Articles
- How Not to Display Your Artwork on the Web
- Part 1: Finding a web hosting provider
- Part 2: Registering a domain name
- Part 3: Building your web site
- Part 4: Planning your web site
- Part 5: Designing your web site
- Part 6: Preparing images for the web
Introduction
Who this is for: This is intended as a rough guide for illustrators, gallery artists, cartoonists, comics artists, concept artists and other visual artists who want to present a professional representation of their work on the web. If you’re just putting up your stuff for the benefit of your friends, do what you want, it doesn’t matter. If, on the other hand, you’re trying to have your art seen by art directors, publishers, gallery owners, webcomics readers, reviewers and prospective buyers, how you present it can make a big difference in how it’s viewed and received.
Why did I write this? In the past several years, and particularly in the last few as I’ve worked on lines and colors, I have seen hundreds (if not thousands) of artist’s web sites. So many of them are so badly arranged, poorly designed, ill-conceived and horribly implemented that it has started to make me crazy. If you’re read much of this blog, you’ll know how much I love this stuff, and how much I would desparately like artists of all kinds to succeed in doing a good job of making their work visible on the web.
The original post that prompted this grew out of this frustration with the apparent desire on the part of artists to drive visitors away from their sites in droves. My repeated encounters with mind-numbingly bad artists’ web sites eventually resulted in my snarky, but well-received article, How Not to Display Your Artwork on the Web.
The response to the article was, and continues to be, emphatic, and frequently includes requests for more information. Those requests prompted this series of follow-up articles. If you haven’t read the original post, I reccomend that you read it first and then come back to this one.
Caveats
What do I know? This is simply the opinions (read that word carefully) of one person. However, I do have some qualifications to be knowledgeable about this topic. I’ve been on the web since 1994, several years before most people even knew the web existed. For most of that time (12 years) I’ve worked as a professional web site designer. (When I started doing web site design we actually had to put some effort into convincing companies that a web site was a worthwhile investment, and that the internet wasn’t just a fad for geeks that would fade out in a couple of years.) In 1995 I created Argon Zark!, the first long-form (comic book style) comic for the web, and one of the earliest webcomics of any kind.
I do not hold myself up as a paragon of design and usability. I’ve designed my share of bad sites, with navigation problems and usability issues and, due to the realities of graphic design (time, budget restraints, and the wishes, demands, desires and delusions of clients), I will continue to do so to some extent in the future; but I have tried to benefit from my mistakes and I have learned a thing or two (or three, or twenty) over the years.
This is a work in progress. I envision this as a series of eight to ten articles on individual topics, perhaps more. As time allows, I’ll continue to edit, revise and add to these pages in an attempt to make them more useful.
This series of articles is intended to he helpful. I don’t proffer it as definitive or set in stone. If you disagree, write a comment and give everyone the benefit of your own ideas or helpful suggestions.