Fine Art Websites

I recently received a request from a friend who is a landscape painter to explore a website for displaying and selling her work. This got me to thinking about this subset of websites. What things do you need to know to create a website for someone who has a tangible, physical work of art that needs to be seen on the web? Surely, the needs of these clients will be different than the needs of a web designer whose work IS the web and therefore lends itself pretty easily to web presentation.

I decided to take a look around and see what artists are doing to present and sell their work on the web. For the purposes of this blog, I'm concentrating on the fine arts such as painting, sculpture or something similar.

To wit, here are some sites I've discovered:

The first that popped up in my basic Google search was Fine Art Studio Online. This particular site acts as a hub for artists with each artist having their own site designed by Fine Art Studio Online. Seems like a decent option for an artist with little or no web design experience. The sites are functional and the pictures very accurate. The sites themselves are pretty vanilla though and don't represent the artist or their personality at all.

The next one is what I think must be the mega-monster of fine art sites - d'Art. I have the feeling if you can't find what you're looking for her, you aren't going to find it. The huge selection is definitely its biggest plus. Again, the representations of art are very lovely and well done but the artists still don't have their own space. I'd classify this as the "fast food" version of fine art shopping.

Finally, a site dedicated to an artist - William Whitaker. The site itself is fairly simple but in the case of fine art websites, this is probably the better road to take. If the goal is to sell the painting or piece of sculpture, you don't want a gaudy website competing with or distracting from the painting.

I went searching for a sculpture specific website and found Dennis Bernhardt. This website has problems that have nothing to do with its product such as tiny type (and too much of it) on the home page and what appears to be the preference for black that all of these websites exhibit. 

After some more perusing (and resisting an extreme urge to buy something for the newly renovated office), I ran across this rather helpful strategy article for designing an artist website.

Now, let's see what I can find for the new office...