If you’re a working artist you’ve probably experienced the frustration that comes along with the business administration side of a successful art practice. Keeping track of your inventory, events, locations, contacts and expenses are the things that most artists have no trouble forgetting about when they’re in the studio doing what they love.
Don’t get me wrong, being known and well-connected with art professionals and gallerists is an honor and a privilege, and making a sale is a thrill — it’s the getting organized part that tends to become boresome, if not overwhelming, for many artists.
I recently became aware of a business software for artists called ArtistClerk. It’s a web-based application that’s been designed to streamline the administrative side of your art business. I like how ArtistClerk has a clear focus on easing the administrative burden of artists by making it easy to understand important things like:
Who has purchased the largest number of your artworks?
What size(s) of artwork are your best selling?
Where do you sell most of your pieces?
How much money have you spent on business expenses?
ArtistClerk is reasonably priced and has an experienced leadership team behind it with a track record of delivering on their promises. The software has been developed from the ground up by artists for artists, and it’s been tested by professional artists to ensure that it is user-friendly for everyone.
Here’s a link to a video introduction and demo for those interested in learning more. Feel free to leave a comment below to let me know what you think about what ArtistClerk is doing for artists.
Search Engine Optimization is the process of affecting the visibility of a webpage in organic search results. SEO requires both analytical and methodical thinking which tend to be characteristics of left-brain dominant people. Visual artists, however, are imaginative and intuitive, and the phrase “search engine optimization” or even the acronym “SEO” are non-starters for most right-brain dominant creative thinkers.
With this in mind, the topic of SEO is one in which I will tread lightly on the surface and try to synthesize into a simple 4 part to-do list that can be completed in under 2 hours from start to finish.
As a visual artist, at minimum you should aim to successfully rank your online portfolio at the top of search engine results when your name is searched. To help Google index your website you will need to familiarize yourself with meta tags and use relevant keywords.
Keywords are the words and phrases that people type or speak into search engines to find information on a topic. Simply put, keywords describe what your webpage is about.
Meta tags: page title and description
A page title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a webpage in 50-60 characters. Your page title should accurately describe the content of the page because it will be displayed on search engine results pages as the clickable headline for a given result. This makes the page title especially important for usability, SEO, and social sharing.
A page description tag is an HTML element that provides a brief summary of a webpage in 50-300 characters. The page description tag often appears underneath the page title on a search engine results page (SERP).
As a simple exercise, take a moment to study the page title and description tags in the box below and try to identify the focus keywords.
Page Title (50-60 characters):
French painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor | Henri Matisse
Page Description (50-300 characters):
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French artist, known for both his use of color and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter.
Were you able to correctly identify the following focus keywords?: “henri matisse”, “french painter”, “draughtsman”, “printmaker”, “sculptor”, “french artist”, and “painter”.
Your objective for your own page title and page description tags is to associate your name with your chosen medium and geographic location (if you hope to be indexed for local search).
Your keywords should be included once in your page title and description meta tags and once in the content of the page itself, if possible. Our Made, Eero, Milo and Eames themes feature space for a short description, which is ideal for SEO.
Page speed
Page speed is a measurement of how fast the content on your page loads. It is important because a site that loads quickly offers a better user experience. For ideas on how to improve the page speed of your online portfolio, refer to my post on 5 Ways to Improve Your Website’s Performance.
Mobile optimization
Mobile optimization considers site design, structure, and speed to determine whether a visitor accessing your online portfolio from a mobile device is likely to have a positive or negative experience.
Each of our WordPress portfolio themes has been coded to handle images efficiently, and each has been responsively-designed to automatically adapt to the size of a user’s screen, which means your theme is built to perform well on mobile devices. 👏
Image optimization
The masonry and thumbnail galleries included with our Made and Eero themes allows visual artists to take full advantage of image search optimization (i.e., ranking individual images in search results). These gallery templates are uniquely designed to assign a dedicated URL for each image in the gallery.
Consider the following tips to help search engines index your portfolio images:
– Image size (1500 pixels on the longest side – 72dpi – JPEG format)
– Image file name (include relevant keywords)
– Image caption (include relevant keywords)
– Image description (include relevant keywords)
– Image alt tag (include relevant keywords)
Helpful Tools and Resources
Yoast SEO and All In One SEO Pack are the two most popular WordPress SEO plugins with 1+ million active installations each. Either plugin (choose only one) will allow you to easily edit your page title and description tags for each page and post of your site.
The Yoast SEO blog is also an excellent resource for those interested in gaining a richer understanding of search engine optimization, as well as for those of you who are feeling up to the task of learning how to rank for high intent keywords (i.e., keywords which signify a strong intent on the part of the searcher to conduct a transaction).
If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it. And of course, if you have any questions about SEO for artists or thoughts of your own to share, please leave a comment below to start a discussion.
Have you ever wondered if your online portfolio is meeting the expectations of creative directors, prospective clients, art buyers or potential employers? For nearly 10 years I have had the privilege of serving the creative community by helping visual artists create an online portfolio. In my experience, there isn’t a more effective way to display creative work online than within the confines of the well-known Minimalist design precept “less is more” where the goal is to reduce a subject to its necessary parts. When applied to an online portfolio the presented work becomes the focal point of every page — just as it should be.
I’ve come up with a list of 5 tips or benchmarks that every visual artist should follow when creating an online portfolio.
5. Maximize negative space
Negative space is the area surrounding the main subject. Creative professionals are often intuitively aware of the value of negative space within their work but it’s also important to expand your perspective to include negative space as it relates to the portfolio presenting your work. Note the following two examples which effectively allow the creative work being displayed to become the focal point of the web page without compromising the user experience in terms of communicating information about the work itself, or how to navigate the site.
KIS (i.e. Keep It Simple) is an acronym for a design principle noted by the U.S. Navy in 1960. The KIS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore simplicity should be a key goal in design and unnecessary complexity should be avoided. (Wikipedia)
A practical online portfolio must be easy for a user to navigate. The two primary areas of navigation include the site menu (i.e., how a user navigates from one page to another) and the site gallery(s) (i.e., how a user navigates from one image to another).
Again, note the examples to the linked live demo sites above. The menu location of each site is clearly understood and is visually supported by a smart combination of color scheme and typography; elements that promote a positive user experience which is, of course, the overarching goal of an online portfolio.
3. Present images that scale
Images in your online portfolio should dynamically scale down to fit within the view space on desktop screens as this is the expectation of viewers on these devices (mobile design may optionally streamline images into a single column or offer a 1-finger swipe). This means that the best user experience on desktop screens happens when a viewer is not required to scroll down to complete viewing a single image. Likewise, images should be allowed to dynamically scale up to fill larger screens, a feature that creative directors enjoy.
It’s worth noting that image scaling is considered a best practice and like all things creative, it’s alright to break the rules. The important thing is that you first understand what is considered a conventional rule so you can exercise your creative liberty in breaking it.
The following examples demonstrate dynamic image scaling. Note how gallery images automatically resize to fit within the view space on desktop screens and how they align into a single column on mobile devices offering a quality cross-device user experience. Acceptable mobile gallery layouts generally include a single scrollable column or 1-finger swipe experience.
Michael Kuby
Lesley Nowlin
Dave MacVicar
Caroline Gore
Christoph Papsch
Kristy Blackwell
2. Pay attention to page speed
Perhaps the most unrecognized aspect of a compelling online portfolio is page speed. Normally, when page speed is recognized by the viewer it is because a page is loading too slowly. When this happens visitors are likely to leave your site sooner than they would have otherwise.
A well-crafted code base is the foundation of a fast loading site followed by images that have been optimized for use on the web (i.e., 72dpi – JPEG format – Save for Web in Adobe Photoshop at High or Very High compression quality) and supported by quality web hosting. For WordPress sites, quality shared hosts include Bluehost, DreamHost and SiteGround. For premium WordPress hosting (i.e., optimized and managed) at a relatively affordable price WP Engine provides the best value in terms of technology, speed, security and support.
1. Embrace responsive web design
Are your site visitors Mac or PC? Are they viewing on 13-inch, 15-inch, 21-inch or 27-inch screens? Do they view from desktop, tablet or mobile devices? Which browsers do they prefer (e.g., Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer)? The list goes on. Only a few years ago each of these questions had to be carefully considered with a web developer prior to commencing an expensive custom project ranging from $5,000 – $15,000. Today, a well-crafted WordPress portfolio theme will have already addressed these important considerations through responsive web design, an approach to web design which makes pages render well on a variety of devices and/or screen sizes.
If your online portfolio isn’t meeting these 5 benchmarks it’s probably not meeting the expectations of your intended audience or performing as well as it could be.
Join the conversation by sharing your own thoughts and feedback in the comments.
Here’s a link to a video introduction and demo for those interested in learning more. Feel free to leave a comment below to let me know what you think about what ArtistClerk is doing for artists.
