Websites For Artists
Dec 12th, 2007
Here are some of the sites I’ve designed and built for clients in the commercial and fine arts. I offer them as examples of the simple, static, Web 1.0 sites, done very quickly for friends a few years ago. Today it’s much easier and more effective to establish an online presence using Web 2.0 tools and social media services.
Suzearts is the online showcase for my best friend, Susan Thornton, who creates wonderful images from the land and sky scapes of New Mexico and Fire Island. We put this simple site together in an afternoon several years ago for the New York Licensing show. Today, you can do a lot more to showcase art and music by using services such as flickr and photobucket, to organize and tag your art, and social media services like Facebook and Twitter to promote your work across a web of networks, groups and friends.
Mick Kolodgy Fine Art
is an online gallery of his paintings. I developed the horizontal gallery design with rollover menus at both ends and tied it all together with a compact image caching and navigation scheme written in Javascript. This was fun to build but I can’t advise artists that having your own showcase site is the best way to leverage the Web anymore. There are many web services companies that want and need your content; provide a wide range of options for organizing, displaying and selling it; can boost your search engine juices and connect you to networks, groups and forums of people interested in what you do.
