Website review please?

[Vanessa Heaton]

I've recently started marketing my artwork online & have a website (linked into my signature below) with a gallery which links to my Etsy store as the purchase facility.

As a visual artist, I've tried to maintain a balance between personalising my page so that people feel like they're dealing with a real person & projecting a businesslike image. I'm really not sure how successful this is & would appreciate feedback . My marketing budget is approximately nil, in case that's relevant to possible advice.

Thank you in advance for taking the time to have a look.

Vanessa

[Adam Randall]

Hi venessa

A few tips

1) reduce the file size of the header its 84k and should be about 15k

2)Get rid of the people counter, they are very Undude

3)Change the title of "about me" (how many people will do a search on that?)

4)Get rid of the company name and "about me" from the page title and put something meaningful in there.

5) Read all my articles on getting the right search engine company.

Lots of other articles under the articles tab

Please keep in mind that this has just cost you about 50% of your marketing budget!

[Vanessa Heaton]

Thanks Adam,

What kind of words do people search for, is this is what SEO articles are on about?

[Adam Randall]

You know your business better than I do, but you need to get in the mind of your potential client and use words that they may use

For example you may get really offended calling what you do "Paper mache" however if thats what your clients are searching on then that is what you should use.

phrases that come to mind are:

Etchings
etching art
Paper art

[ahortin]

Hi Vanessa,

I think Adam covered some good points...

It's always good practice to optimise your images so that they're reasonably small, while still having decent quality. If you're not sure how to do this for your banner or don't have the tools, feel free to contact me and I'll be happy to do that for you. It's literally a 2sec job, so it's not a big deal.

Yep, change the page titles to something meaningful for each page. You've currently got "lightandshadeart" as part of the page title. I'd change that so it's more readable (ie. "light and shade art").

If you don't have any content for your "Other Interesting Sites" page, then I'd remove it altogether. Add it back in when you have some content for it.

You've obviously got the domain name "lightandshadeart.com". Within your website hosting environment you should be able to setup email addresses for that domain. Create an "info@lightandshadeart.com" or "vanessa@lightandshadeart.com" email address, or something similar rather than using your gmail account.

In relation to your SEO question... Search Engine Optimisation covers a number of areas. What people are going to search on to find your page obviously depends entirely on what your site is about. Search engines will look at the meta tags within your html page as well as the actual page content, among other things.

Cheers,
Anthony.

[Vanessa Heaton]

Originally Posted by Adam Randall

For example you may get really offended calling what you do "Paper mache" however if thats what your clients are searching on then that is what you should use.

I wouldn't be offended by 'paper mache' at all if that was what my sculptures are. They're actually two layers of paper cut in the same pattern & laminated together, which isn't paper mache.

I now have instead of 'about me'; Vanessa Heaton & instead of 'Gallery'; Gallery of art Prints & Sculpture.

Thanks for the help!

[Adam Randall]

Originally Posted by Vanessa Heaton

I wouldn't be offended by 'paper mache' at all if that was what my sculptures are. They're actually two layers of paper cut in the same pattern & laminated together, which isn't paper mache.

I now have instead of 'about me'; Vanessa Heaton & instead of 'Gallery'; Gallery of art Prints & Sculpture.

Thanks for the help!

Hi Vanessa, thats my point, it might have nothing to do with paper mache, it might be some other phrase that has absolutely nothing to do with what you actually do.

Your potential clients may have different ideas, if that is what they are searching on, then a great way to market your website is to have a page dedicated to educating them on why what you do has nothing to do with PM because then you can get that phrase a number of times on a page and you capture people searching with that phrase.

If it was me, I would create a page for every single style of art that I could think of and then talk about why the artwork you do would be a better buying decision.

[Lucki]

Hi Vanessa

Not being an artist or web expert, my first impression was that it was good. I did however, find some of the larger images unclear. We've found using photoshop to edit the images a very useful tool and gives it that professional look.

Websites are very personal and subjective. What appeals to someone may not necessarily appeal to others. Perhaps look at other 'art' websites and see what it is about them that appeals to you.

Also try installing google analytics (it's free) this can help you in determining how many people visit your website, what pages they look at, where they bounce off. It's certainly helpful to identify the areas you need to fine tune.

I think you getting other sololists to review your website is a great idea!

With that said I was hoping others would be able to review mine (see link below) and comment. It's great to see how others perceive it and not be blinded by my own happy thoughts.

This is the second attempt at ours after my mentor commented the original was 'boring and dark'. Very disheartening. After getting over the attachment to the original website, we reviewed the products and produced a new lighter one - your comments would be greatly appreciated.

[Renee Barber]

[extract only]

Originally Posted by Lucki

Hi Vanessa

I think you getting other sololists to review your website is a great idea!

With that said I was hoping others would be able to review mine (see link below) and comment. It's great to see how others perceive it and not be blinded by my own happy thoughts.

This is the second attempt at ours after my mentor commented the original was 'boring and dark'. Very disheartening. After getting over the attachment to the original website, we reviewed the products and produced a new lighter one - your comments would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Lucki, it'd be interesting to see a snapshot of your original site, just for comparison's sake, but let's concentrate on what's there now.

It's smooth, inviting and rich: just how I like my chocolate. Having said that, my main problem with the site is that it appears to be 'just' a shopfront. By that I mean, it feels like there should be a 'wrapper' website that envelopes your sweet shopfront. (Hmm, all this talk of chocolate is clearly making me hungry as all of my allegories are food-related!)

Anyway, it's almost 4 am so perhaps I'm missing something ... or perhaps there's more to come?

[BrightSpark]

If you want to do the SEO yourself Google Adwords has a keyword tool which is at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal which you may find helpful. I would create more pages within your website firstly by creating a separate page for each if your styles in the Gallery section with links directly to them rather than via the Gallery page. As you have already paid for the domain name why not use it to promote you and not gmail (I don't think they need anymore, but you do). The same goes for Etsy. One of the objects of your website should be to keep visitors on your website. A personal peeve of mine is file names with a lot of _ _ _ _ in them, also page1, page2 etc. descriptive names would be better. Also you need to add keywords to your of your web pages and make the keywords relative to the web pages that they are on. Also your blog page could also be brought in house as well where you control the links out to other blogs etc.