Building a Great Web Site - Part 1 of 4 - Site Planning (3/8/2007)

Over the next few weeks, I will be writing a four part series on how to build a great web site. I won't be going into any great detail, but I will hopefully give you some useful information for building a new web site, or reinvigorating an existing web site. If this is something you'd like to see more of, please post a comment at the bottom of the article.

The first obvious question is should you build a web site? The answer is yes. Web sites are the first place most people go when looking for information of any kind. 73 percent of Americans say they use the Internet regularly, up from 66 percent in 2005. Whether you build a fully functioning shopping cart enabled web site, or you simply have a listing here at Montana-Artists.com, you should be on the Internet. If you've got an artist friend who hasn't gotten online yet, print this off and take it over to them.

On to the rest of the story…

I've been a web site designer for 11 years, and have built hundreds of web sites. I got my start building the web site for Travel Montana - www.visitmt.com, whose job it is to market Montana as a Travel and Tourism destination. At the time, Travel Montana's emphasis was on a travel packet they mailed out to people, the occasional magazine advertisement, and performing detailed conversion studies to determine who the tourists were and why they came here.

The web site they had before I got my hands on it amounted to an online business card, that said call this 800 number for more information. For a department whose yearly budget was nearly $10 million dollars, it was laughable. My goal was well defined though: take all the information they had about tourism businesses and put in on their web site.

Defining the goals for the web site is also the first thing you should do before

Goals of the web site

Most of you reading this are artists or gallery owners, so your goal is that you want to sell your artwork. This is a lot harder than it sounds though, building a fully credit card enabled shopping web site is expensive, and just because you build it doesn't mean you'll sell anything.

Over the years, working with artists, I've learned that selling artwork on the internet is based on two things: the fame of the artist and the amount of money each piece of artwork sells for. This works out to four different types of artists:

New artist with inexpensive artwork

New artists with inexpensive artwork may consider selling their work online, but shouldn't invest a lot of money up front. Building a web site and attracting visitors takes time, and you may not make your money back for quite a while. Initially just display your artwork, along with prices and provide contact information for how to purchase it. When someone makes an order, always be sure to find out if it was because of the web site. When the web site starts to make a fair amount of sales, then consider adding a shopping cart. Remember, web sites aren't cut in stone, you can always modify them later.

New artist with expensive artwork

You've got a tough job ahead if you're in this ball park, at least on the Internet. The fact is you probably won't sell anything on the internet. Rudy Autio, one of the most famous artists in Montana, told me one time that in six years he had only sold one piece of artwork on the Internet, and that was to his niece. However, when you consider that most of his artwork sells for $10,000 and up, you can start to understand why. Anyone with $10,000 lying around to purchase art, can certainly afford the plane ticket to fly to Missoula and see it with their own eyes.

Your goals as a new artist, are to expose your artwork to as many people as possible. Don't try to make the sale, just show them what you can do. Focus most of your web site time on marketing (more on this in part 3).

Established artists with expensive artwork

An established artist should consider using a web site as the rallying point for your collectors, galleries and friends. Use your web site as a calendar of events, telling people when you'll be a certain places. On the other hand you might use it as a newsletter that highlights of all the things you've been doing.

The fact is that your collectors are interested in YOU just as much as they are interested in your artwork. Put anything on your web site that gives your visitors a doorway into your world.

Established artist with inexpensive artwork

An already established artist with inexpensive artwork has it relatively easy. You already have a following, and can usually rely on them to drive traffic to their web site.

If your average piece of artwork sells for less than $150 a piece, consider building a shopping cart. They aren't cheap, but if you can make the money back on Internet sales in a year, then it's worth the upfront costs.

As you probably noticed, most of the things I talked about above can be applied to all artists depending on the amount of time you're willing to invest and your specific situation.

Now that you've got an idea of what a web site can do for you, it's time to start organizing the web site into a usable idea.

Organization

What is it you want to display on your web site? This may include your artwork, information about you or your gallery, contact information, events, newsletters, and possibly links to other web sites. If you were to make one page for each section, you'd have a 7 page web site, each section listed above plus a home page.

The point is to organize your web site into an easy to understand table of contents. Make it intuitive for people to know what each section will contain. Confusing your visitors with ambiguous terms like "Ezine" will only drive them away.

If you have more that 20 pieces of artwork, you might consider breaking it up into smaller, more easily digestible chunks. If you're artwork crosses multiple mediums then you could have a page for each medium (e.g. sculpture and a page for paintings).

If you're artwork is all in one medium, then you might consider breaking it up by series. Most of the artists I know personally tend to work in spurts, each group being created with a different theme or inspiration.

If you are truly creative, and no two pieces of artwork are similar, then you can always break up the pages by the year or years they were created.

Home page

What is a home page? The home page is the first page on your web site, for instance www.montana-artists.com/index.asp, is the home page for this web site. Because it is usually the first web page visitors see when they come to your web site, it should also be the focus of your web site efforts.

What should you put on your home page? Your home page should be short and sweet, not overwhelming visitors, but at the same time giving them a glimpse of what to expect through-out the web site. It should also be up-to-date, showing event listings for 1998, will only show that your web site is the LAST place they will be able to find fresh information about you and your artwork.

In a web study I helped conduct for Travel Montana, we determined that when a visitor first comes to a web site from a search engine, link, or other exploratory web surfing they will examine the web site for 4-7 seconds before deciding to stay and view the web site, or move on to another web site. That is a really short period for capturing someone's attention, so how do you make the best of it?

In 7 seconds, you might have time to read 2 sentences if you're a fast reader, and you might be able to look at 1 picture in detail. This doesn't mean you can't have more on your home page, it just means that the first picture and text immediately surrounding it should emphasize who you are as quickly as possible. They'll checkout the rest if interested.

You might use your most famous, or perhaps most eye-popping artwork on your home page.

Contact Page

Another vital page is the contact page. This should include all the contact information for finding you, phone number, address, email address, fax, etc. Some people skip this page, and just put their contact information at the bottom of all of the pages on the web site. Skipping the contact page is okay, but make sure your contact information is easily locatable on each page.

Now that you've got a solid idea of what information will be on your web site, you can start to figure out what your web site will look like. In my next article about a web sites layout and design, we'll explore the graphical and navigational elements of a web site.

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