing…
Getting in front of the right audience.
Your primary focus as an artist when marketing your artwork should be to get as many eyeballs and as much attention on your artwork as possible. That’s why experts and people advising artists tell you to:
post consistently on social media
brand yourself so your target audience and ideal buyers can resonate with you
share your art on multiple platforms
grow an email list you can send out newsletters to (free Newsletter Templates here!)
find a gallery that can represent you and get you into numerous exhibitions and fairs
sell on Etsy or online art galleries so your artwork can get pushed out
create a YouTube so art can get pushed out even more
These are all very good things to do.
And the point of doing all of these things, or at least some of them, is to increase the chances of people finding your artwork, so you can increase the possibility of your artwork getting purchased or receiving new opportunities.
If people can see your artwork clearly via any one of these channels, and then proceed to get in touch directly through that channel, then in theory, there is no real need to have a website, let alone an up-to-date one (by up-to-date, I mean one that looks like it was made in this decade).
But it just feels right to have a website, though, no…?
Well, I’m going to give you my honest opinion, even though the bio in the footer might point to an obvious bias towards indeed having a website as an artist.
My controversial opinion is that it is better to have no website at all than a website that is hard to navigate, doesn’t do justice to your artwork (images look better on social media), and is not mobile optimised at all. It can be outdated and clearly made 20 years ago, but if it does the above, get rid of it.
Why?
Because it gives off a much stronger sense of unprofessionalism than not having one at all. If you’ve conserved your resources to create a well-curated social media presence that you’re consistently active on or online gallery profile you nurture with new artwork and well-written descriptions, those things can be worth more than a shoddy website you’ve linked in an email you send out every 5 months.
Essentially, it is better to do one thing very well, rather than a handful of things half-done.
It might feel like the right thing to do, or just ‘the thing every artist needs to have’. But if you're wasting your time and money on something that is doing more harm to your interest-in-art to sales-and-opportunities conversions than good, then you need to shift your focus to where you will get greater returns on your efforts.
If it’s taking you 5 hours to rejig your art website gallery, then that’s time that you could have spent crafting an email (or five) to send out over the next few months to 100 fans of your work who are already primed to see what you send out.
If you get regular clicks to your website, so in essence it would be good to keep, but you know it probably isn’t organised in the best way or doesn’t reflect the way you want to present yourself as an artist, then get in touch, because Shrub Designs can help you… And don’t worry, we’ll make sure it won’t take you five hours to update every time after that!
Get in touch! We’d love to hear from you!
