What is Your Work Hanging Next To?

In marketing, image is everything. A polished presentation gives credibility to the company, product and service.

Artists who are actively showing their work understand this principle, and pay attention to framing and other aspects of good presentation. Artists also tend to recognize that what their work hangs next to is important to how their work is perceived. Accomplished artists are likely to be discriminating about what shows they enter, choosing venues where their work will be displayed with pieces that are as good as, or better, than theirs. These artist grasps that context is just as important as presentation.

Yet, many artists seem to have a blindspot when it comes to their website. You’d be amazed by how many truly bad artist websites are on the Internet – websites owned by artists who do very nice work. By bad, I mean amateurish websites that devalue the work that appears on them. In those cases, the context (the website) spreads the perception of “amateur” to the art itself. Even the best work is devalued by a poorly designed and constructed website.  In fact, a bad website can do more harm than good for an artist.

So, what makes a site scream amateur?

Here are some things to watch out for:

• Gaudy, clashing colors
• Fussy, decorative page backgrounds
• All-black pages that make your eyes wiggle when you try to read them
• Visual clutter
• Huge text, or very tiny text
• Times New Roman font
• “Under Construction” signs
• Cutesy moving images
• Broken links and bad navigation
• Ads unrelated to you and your work - especially those put on your site by your free website service
• Bad spelling and grammar
• Fuzzy, distorted, pixilated, dark, or otherwise unclear pictures.
• A counter on the site that shows the number of visitors.
• An unprofessional website address like: www.members.aol.com/terryartist3/
  instead of www.TerryArtist.com

A good artist website is crisp and clean, serving as a neutral background that allows the art to predominate. Nicely sized, high-quality images that show the work to perfection are a must. Navigation needs to be obvious and fool-proof. The site’s ‘logo’ should be simple and polished.

Overall, you want your site to create a pleasing, professional impression and to nicely showcase your work without the site itself taking center stage. After all, your goal is to wow your visitors with your work, not distract them with your website (good OR bad!).